I’m a huge Sonic the Hedgehog dork. My earliest childhood memory is playing Sonic 2 on the Mega Drive in the 90’s. I’ve been with Sonic every step of the way, through the good and through the... well, through the bad.
I wanted to put my thoughts on all the Sonic games in the “main cycle” of the series down on paper so I could refer to it when I wanted. These are what I’m calling “mini-reviews” because I’ll try to be as brief as possible.
There will be SPOILERS but it’s Sonic guys, come on.
Sonic’s history can be split into three “eras:” The Origins Era, consisting of the Mega Drive/Genesis games (all later collected in 2022's Sonic Origins); The Adventure Era, consisting of Sonic’s first foray into 3D games and his beginnings as a third-party mascot; and The Boost Era, consisting of a radically different approach to how Sonic operates in 3D. We could nebulously be in the beginning of a fourth era with the release of 2022's Sonic Frontiers, but time will tell.
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This game rules. The momentum system set the game out from other platformers of the era. Sonic winds up to his top speed, builds momentum when going down slopes, and loses momentum on upward slopes. Most platformers didn’t really do this (I don’t think any did at the time). Green Hill Zone, the first level, is a masterpiece in communicating this to the player. The rest of the levels? Hit or miss. Marble Zone feels like it was designed for a different platformer because it has less slopes and is more blocky. Labyrinth Zone, the first of the series water levels, sucks. Being underwater makes Sonic move really slowly, and it’s blocky like Marble Zone. Yuck. Collect rings so that when you get hit you drop them all but you don’t die. Collect 100 rings and get an extra life. Finish a level with 50 rings to get to the special stage, giving you a chance to get a Chaos Emerald. Get all six for the game’s good ending. Easy to understand, and collecting rings feels more substantial than getting coins in a Mario game or whatever. The special stages get real hard, but they’re fun and psychedelic. Each set of levels ends with a boss fight against Dr. Eggman (or Dr. Robotnik, whatever). All the boss fights are fantastic, except the one in Labyrinth Zone, which sucks.
Sonic 2 is a masterpiece. Does everything a sequel should. Levels are bigger, more intricate. The new Spin-Dash move helps you get momentum when you’re stuck. The Spin-Dash is so essential they put it into Sonic 1 whenever they re-release it. Sonic now has a sidekick, Tails, who can help defeat bosses, collect rings, and doesn’t need to be constantly watched over. Everything about Sonic 2 is bigger and better than Sonic 1. Even the water levels can be played in such a way that you never touch the water. They added a seventh chaos emerald and more opportunities to get into special stages at the levels checkpoints so you can get ‘em quickly. When you get all seven you can turn into Super Sonic and go even faster. It’s rad. The game ends with Sonic chasing Eggman into space. When you go to space you know that’s when shit gets serious. You go to Eggman’s space station, the Death Egg, and fight a giant robot version of Eggman with no rings to protect you. It’s tense as fuck and it rules. It is the best final boss in any video game. There is no such thing as a “perfect video game,” but Sonic 2 is a mighty strong contender.
Sonic CD came out on the Mega-CD which, like, four people bought so no one really played it until it got released elsewhere. Sonic CD is rad. Dr. Eggman is attempting to take over the Little Planet and mess with time. Sonic goes to stop him and is followed by Amy Rose, his #1 superfan. She is kidnapped (shock horror) by Metal Sonic. This leads to the best boss battle in the game when you race Metal Sonic to save her in Stardust Speedway. It kicks ass. Same rules as Sonic 1, but there’s no Chaos Emeralds, now there’s Time Stones. The game is all about time travel. Hit sign posts that say “future” or “past” then run until you launch through time. In the past you have to destroy Eggman’s machinery. If you do, you can go into the “good future”. If you go to the future and you haven’t done that, you see a “bad future.” The level design is all over the place. Some of the blocky complaints with Sonic 1 still apply, and a couple of the levels feel like they're built to be frustrating with weird spring placement or bizarre bouncy mechanics. Wacky Workbench sucks because the floor launches you high into the air, which can get in the way when you need to go through a low path.
Sonic 3 can feel kind of short compared to Sonic 2. There aren’t as many levels, and a couple of the levels can go on for just a tad too long…
…and the same can be said for Sonic & Knuckles. Sonic 3 & Knuckles (it’s one game, so I’ll treat it as such) is a big game when locked together. Like real big. It has a save feature which helps because holy heck this game is long. Some of the levels go on too long, such as Sandopolis or Carnival Night. The Death Egg from Sonic 2 crashed on a weird floating island called Angel Island and Eggman has gone to get it back up and running. He convinced some dude named Knuckles that Sonic is bad so Knuckles takes the Chaos Emeralds. As Eggman is about to launch the Death Egg he betrays Knuckles and takes the Master Emerald. They all beat up Eggman and save the day. If you collect all the Chaos Emeralds before the Sonic 3 part of the game is over, you get the chance to unlock the Super Emeralds when you get into the Sonic & Knuckles half of the game. Get all those and you can become Hyper Sonic. Hyper Sonic is even faster than Super Sonic. If you finish the game with all of these you get a special final level, the Doomsday Zone, which is rad. You can also play as Tails solo, or Knuckles solo. They can get through the levels in a different way than Sonic can. That’s replay value right there. You can also lock Sonic 2 onto the S&K cart and play as Knuckles in Sonic 2, but why ruin perfection? Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a true epic, even if it overstays its welcome occasionally. It’s a cool game. It’s no Sonic 2, but it’s cool.
Sonic Adventure is alright. This was the first game they did in 3D. They did a good job replicating the momentum feel of 2D Sonic, but hoh boy you wouldn’t know it from the level design. Boost pads everywhere. An over-reliance on set pieces where the controls are taken away from the player ruins some of the experience. No special stages. There’s a story now and the Chaos Emeralds play a big role in that. Even more other characters to play as. Some are good, some are bad. Tails levels are races, they’re good. Knuckles levels are treasure hunts and they’re a bit tedious. Amy’s levels are chase sequences and they’re fine. New characters! E-102 Gamma’s levels are lock-on shooty things, they’re fine. Big the Cat’s levels are fishing and they suck really badly. The story is… fine. Dr. Eggman wants to resurrect some god called Chaos and feed it the Chaos Emeralds so it can destroy everything. This becomes a recurring theme for Eggman moving forward. Sonic and friends fuck around for a while but Eggman does the thing and it goes bad. So Sonic turns into Super Sonic and beats up Chaos. Happy ending. Kind of. The last line of dialogue in the game is Tails saying “all’s well that ends well!” as they all stand in the literal ruins of a massive city. It’s pretty funny.
Sonic Adventure 2 is a good game and a bad game all at the same time. There’s two halves to the story mode, a “Hero” story and a “Dark” story. They intertwine in a way that suggests you need to play both to get the whole picture, but the story is so thin it doesn’t actually matter. There’s three gameplay types. Speed is for Sonic and Shadow, Sonic’s new rival. They look cool as shit, but the level design soars and dips. The characters are too twitchy to control reliably. They can go flying at the slightest touch of the controls. An over reliance on boost pads makes it feel as though most of the time speed isn’t earned. Later levels are built over bottomless pits which creates a false sense of difficulty. It sucks. When it rules, it rules, but it sucks just often enough to be frustrating The other two playstyles aren’t as interesting. Mech levels (for Tails and Dr. Eggman) are similar to Gamma’s levels from the first Adventure game. In that game comboing enemies adds time onto a countdown. Not so in this game, so the levels have no urgency. Treasure Hunting levels (for Knuckles and Rouge) are tedious, overlong, and frustrating. Especially as the levels get larger, longer, and start flirting with mechanics that feel half-cooked and poorly implemented. They also messed with the objective detector in a way that’s a bit too long to get into here, but it makes the levels take three times as long as they should. The story is that Dr. Eggman uncovers Shadow who was an experiment in creating the ultimate life form. He looks like Sonic because reasons. Also, he was made 50 years ago, a fact they bring up then keep forgetting. They go to a space station and Dr. Eggman blows up the moon and threatens the Earth. Sonic and pals go and stop him. Shit gets bad and they all have to work together to stop it. Sonic and Shadow go super because they have to destroy the prototype for the ultimate life form who is some big weird lizard. They defeat it but Shadow dies for some reason. Then they’re all sad even though Shadow was only introduced about five hours ago when this game began and Sonic was right there and could have easily saved him. It’s silly. Also the reason Shadow turns good is because he remembered the dying words of a girl who used to look after him when he was created. She was murdered by a SWAT team who invaded the space base they lived on even though it’s meant to be set in the 1950’s. Sonic Adventure 2 is a game I adore with my whole heart. So much of it’s music, it’s expressive colours, it’s low-poly aesthetic, it’s corny dialogue and story, is ingrained into every facet of my brain. It could be very easy to read this review and think that I don’t like this game, but I do. It sucks but I love it. Like wrestling.
Sonic’s first multiplatform game! And it stinks! In Sonic Heroes you play as three characters at once, and there’s four separate stories. The plot is so thin that the games wikipedia article doesn’t even bother summarizing it. Dr. Eggman is gonna destroy the world and is gloating by sending a letter to Sonic and friends. In the end it turns out to not actually be Eggman but instead Metal Sonic in disguise. He uses the Chaos Emeralds to turn into the Metal Overlord, but Sonic also uses the Emeralds to go Super and beats him. Yawn. There are two (TWO) face buttons dedicated to cycling between the three characters. Depending on which character is currently selected the play style is different. There’s speed (Sonic, Shadow, etc.) where the gameplay feels like the previous two games. There’s flight (Tails, Rouge, etc.) where the main character flies while carrying the other two. Finally there’s power (Knuckles, Big, etc.) and they do punchy stuff and use the other two characters as if they were boxing gloves. All the levels in this game are miles too long. They recycle gimmicks, enemy encounters, and require you to switch characters so often that they all blend together into a giant fever dream of shiny bright colours. This game is so bright, the characters literally have a sheen on them. It’s so bright that the first time I played through when I was fifteen I had to stop after a couple of hours because it gave me a headache and made my eyes hurt. So I glanced over this earlier, but uhh… Shadow’s back. Even though he died. There’s a moment in the Dark story where they walk into a room full of Shadow’s in vats. That leads us too:
Shadow The Hedgehog is a bad character and hey guess what? His game also sucks. Some people might think this is a spin-off and not a “main” game, but since they set up the story for this in Sonic Heroes I’m including it. It’s built using the same engine they used for Heroes so it plays the same (badly), and it looks the same. Everything has the same colourful sheen to it which is hilarious considering how grim-dark it’s trying to be. Now there’s also guns and vehicles. The guns automatically shoot whatever enemy is closest to you which can get really frustrating with some of the objectives. Oh, and every level has three objectives: one normal, one good, and one bad. Depending which you finish determines what your next level is. This means the game has a bunch of different endings. To get the final “true” ending you have to unlock all the other endings. You can’t just pick a level from the level select and do the route from there through, you have to physically play through from the first level and do the whole process again. That means you have to play through the whole game ten separate times, doing all the different tedious objectives as you go. Most of those levels, like Sonic Heroes, are long and awful. The objectives typically require scouring every inch of a level looking for enemies or items and such. It sucks. The story is dumb. Turns out Shadow was made using alien DNA or something. The aliens show up and want Shadow to help them harvest humans for energy. Shadow fucks around for a while (in a couple of the fake out endings he actually murders Dr. Eggman), then in the final true ending he goes through the same shit he went through in Sonic Adventure 2, becomes good again, then kills all the aliens. It’s dumb.
Sonic ‘06 is the worst game I’ve ever played. Sonic ‘06 is similar to Sonic Adventure, but worse. It plays badly and is a glitchy, broken mess because they wanted to release it in 2006 for Sonic’s 15th Anniversary year so they rushed it out the door. There’s three storylines and you need to play all three to get the whole picture. Unlike Adventure 2 where the story was so thin it didn’t matter, here the story is so convoluted that you do actually need to play all three to get it. And also take notes. You play as Sonic, whose levels play like worse versions of the past few games, Shadow, whose levels play like a worse version of his game, and new character Silver, whose levels are even slower and built around bad physics puzzles. The story is… a fucking mess. There’s time travel, and ontological loops, and Eggman wanting to resurrect gods but accidentally resurrecting other gods, a princess whose tears will end the world, hedgehogs confusing hedgehogs for other hedgehogs. I can’t even be bothered to sift through all my notes to recap this shit. In the end it doesn’t even matter because Sonic and Princess Elise travel back through time to make sure none of it ever even happens anyway so it's all good. Sonic 06 is a bad game. I hear lots of weird Sonic fans posit that if Sonic Team went back and fixed all the bugs and glitches this game would be awesome. But it wouldn’t. The levels are bad and rely too much on set pieces, even more than previous games. The story would still be a fucking mess. Silver’s levels aren’t just broken, they are mechanically bad. The boss fights are completely uninspired. The dialogue and voice acting is embarrassing, and the cutscenes were mo-capped so the characters all move weirdly.