The Games of my Life

I received it last Friday, for the GameCube, and played it yesterday for a couple of hours.

First, let me say that this is my first Sonic game since the original ones for the Megadrive (I have the 2 Sonic Adventures ordered, but one of them is back-ordered and so they haven’t arrived yet). This means that it’s also my first Sonic in 3D.

From what I’ve played so far: the graphics are good. Not great, but good. Voice acting is… OK. The levels themselves look very, very nice, and the sense of speed is absolutely amazing. The camera, however, is quite poor - quite often you have to use your memory about what you’ve seen earlier, because you’re not seeing where you’re going - the camera takes too long to turn.

Even though the game is fully 3D, it plays (at least, so far - I’ve just got past the first boss) much like the old 2D games, in the sense that it’s quite linear - it’s always obvious where you have to go, and there’s not really any exploration, except to look for hidden areas and items. In other words, instead of free exploration like, say, Mario 64 or the 3D Zeldas, Sonic Heroes plays more like an “obstacle course”. A beautiful and varied one, though.

As you’ll know if you’ve read any (p)review or seen any ad for the game, you don’t just play one character, but a team of 3. There are 4 different teams, with slightly different storylines, goals, game styles and difficulty levels. Basically, however, each team has one “Speed” character, one “Power” character and one “Flight” character (for instance, in Team Sonic, they’re Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, respectively). In many parts of the game, you have to use a specific kind of character, though many challenges can be overcome with different characters, and sometimes you even get to choose paths, such as one which requires Power and one which requires Flight.

So far, I’m enjoying it, and thanks to its being a Player’s Choice game, it was quite cheap, too.