 |
|
|
|
|
News |
|
Review |
|
Preview |
|
Videos |
|
|
|
Cheats |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | Title:
Sonic Heroes
..............................................
System:
Gamecube
..............................................
Genre:
Adventure
..............................................
Publisher:
Sega Corporation
..............................................
Developer:
Sonic Team
..............................................
Release:
01/06/2004
..............................................
Online:
No
..............................................
ESRB:
Everyone (E)
..............................................
 |
Sonic has been a long-lasting and moderately impressive series. Over the years we’ve seen the lightning fast hedgehog transform out of the 2D arena and into 3D worlds of action and adventure. Sadly, things haven’t been very seamless in the transition of Sonic’s pixels into polygons. Camera and control issues plague the recent 3D sonic games. And such issues don’t seem to be getting better.
The story is as basic as ever: Stop Dr. Eggman from taking over the world. Each team has a different purpose for encountering him but all of them have to stop him. The extra-fine details for each team’s story are something I didn’t pay much attention to, mainly because the cut-scenes normally took place in the transition of the stage opening and the game giving control over to the player. So trying to hear what the characters were talking about while trying to avoid falling into the proverbial endless-pit was a bit difficult. Nevertheless, the story still follows the evil exploits of Dr. Eggman and his quest to control the chaos emeralds.
The neat part, though, is that you can control four different teams who have different quests within the stages. The teams include Sonic’s Team (consisting of Sonic, Tales, and Knuckles), Shadow’s team (which includes Shadow, Rouge and Omega,) Team Rose (lead by Rose, Cream, and Bigg the cat) and lastly Team Chaotix (composed of Espio, Vector, and Charmy). Each team consists of a speed character (the leader of each team), a flying character and a strong character that you can switch between at any time. Each team’s ease-of-use is also ranked in stars. This also determines the difficulty they will face in each stage, going from one star (the easiest) to three stars (the hardest). Each team also has different purposes for going through a stage. For instance, Team Chaotix are bounty hunters being led around by a mysterious client. Their missions are fun because you have to do different things, ranging from being stealthy in some stages to collecting or destroying a certain amount of objects and items throughout other stages. Team Rose simply has to get to a designated area of a stage – their stages are the easiest and shortest. Both Sonic and Shadow’s team must complete the entire length of the stage by getting to the end. The last two teams are ranked with three stars, and have longer and harder parts of the stage to complete.
There are about 14 stages in all, but nearly half the stages are continuations of the previous stage. However, the developers designed many levels based on older Sonic games, which was definitely a plus. For instance, you have to bounce through a Casino stage (similar to Casino Night in Sonic 2), and on the stage after that you go to the Bingo Highway. In the Bingo Highway it’s very similar to the Casino stage, except there’s lots of rolling around and collecting of rings from playing a pinball version of Bingo.
The stage designs, for the most part, are fun and well designed for platforming. All of the stages give each team member–no matter what their objective is–a good amount of screen time. So a flying character will be used about as much as a strength or speed character, depending on the parts of the stage you are on. My only gripe with such a feature is that the speed characters didn’t get to use many of their speed capabilities. Many of the level structures aren’t designed for you to run straight through, which is an opposite concept from a lot of other Sonic games. Since bad guys can easily be dispatched with a strength character, or large platforms can be reached easier with a flying character, you might find yourself constantly killing the momentum of a speed character due to the constant switching, which disrupts any kind of continuous game flow.
On a huge plus side, there’s tons of content to unlock (i.e., music, stage bonuses, time attack, etc.). There’s also a two-player mode that features about half-a-dozen different game modes, from battling, and racing, to ring grabbing for the highest score. One of the better modes (and some of the most fun stages) would have to be the Special stage challenge. The concept is almost identical to Sonic 2's Special stages except, instead of collecting a certain amount of items and rings, players simply have to grab the Chaos emerald by using speed boosts. Basically, you’re inside a tube trying to avoid mines and collect spheres to continuously activate your speed boosts to catch the fleeing emerald. It is the most fast-paced and insane mode featured in the game, a true “Sonic” feeling.
Pages
|
|
| |
