Sonic Heros

Publisher: Sega of America
Developer: Sega of America
Players: 1 – 2
ESRB Rating: Everyone
Platform(s): PS2, Gamecube, Xbox  

Score: 5

Review by: Tim Harris

            Get ready to learn the value of teamwork with cute little animals in "Sonic Heroes"

You know it's a Sonic title when you hear that awful theme music. Sonic Heroes is Sega's newest adventure, for their oldest character, the blue blur, Sonic. For a long time many gamers were skeptical that Sonic would ever have a new game. And they had good reason to be seeing as how Sonic hasn't had a new game in 3 years. We've only had ports of old sonic games to the Gamecube to gold us over. Well Sonic is back and, well let's just say he starting to show his age. But Sonic's not in his old format. Instead of running forward and grinding a few rails you now have to use teammates to overcome obstacles.

Teammates you ask. Yes Sonic heroes has 4 teams each consisting of 3 players and their own level of difficulty and acuteness. The Sonic Team of course has the most popular characters, Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. This is the most well balanced team. The Dark team has shadow, rouge the bat, and omega the robot. Use them if you want a slightly more challenging game. The Rose team has Amy, Cream the bunny with her little chao cheese (you get it? Cream. Cheese. Nevermind) And big the cat aka the most worthless sonic character ever. This team is more on cuteness than it is on challenge. And then there's the Chaotix team. This team adds to the touch of weirdness to the game with the off the wall attacks and strange level objectives. Basically, your led throughout the game as always. Stopping for an occasional boss fight or special stage. If stopped by an obstacle, you can switch to the power formation and knock it down. When you need to achieve top speed, you can use the speed formation. And when you need to reach high places. Fly. Now while all this sounds cool, it doesn't quite work. For one the levels are way to long. And while the whole team thing is a nice change, it is kind of a distraction.

Finally as you know it wouldn't be complete without bad camera angles. And when half the game is grinding top speed over a huge mountain, bad camera angles just won't cut it. We waited for this game, but now we realize, we wasted our time. Oh and then there's the voice acting, terrible as usual.  While this is mildly better than Sonic Adventure 2 Battle it just doesn't cut. It's a shame that both new sonic titles are so bad. This is better than "Sonic Battle" for the GBA, but that's not saying much.