What the hell happened to this series? Although I’ve always preferred the Mario games, I had a blast with Sonic 2, 3, and Knuckles back on the Genesis. The games had tight controls, cool levels, great graphics, and just the right amount of challenge. I never played much of Sonic Adventure, but I rented SA 2 Battle on GameCube and played through a good bit of it. I was shocked at the sloppy controls and spastic camera. I was bored with the terrible level design and alternative gameplay styles. Even the classic speed-based Sonic levels had been turned into cut-scene fests that felt like they were on autopilot. Then there was the dumb story, forced upon me by abundant voice-acting and horrendous cinematics.

Three years after the Dreamcast release of SA2, Sonic Heroes has arrived with hardly any of these issues addressed. The gameplay has been unified by instituting teams of three characters at once, but this mechanic drags in a whole new set of problems in place of the boring shooting and digging levels in the last game. I’m shocked that a group as talented as Sonic Team couldn’t tighten up their star series in this amount of time. Sonic Heroes is inexcusably lame, a product so unpolished and poorly designed that every one of my friends I showed it to couldn’t help but laugh at its expense.

The game does set admirable goals for itself. In broad terms, the levels and gameplay are much more like the old 2D games than either of the Adventures offered. The teams let you control three characters at once, and switching among them is quick and easy. And, in theory, having four different teams means you can play the game four times for four different experiences. But none of these promises is fully realized.

The dark heart of Sonic Heroes is its controls; though there are many other problems, the game would at least be fun to play for short bursts if its controls weren’t completely broken. It is this failure that makes the game irredeemable. You can’t play for more than one or two minutes without being distracted or even killed by the absurd control issues. The homing dash may home in on the nearest enemy, or it may simply shoot you off into the nearest bottomless pit. The power characters’ attacks send them forward with so much momentum that they very often tumble off ledges even after connecting with enemies. Hit detection for moves like the tornado spin are unpredictable at best, while moves like the rocket accel may not even execute at all. There’s no consistency in jumping from rail to rail while grinding. On any given level, there are hundreds of places where one of these control snafus will send you careening into the void (though not before you are forced to watch the team fall helplessly for ten seconds or more). It’s absolutely maddening. There may be some games in which sloppy controls aren’t a huge detriment, but a 3D platformer has to feel natural and responsive or the immersion process will not kick in. While playing Sonic Heroes, I feel like I am herding the characters more than controlling them directly.

There are about a dozen levels in the game, grouped by pairs into various stereotypical world themes like an ancient temple and an oversized forest, as well as more interesting environments like a squadron of flying battleships, a rail-infested canyon, and the return of the Casino Zone. Some of the level design is quite inventive, and there are often multiple paths to take, but there are also some serious problems with how platforms are positioned, the pacing of speed and combat sections, etc. The Casino Zone is particularly bewildering, a nightmarish gauntlet of pinball machines way too large to play with any sort of strategy, since you can never see more than 10% of the board at a time. The would-be triumphant return of these classic levels also inflicts upon us “bingo”, in which you can roll through numbers to win a prize… when you’re not rolling right off the stage thanks to the cheap embankments and surprise drop-out holes. Nearly all of the levels suffer from a general confusion about just what you’re supposed to do, despite the characters constantly barking their patronizing advice on which formation would be most appropriate. Many of the battles take place on fairly small platforms where it’s easy to fall off, thanks to the control problems described above. Or, perhaps even worse, you may end up fighting in a small room or corridor, which brings into focus yet another huge flaw: the camera.

That’s right, the epileptic camera system from Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is back with a vengeance in Sonic Heroes. To be fair, it has improved somewhat, in the sense that it wigs out less frequently. It also helps that the gameplay has more straightforward speed sequences, the only time when the camera seems to settle down and do its job. But if you slow down or, heaven forbid, try to backtrack to pick up missed items, be prepared for a battle. In almost any given situation, the camera seems to have one angle that it really likes, and it takes a lot of struggling to wrangle it elsewhere. Sure, the shoulder buttons rotate the camera around the characters any time you want, but take three steps and the camera will jump back to its previous position. It zooms in way too close during fights, so much so that enemies can be easily close enough to hit you even though you can’t see them. You can imagine what happens when the same thing occurs with nearby ledges, combined with the super-momentum attacks. The camera is nothing short of disastrous for any kind of flying. It doesn’t give enough vertical perspective for platform climbing, and it doesn’t angle up enough to show your shadow when trying to fly across long distances, so landing on small spaces becomes a guessing game.

All these problems, big and small, compound to make Sonic Heroes one hell of a frustrating experience. It’s really a shame, because there are some good ideas here, such as the team/formation mechanic, but even this feature is poorly implemented and rarely capitalized on by the levels in any sort of clever puzzle or platforming challenge. Sonic fans who have stuck through the series this long will probably be glad to see more speed-based areas, but there is still plenty of messy combat and clunky platforming, it’s just now all mixed up in the same levels. Then there are those of us who aren’t satisfied with how the Sonic speed runs have been done in 3D. I for one don’t appreciate that the game frequently takes over the controls for me, only to give them back with no warning right before I’m expected to jump or dodge something. In the game’s most glorious moments, it’s not even clear whether you’re controlling the characters at all. I absolutely hate how every character, including the “Power” ones like Knuckles, feel incredibly vulnerable because so many of their moves send them dashing around uncontrollably with no protection at all. That’s not what the original games were all about. Where did Yuji Naka get the idea that I actually want to play as a character like Espio the Chameleon, who has a completely useless stealth move obviously thrown in just because it looks good in his bio?

Sorry guys, three strikes and you’re out. Sonic in 3D sucks, and Sonic Heroes does little to show that the development team is even headed in the right direction to restore this franchise to being great. It’s playable and has perhaps two or three memorable sequences, but not nearly enough to justify the frustration of playing through a game that had enough problems in its basic design before it was utterly crushed under the weight of technical buffoonery. This is a rental at best for all but the most devoted Sonic fans.

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