So, following up on my playthrough of Shadow the Hedgehog, I decided I needed some another terrible Sonic game in my life to compare. Not having 06 available (and certainly not willing to spend money on it), I decided to pull back out my copy of Heroes. This was the game that broke me on Sonic games until Colors (which I feel infinitely lucky that it decided to be the first actually good Sonic game in forever, as I for some reason felt confident enough to preorder).
Booting it back up again, I've found that this game is still bad in a ton of ways, but it's really more of a tragedy than Shadow in that there is a decent game in here somewhere, it's just buried under the massive lack of polish and some minor bad decisions here or there.
In the past few days I've done the full team Sonic story, as well as most of the Chaotix one. And you know, starting off, the first two zones weren't too bad (I'm just going to call them "Seaside Hill" and the city area, because it seems redundant to refer to the parts separately). Sure, it was definitely rough, but at least it controls infinitely better than Shadow. But upon hitting the casino area, holy crap did issues start to crop up. I mean, the physics on that pinball table is just so, so very bad. It just doesn't work right at all. And that just makes it a huge pain to get past them. Also, the game somehow managed to shoot me up on top of the pinball table's walls a couple of times, which is just... great. The boss for that area is also just a super lazy fight against wave after wave of enemies, an idea they apparently liked so much they reused it for the Hang Castle area.
Rail canyon is just an atrocious level design, and if I recall correctly is the point I realized the game was crappy way back when (don't know how I didn't figure this out from the pinball tables, but whatever). I mean, it's just grinding rails. Nonstop. And then of course the aforementioned lack of polish comes into play, meaning switching rails will occasionally jettison you into a pit instead of just moving you over a rail. Which actually brings up a recurring issue that Shadow didn't have in quite the same way: the levels are LONG, and the game likes to hand out random repeated deaths, whether due to glitches or just poor game design. And that means repeating things a LOT, especially if the game screws you over hard enough for a game over (not to mention all the times when checkpoints are just WAY too spaced out). Oh, and the boss here is also pretty screwy, and as such my preferred method has been to manage a some on the main body and then just spam the button, floating there until the dumb thing's health disappears.
The frog forest area is actually pretty nice, outside of the weird "jumping on vines while an alligator or whatever chases you" segment that goes on for way, way too long. Outside of some weird glitches of course, the first half of the Hang Castle zone isn't so bad, but the "three trials" part of the second half is straight up awful. Oh, and they DEFINITELY stole a pretty large amount of assets from here in making Shadow. The final area is at least visually nice, but it suffers from a bit more obvious repeated areas than most of the game. Oh, and there is of course the dumbest line to ever come from a Sonic game, "I wonder why it self destructed," said by Tails after we hit a goddamn self destruct switch (which Knuckles JUST referenced as such).
The Egg Emperor is the worst designed thing ever, though. Rail canyon may have made me dislike the game way back when, but taking the time to beat this piece of crap is what made me rage quit. They just didn't think through the priority, meaning that you have to carefully juggle your distance the whole damn fight just so he doesn't charge at you while you're in the air. Added to this is the fact that he'll often do the damn homing slashes whenever he wants to as well, which gets REALLY annoying when he decides to do that while leaving a platform (essentially meaning you WILL get hit and if you don't wait, you WILL die). I'm sure there was a more "efficient" way to fight him, but the best way I could figure out was to just manage a super attack each time he stops until he was dead, dragging the fight out way too long.
As for Chaotix, I was shocked to find that at the very least, they seem to handle mission based gameplay better than Shadow did. The only super annoying levels thus far have been in the castle (both of which sucked big time), with a lot of them even being smart enough to, you know, offer more things to collect in the level than is required to pass. Oh, and it's pretty lame to see that even their levels seem to pretty much be cut and pasted from the Sonic campaign. Why bother having "different" stories if they're all going to be pretty much the same? At least Vector's pretty awesome (and a hell of a lot more effective than Knuckles).
The big overarching issue bugging me with the game is how the damn chaos emeralds are setup. I mean, the keys seem to be hidden well enough, such that they aren't usually right in your face but aren't impossible to find either. But the requirement that you don't get hit in getting to the goal or you lose them is just ridiculous, especially seeing how cheap this game (and the crappy camera) can be at times. And then the special stages are useless in Act 1s, only good for 1-ups or whatever instead of another chance at the emerald. The biggest problem, though, is that the minigame just controls terribly. I swear, it's like there's a suction pull to the (mostly) useless top of the tube. Bleh. (Is there even a decent way to quickly retry these if you fail? I've only managed to grab the first two thus far, and seeing how bad the minigame is a foresee this becoming a problem if I have to go through a ten minute level for each try).
Oh, and the post-hit invincibility period is just plain broken. If another attack is coming at you when you're getting up, it WILL hit. Had a number of deaths due to this stupidity, as well as a good thirty seconds or so where freaking Big the Cat kept hitting me, only for my ring to fall in long enough to keep me alive before he hit me again.
So yeah, tldr; This game could've been a solid entry into the series (I mean, they finally got a decent look down for enemies here, nice and playful, and the plot isn't even too terrible (note Metal Sonic hasn't really shown up yet of course), but a big lack of polish and some stupid little decisions absolutely ruin it.
Also, the voice acting is hilariously awful.
Booting it back up again, I've found that this game is still bad in a ton of ways, but it's really more of a tragedy than Shadow in that there is a decent game in here somewhere, it's just buried under the massive lack of polish and some minor bad decisions here or there.
In the past few days I've done the full team Sonic story, as well as most of the Chaotix one. And you know, starting off, the first two zones weren't too bad (I'm just going to call them "Seaside Hill" and the city area, because it seems redundant to refer to the parts separately). Sure, it was definitely rough, but at least it controls infinitely better than Shadow. But upon hitting the casino area, holy crap did issues start to crop up. I mean, the physics on that pinball table is just so, so very bad. It just doesn't work right at all. And that just makes it a huge pain to get past them. Also, the game somehow managed to shoot me up on top of the pinball table's walls a couple of times, which is just... great. The boss for that area is also just a super lazy fight against wave after wave of enemies, an idea they apparently liked so much they reused it for the Hang Castle area.
Rail canyon is just an atrocious level design, and if I recall correctly is the point I realized the game was crappy way back when (don't know how I didn't figure this out from the pinball tables, but whatever). I mean, it's just grinding rails. Nonstop. And then of course the aforementioned lack of polish comes into play, meaning switching rails will occasionally jettison you into a pit instead of just moving you over a rail. Which actually brings up a recurring issue that Shadow didn't have in quite the same way: the levels are LONG, and the game likes to hand out random repeated deaths, whether due to glitches or just poor game design. And that means repeating things a LOT, especially if the game screws you over hard enough for a game over (not to mention all the times when checkpoints are just WAY too spaced out). Oh, and the boss here is also pretty screwy, and as such my preferred method has been to manage a some on the main body and then just spam the button, floating there until the dumb thing's health disappears.
The frog forest area is actually pretty nice, outside of the weird "jumping on vines while an alligator or whatever chases you" segment that goes on for way, way too long. Outside of some weird glitches of course, the first half of the Hang Castle zone isn't so bad, but the "three trials" part of the second half is straight up awful. Oh, and they DEFINITELY stole a pretty large amount of assets from here in making Shadow. The final area is at least visually nice, but it suffers from a bit more obvious repeated areas than most of the game. Oh, and there is of course the dumbest line to ever come from a Sonic game, "I wonder why it self destructed," said by Tails after we hit a goddamn self destruct switch (which Knuckles JUST referenced as such).
The Egg Emperor is the worst designed thing ever, though. Rail canyon may have made me dislike the game way back when, but taking the time to beat this piece of crap is what made me rage quit. They just didn't think through the priority, meaning that you have to carefully juggle your distance the whole damn fight just so he doesn't charge at you while you're in the air. Added to this is the fact that he'll often do the damn homing slashes whenever he wants to as well, which gets REALLY annoying when he decides to do that while leaving a platform (essentially meaning you WILL get hit and if you don't wait, you WILL die). I'm sure there was a more "efficient" way to fight him, but the best way I could figure out was to just manage a super attack each time he stops until he was dead, dragging the fight out way too long.
As for Chaotix, I was shocked to find that at the very least, they seem to handle mission based gameplay better than Shadow did. The only super annoying levels thus far have been in the castle (both of which sucked big time), with a lot of them even being smart enough to, you know, offer more things to collect in the level than is required to pass. Oh, and it's pretty lame to see that even their levels seem to pretty much be cut and pasted from the Sonic campaign. Why bother having "different" stories if they're all going to be pretty much the same? At least Vector's pretty awesome (and a hell of a lot more effective than Knuckles).
The big overarching issue bugging me with the game is how the damn chaos emeralds are setup. I mean, the keys seem to be hidden well enough, such that they aren't usually right in your face but aren't impossible to find either. But the requirement that you don't get hit in getting to the goal or you lose them is just ridiculous, especially seeing how cheap this game (and the crappy camera) can be at times. And then the special stages are useless in Act 1s, only good for 1-ups or whatever instead of another chance at the emerald. The biggest problem, though, is that the minigame just controls terribly. I swear, it's like there's a suction pull to the (mostly) useless top of the tube. Bleh. (Is there even a decent way to quickly retry these if you fail? I've only managed to grab the first two thus far, and seeing how bad the minigame is a foresee this becoming a problem if I have to go through a ten minute level for each try).
Oh, and the post-hit invincibility period is just plain broken. If another attack is coming at you when you're getting up, it WILL hit. Had a number of deaths due to this stupidity, as well as a good thirty seconds or so where freaking Big the Cat kept hitting me, only for my ring to fall in long enough to keep me alive before he hit me again.
So yeah, tldr; This game could've been a solid entry into the series (I mean, they finally got a decent look down for enemies here, nice and playful, and the plot isn't even too terrible (note Metal Sonic hasn't really shown up yet of course), but a big lack of polish and some stupid little decisions absolutely ruin it.
Also, the voice acting is hilariously awful.
