So I was able to purchase Sonic Heroes for the Gamecube recently for next to nothing (I think it came to $2). I'd never played this game but I have played the majority of Sonic games. For the purposes of this thread, I've played nearly every 3D Sonic game. The only 3D iterations I've never played to completion are Unleashed, the 2009 game, and Colors.

Of all the 3D Sonic games I've played, Sonic Heroes is by far the best. In fact, I'd go as far as to say the game is good. Not great, but solid and fun. The controls aren't so tight that I slam into walls at full speed. The game design is mostly solid (minus the Casino levels). There's practically no story or extended cut-scenes. The voices are...well, bad but I'm really good at muting my TV so I hardly hear them. But most of all it is fun. Honest to God fun in a 3D Sonic game. Why didn't they copy this formula over and over again?

What are your thoughts on this forgotten Sonic game?

@JasonR86 said:

So I was able to purchase Sonic Heroes for the Gamecube recently for next to nothing (I think it came to $2). I'd never played this game but I have played the majority of Sonic games. For the purposes of this thread, I've played nearly every 3D Sonic game. The only 3D iterations I've never played to completion are Unleashed, the 2009 game, and Colors.

Of all the 3D Sonic games I've played, Sonic Heroes is by far the best. In fact, I'd go as far as to say the game is good. Not great, but solid and fun. The controls aren't so tight that I slam into walls at full speed. The game design is mostly solid (minus the Casino levels). There's practically no story or extended cut-scenes. The voices are...well, bad but I'm really good at muting my TV so I hardly hear them. But most of all it is fun. Honest to God fun in a 3D Sonic game. Why didn't they copy this formula over and over again?

What are your thoughts on this forgotten Sonic game?

Play Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 then come back.

Heroes is completely abysmal, I'll reflect the others and say SA 1 and 2 were better. At least Heroes wasn't as bad a Shadow the Hedgehog, but it's certainly down there.

Ahahahahahahahahaha no.

Have you played Unleashed and Generations? Just wondering because i find it hard to believe that anyone would say such a thing after they've played any of those, or even Adventure 1 and 2.

If you haven't you really should, they're pretty great.

EDIT: Oh, this was old.

I always thought Heroes was good but I came to it a couple years later found I had some problems with it. The 2 big issues I had with it are the team mechanic and the rail grinding.

Heroes still uses the broken SA2 system of being able to whiff when switching rails. Meaning you want switch rails but instead fall to your doom for no reason. Or you meant to jump, but Sonic switches rails instead simply because the control stick was not centered, and there was no rail next to you in that direction, so you fall to your doom.

You could just avoid switching rails ever and do it manually (by jumping and then landing on a different rail) and that works well enough. Unfortunately, some parts of levels are designed to force you to use rail-switching (e.g. Rail Canyon) because doing it manually isn't fast enough. So ultimately you're forced to deal it.

Character switching. Ironically I always thought a strength of Heroes was the combat, and I always thought that, logically, the character switching couldn't even be considered a problem because of how fast it is. (it happens instantaneously) But I was wrong. The problem lies in the fact that you have to switch characters pretty much nonstop, it wears you out just to play the game. Very tedious. Question is, could there have been better ways of implementing this mechanic? I think the answer is definitely yes. (that's not to say it must have been implemented at all.)

*Sigh* I wrote all this before seeing that this topic was started over 6 months ago, ah well.

I A ranked the entire game and I disagree, too many annoying things botch it up.

Like how the second cannon in world 4 never actually funtions as it's supposed to, instead you always bounce off the rail you land on and have to be ready for that so you can steer yourself onto the lower left one to not die. Like if you touch the controller during loops, or don't touch it quite the right way you'll go flying off or run straight into a wall. Like how the flying formation sucks and feels way too limited and mechanic. Like how the 3 main stories are presented as difficulty levels yet you still have to trudge through the boring easy mode and the tedious mission mode if you want to reach the true ending. Like when the game stopped you for a minute or two, killing your momentum, so you could fight those big robots where you basically just stood around waiting for them to expose their weak points. Like how the pulling switches were way too cumbersome to line yourself up with most of the time. Like the completely stupid team on team boss battles. Like how you weren't always level three in speed form because that was when the game was actually fun. Like how obvious the triggers for the chatter (or anything else that you might otherwise pass off for a visual trick, like those in the scary house level) was in a level, and how audio will repeat if you cross the same point twice.

I believe there was even a point where a voice clip was so poorly timed in its triggering that it skipped over the one directly after it unless you did everything in your power to slow the team down during a rail sequence, and the only reason I suspected it was there was that it wasn't broken like this for the other team that passed through that same point in the level.

Being the first 3D Sonic game I played and coming in with very low expectations (thought the game was over at stage 4) I managed to enjoy it somewhat at the time, but I can't go back to it these days. It has a few neat ideas, but man is it shoddily put together.

Sonic Heroes is the game that turned me off to the notion of 3D Sonic games, so... I would have to disagree with you wholeheartedly.

Sonic Heroes was alright, but Adventure 2 is the best for me.
Fond memories of that game.

If this game didn't have the Team Rose stuff, I would agree. Honestly if it just had the Sonic/Tails/Knuckles stuff, it would be kind of indisputable. Sonic Adventure 1 has the totally not fun Amy levels, the extremely bad Big the Cat levels, and the Knuckles and Gamma levels are kind of boring, and a couple of those Sonic/Tails levels were hit or miss. SA2 on the other hand, besides the speed levels, is some hot garbage(what were they thinking with the Tails/Eggman levels? such atrocious platforming and the "Final" levels just got horrendous at times). Even those aren't exactly great or something, but can be pretty fun. Oh and Heroes doesn't have some shitty hub or humans besides Robotnik(I think) so it gets points for that.

But yeah I see where you're coming from.