"Sonic's Breakdancing kills me"

Sonic Rush took a long time to finish so I could review this, (I hated the game from the get-go, but wanted to write a review so I went on.) that includes beating all levels, getting all Chaos Emeralds and beating the final boss. Sonic Rush, if anything, reminds me of a mish-mash between the boring Sonic Advance series and the Sonic Adventure series, rather than a blast from the past.

~~Story~~
Sonic Rush is the story of how two worlds begin to merge and so, Blaze the Cat, a guardian from some other world we never get to see or explore, comes to Sonic's world to find the Sol Emeralds and fix the merging worlds. Blaze meets up with Sonic and Blaze insists that she can fix things on her own without Sonic's help.

The story doesn't actually unfold until about WORLD 7, previous to that, you'll know just as much about the plot as you did after WORLD 2, as before that. It's just Sonic chasing Eggman Nega all over and Blaze capturing another Sol Emerald from Eggman. After WORLD 7 it tries to have some sort of plot and give some character background on Blaze and learning to trust friends, but it really didn't seem to affect me. I suppose it's a step up from the eventless Sonic Advance series.

~~Gameplay~~
The gameplay is annoying, I found myself running into various enemies after just going through a loop-de-loop or some other speed-up thing, in other words, it's difficult to hold on to rings. There's a few cheap shots here and there and lots of annoying tricks that take a few lives to remember or do correctly.

Sonic and Blaze still have Kaiten/Spin Jump, Spin Dash, and Rolling but now there's a Tension Gauge, the Tension Gauge rises when you defeat an enemy or do a trick and then you can press X or Y and speed up. Because of this, I don't see much point in the Spin Dash and didn't discover it until much later. The Tension Gauge also needs to be filled up in order to obtain the Chaos Emeralds.

Sonic and Blaze aren't very different, Blaze jumps higher and can float, while Sonic is faster, but this difference isn't enough to modify your gameplay so you're playing the game twice. There aren't any other characters although I would assume so due to the Sonic Adventure-like character select screen.

The Bosses seem to really drag on, some of them are really frustrating and long while others are simple and long. In fact, the boss battles were worse than anything else in the game. There are almost always cheap-shots too.

There's also special stages, they're a lot like Sonic the Hedgehog 2's and involve you collecting rings and avoiding mines using the stylus, they're pretty fun and the music was good when I didn't have to hear it twenty times to beat the last special stage.

~~Music/Sound~~
The music really bothered me at first, but some of them are pretty catchy, (I can't get Jeh Jeh Rocket out of my head). It's sort of a Rap/Dance/Techno thing, it feels a bit out of place though, like they just bought an album and put a song here and there. I'm disappointed in the lack of voice acting, Sonic Battle had more of it.

~~Graphics~~
The graphics were pretty decent, I mean, for some reason it just doesn't look good to me when I see 3D sprites on a 2D background. There's lots of things put in there just for the sake of looking good as well. The talking sprites looked good and the few 3D cutscenes look okay, but would be better if they were animated and contained voice acting.

~~Final Words~~
This game is annoying, difficult, and hard and offers little reward for beating the whole thing, Oddly enough, I'm not surprised. Maybe Sonic Wild Fire or the PS3/Xbox360 game might have something better, in fact, I'm pretty sure it will, at least in comparison to this.

Oh and does anyone remember Naka saying about how rubbing the touch screen would make Sonic move? Well, that never worked out. There wasn't much use out of the touch screen except be the bottom part of the screen.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 08/22/06