(This is my first review, so bear with me a little. Any comments would be great, my e-mail is BZMew2@hotmail.com)
Games come and go, but only a few stand the test of time. Classic NES games, SNES games, and Genesis games. One of these games was Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega's answer to Mario. Heck, Sonic is even BLUE as to Sega's blue logo, as Mario is red to Nintendo's logo. Sonic 1 was a greatly-hyped game, and everyone bought it, and 99% of the people who played it loved it. The speed, the colorful graphics, and the AMAZING level design. 10 years later, Sonic is here and back to his roots, outfitted with thousands of polygons. How great is this game? Let's find out... (Remember, if I refer to "Sonic 1" in this review, I am reffering to Sonic the Hedgehog 1, NOT Sonic Adventure 1).
Story: 10/10
The standard story. You really don't know much about it until you play into the levels a bit. Basically, Dr. Robotni- err... Dr. Eggman (why the heck do they call him that again?) breaks into a secret military base and lets loose the Military's seeecret weapon, which happens to be a Sonic look-alike named Shadow. Of course, Shadow is EEEE-VIL, and he has jet boots to substitute for Sonic's natural speed. Then the plot is shortly revealed thereafter of how Dr. Eggman is going to take over the world this time.
Meanwhile, Sonic has been captured and is escaping from a plane, he then complains about the flight service, rips a chunk of metal off of the plane, and sky-dives onto the street below, gearing up for some asphalt-surfboarding™ :). Really the standard fare for a Sonic game, but I thought it was a real bonus of how Sonic finally gets to fight a flesh-and-blood enemy, unlike Dr. Robotnik or his brain-dead robots.
Gameplay 10/10
Yes, this is where the game REALLY shines. There is 3 modes of play in single player (4 if you count the Kart racing stage, but that's mainly for 2 player mode), they include Speed stages (Sonic/Shadow), Item Collection stages (Knuckles/Rouge), and Shooting stages (Tails/Eggman). Let's break it down... in the Speed stages, you play as Sonic or Shadow and try to make it to the end of the stage in the shortest time possible, while grabbing all of the rings you can. I still remember in Sonic 1, if you got JUST the right power-ups, timed jumps and springies, you could go through the whole level in record time without even stopping once! Sonic Adventure 2 goes back to it's roots, providing two paths: the slow "Normal Path", and the fast, non-stop "Right Path". That kind of brilliant level design gives you non-stop fun :). Sonic and Shadow have to Cartwheel under obstacles, use a jumping "homing attack" to destroy enemies, grind on rails (PHATTY DUDE!), and the return of the ever-popular spin-dash. The speed stages are by FAR my most favorite stages, and I wish there were more of them :(. Next up is the collecting stages, which I won't go into very much depth, because I don't like them very much (OK, so I'm kinda a biased reviewer :). Basically you either play as Knuckles the Echidna or Rouge the Bat, and you are usually either searching for three pieces of the Master Emerald or looking for three keys. Knuckles and Rouge can glide, climb on walls, dig up stuff (once you get the digging claws), and attack with punches (Knuckles) or kicks (Rouge). You have a radar that tells you how close you are to an object. What I really hated is that it only tells you how close you are to ONE item, instead of all of them like in Sonic Adventure 1. That means that you couldn't take a break on an item you couldn't find and try to find a different item, but you have to keep searching. Sometimes I just restarted the level so the items would be re-located in hope of making it easier. I guess this mode would be the favorites of NiGHTS veterans (that game focussed on item collecting) but be warned, some of these levels later in the game are insanely hard. The last gameplay mode is the shooting one. You play as either Eggman in his robot walker or as Tails in his transformed tornado jet. You try to get to the end of the stage, just like Shadow and Sonic, but at a MUCH slower pace. When you hold down the button, a targetting laser comes out, and you point it at something and mash the button and the thing dies. That's the basics of this gameplay. Every now and then you'll encounter a jumping puzzle or something, and you can target multiple things at once and fire to get more points. More often then not, I just found myself mashing away on the buttons and jumping from platform to platform, blowing the living crap out of everything and making it to the finish line. Kind of boring really, but it's loads of fun if you are a great fan of 3rd person shooters. All of these gameplay modes have good levels and not so good, but good nonetheless levels; with a fair ammount of puzzles, so you have to be good at thinking too if you want to succeed. Plus, as an added bonus, there's a highly longed-after 2 player mode!! Yes!! You can race a friend w/Sonic and shadow, have an item collecting contest with Rouge and Knuckles, or blow the crap out of eachother with Tails and Eggman! It's the best two player mode in any Sonic game to date!
All in all, excellent gameplay.
Graphics 10/10
Some of the BEST graphics on ANY game system! Plug in a VGA monitor, and this surpasses almost ANY game on Playstation 2. I'm not kidding, either. Seamlessly high polygon counts, constant 60 frames per second, and colorful special effects will leave you in the dust. Of course, it's almost impossible to explain the breakneck speedy pace of some of the levels in Sonic Adventure 2, but a picture is worth a thousand words (and an animation; a million!). You should either see a trailer of this game in action, or play the game itself; preferably the latter. Naka-san never had the chance to re-create his vision of Sonic due to hardware constraints, but he has here. This is the Sonic game, and should not be missed.
Sound 8/10
The music in this game is composed of classic Sonic Rock and a bit of techno. There's a wide range of crisp, clean sound effects, and the sound score would've gotten a perfect ten also, but one thing holds it back: THE VOICE ACTING. OK, so it's not as bad as it was in Sonic Adventure 1, and it's a HELL of a lot better than House of the Dead 1/2 and Resident Evil 2, but it just doesn't live up to the perfect gameplay. Sort of sad, huh.
Replay Factor 10/10
You'll be busy trying to get the best score and to get all the "Emblems", and of course you'll want to re-play those awesome stages that you love, and there is a lot of 2 player mode to go around, so you'll have this stuck in your dreamcast for at least a few days exclusively, and you'll have it nearby as to quick means to pop it back in for a long, long time :).
Overall 10/10
Just as a first-person shooter fan cannot be considered a true fan if he/she has not played the original Doom, any gamer or fan of Sega cannot really be put into the ranks of the Hard-core until they have played this rare gem at least once. To quote the Sergeant in Starship Troopers,
"Never pass up a good thing."
Kudos to Sonic Team, one of the greatest Development teams of all time, in my book. They helped the Dreamcast go out in a blaze of glory; a Sonic boom (pun intended). May the force be with them.
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