Sonic's Infamous Flop: Sonic the Hedgehog (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360, 2006) Review
NOTE: This review is part of a retrospective of the Sonic franchise. Feel free to read the other Sonic reviews I’ve done here - https://expithecat.blogspot.com/search/label/sonic%20retrospective
Well gang, today I’m reviewing Sonic the Hedgehog.
No, not the game released for the Sega Genesis for 1991. Or the game released for the Master System and Game Gear the same year.
I’m talking about the game released in 2006, for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Probably one of the most infamous games in the franchise, and one that arguably did lasting damage to its overall reputation.
This is going to be fun.
Background and History
Development of Sonic 06 can be traced back to the completion of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg in 2003 - where Sonic Team was trying to come up with new ideas for their next project, one of which being a more realistic game in tone and a new physics engine. It was decided that the game would be developed and released in 2006 for the next generation of platforms - at the time, being the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Supposedly there was also a version planned for the Wii, but those got cancelled, albeit the former would get it’s own exclusive game, Sonic and the Secret Rings, the following year.
Anyway, Sonic 06 was thought of as a soft reboot of the series - a “return to form” compared to the likes of Heroes and Shadow (I told you that wasn’t going to be the last time you heard that one). The game was announced at E3 2005 under the very creative name of “Sonic the Hedgehog,” and was revealed to feature the “Havok” physics engine, and entailed the idea of “What if Sonic existed in the real world?”
Well gang, today I’m reviewing Sonic the Hedgehog.
No, not the game released for the Sega Genesis for 1991. Or the game released for the Master System and Game Gear the same year.
I’m talking about the game released in 2006, for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Probably one of the most infamous games in the franchise, and one that arguably did lasting damage to its overall reputation.
This is going to be fun.
Background and History
Development of Sonic 06 can be traced back to the completion of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg in 2003 - where Sonic Team was trying to come up with new ideas for their next project, one of which being a more realistic game in tone and a new physics engine. It was decided that the game would be developed and released in 2006 for the next generation of platforms - at the time, being the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Supposedly there was also a version planned for the Wii, but those got cancelled, albeit the former would get it’s own exclusive game, Sonic and the Secret Rings, the following year.
Anyway, Sonic 06 was thought of as a soft reboot of the series - a “return to form” compared to the likes of Heroes and Shadow (I told you that wasn’t going to be the last time you heard that one). The game was announced at E3 2005 under the very creative name of “Sonic the Hedgehog,” and was revealed to feature the “Havok” physics engine, and entailed the idea of “What if Sonic existed in the real world?”
EDIT: Originally I wrote about how the development for 06 was split and general issues regarding it's development cycle, but according to a user on the r/SonictheHedgehog Discord server, this may not have been entirely true. I decided to remove the paragraph to clear some of the misconception. If anyone wants to add some comments on Sonic 06's development cycle, feel free to do so.
But regardless, when the game released, both critics and fans alike didn’t have very nice things to say about Sonic 06. The game was panned, with people pointing out issues such as the game’s camera, controls, the story, constant and long loading screens, and most infamously, the glitches. The game did sell well, even earning a “Platinum Hits” label on the Xbox 360, but this game ultimately damaged the franchise's reputation - even after it had been somewhat declining in previous years. Not only was it often considered one of the worst games in the Sonic franchise, but outright one of the worst games of all time.
Unfortunately I wasn’t old enough to know what the reaction towards this game was right after it was released, but I kind of wish I was. I mean, after witnessing both the launches of Fallout 76 in 2018 and Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 - both being hyped up games that turned out to be glitchy messes at launch - I could imagine Sonic 06 being in that same calibur.
Personal Experiences
That said… I do have a confession to make.
Sonic 06 was probably the first official Sonic game I had any experience with.
Now, I can’t remember if I actually “played” the game, but I do have memories of my brother renting the game from Blockbuster in their last few years and me watching him play it. Growing up, we had an Xbox 360, and I think I was about 7 years old when he played it.
And truth be told… we liked it. Obviously at the time we didn’t know anything about the game’s reception, and keep in mind that as kids - especially ones whose parents weren’t the most well off, and as such we didn’t have a lot to play - we just weren’t really aware of the game’s problems, and even if we were, we could easily overlook them.
Now, ultimately I feel like my earliest exposures to the franchise were through flash games, and the first “official” game I do remember playing was Sonic 1… for the Game Boy Advance, but I definitely remember Sonic 06 being one of the earliest exposures to the Sonic series, and to an extent, I might have not been as much of a fan of the franchise as I am now if it weren’t for that exposure. Which is kind of sad, but worth mentioning.
As I grew a bit older though, I remember being involved in the ROBLOX forums and on discussions of the “worst video games ever,” Sonic 06 was a game I remember being cited as among them. I didn’t really know that 06 in particular was the game we played, but I found that out and I was actually kind of surprised to find out that the game had the reputation it had. Really? People hated the game? I mean, me and my brother liked the game, it must have been decent, but I guess not.
But over time, as I looked more into others’ thoughts and opinions of the game, it sort of became clear why Sonic 06 was disliked. But I hadn’t actually played it since those early days - my brother’s Xbox 360 broke around 2014 and I didn’t really get a chance to play the game even when I was becoming invested in the series a couple years prior. I did jump on the bandwagon of bashing the game, but truth be told it had been years since I played it (even if I had played it at all). At the most I did try Project 06 when the first demos of that were coming out (although I don’t really remember what I thought of it).
But in 2019, after getting a PlayStation 3, I decided to pick the game up, and of course I played it for this review. And, well...
Story
First of all, I should mention that this game’s story, in a similar fashion to the Adventure games, Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog, is split into three “main” stories that after playing through all of them unlock a “Last Story” which represents the “true” ending. As far as Sonic’s story goes, the premise is relatively simple - At the Festival of the Sun, Dr. Eggman attempts to kidnap Princess Elise in order to reveal secrets of the “Flames of Disaster.” Sonic saves Princess Elise… only for her to get captured anyway and the rest of Sonic’s story largely follows the premise of Sonic trying to save Princess Elise with the help of his friends.
Of course, there is more to it than that, and of course, there are two other “episodes” that represent the entirety of the story and culminate into the “last” episode. Silver’s story starts out 200 years in the future where his world has been destroyed, and he and Blaze (who is now from the future and not another dimension I guess) frequently run into and fight an entity named “Iblis,” before they run into another character named Mephiles who misleads them into believing Sonic is responsible for the state of the world, and refers to him as the “Iblis Trigger,” before teleporting him to the past in order to destroy Sonic. But as the story progresses, he begins to reconsider whether it is morally right to kill Sonic before being transported 10 years into the past from then along Shadow where he finds out the truth about Iblis and Mephiles.
Shadow’s story begins with Rouge being set out by GUN to retrieve an artifact dubbed the “Scepter of Darkness,” and Shadow runs into her as he invades Eggman’s base. Rouge holds onto the Scepter of Darkness as she and Shadow run into Eggman again, before dropping and shattering the scepter causing Mephiles to escape, taking a similar form to that of Shadow and sending him and Rouge to the future where everything is of course destroyed. Later on, as they and Team Sonic meet up, find the Chaos Emeralds and use them to transport back to the past, Shadow runs into Mephiles once again who encourages Shadow to join him, to which Shadow refuses. He is eventually transported back in time, runs into Silver, and is transported alongside him 10 years in the past where he learns about the truth and origins of Mephiles before going back to present day.
Now, I’m obviously not going to go through every single thing that happens in Sonic 06’s story - in fact just my summary ended up being long enough - and chances are most of the people reading this already know about the events that take place within the story.
But I gotta say… I am not a fan of this plot. I’ve mentioned time and time again that stories in Sonic games aren’t really too important to me - it’s nice to have it there but I won’t lose sleep over a bad Sonic story as long as the gameplay is good. But I gotta say, 06’s story in general just felt really convoluted, with a lot of story aspects that just leave a lot of questions unanswered.
Time travel is obviously a major plot element here, and frankly I feel like the addition of it within the rest of the plot just didn’t really make that much sense to me. One thing I pretty much immediately didn’t understand was Mephiles’ origin story - Shadow and Silver being sent back to the past, and it is revealed Shadow was the one who sealed Mephiles. I’m not entirely sure how to explain this, but this game implies that Mephiles was sealed by Shadow, accidentally freed by Rouge, then appears 200 years in the future to send Silver back in time, and him and Shadow go back 10 years from then, where… Shadow seals Mephiles. So I guess there’s just some sort of feedback loop going on where Shadow is sent back 10 years ago to seal Mephiles, then accidentally free him to send him and Silver back to seal him.
Just… how does time travel work in this game? Maybe I could look at this as the Shadow that seals Mephiles being Shadow from 10 years in the past, but that doesn’t work when you consider that he was encapsulated as he was in Adventure 2.
And then there’s Mephiles himself who just kind of feels like a generic “edgy” villain to me, and it’s never explained what his motivation was as part of his intention to destroy the world. And also on further reflection I don’t quite understand why he came up with this complicated plan - his intention was to release the Flames of Disaster by having Elise cry, but I don’t quite understand why he uses Silver to kill Sonic instead of just doing it himself - I mean he outright does so in the Last Story. And hell, if he has these powers of time travel, why doesn’t he just go back to the time period between his creation and the events of the game and either kill or upset Elise to the point of crying?
Oh yeah, and on the subject of Princess Elise… She's an incredibly bland, forgettable character. I feel like that’s a point people have made multiple times, but I feel like she’s pretty much devoid of any personality and just sort of serves as a run-of-the-mill “damsel in distress” type of character. A lot of people comment on the whole “romance with Sonic” plotline and yeah… it’s pretty dumb.
Now, to be fair, this isn’t the first time any piece of media has shown a human + anthro-animal ship - some point to Jessica Rabbit in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and admittedly I haven’t seen that movie so I can’t really comment, although I think what kind of makes 06 stand out here is just how seriously it is played compared to other examples in cartoons and whatnot. I feel like a lot of the human/anthro romances I’ve seen in cartoons are often played for laughs and not really meant to be taken seriously. With Sonic 06, the whole SonElise thing is a core element of the plot, and it doesn’t really help that Elise’s design just does not fit the Sonic art style - looking more like a rejected Final Fantasy character than anything - and that’s why I feel so many people joke about Sonic and Elise’s relationship within the game.
But, whatever. The plot doesn’t even matter anyway since, spoiler alert, Elise literally erases the events in this game from the timeline at the end. I guess even this game wanted to retcon itself.
Presentation
One positive thing I do have to say about this game is that it’s soundtrack… is pretty good. I feel like this is the one positive thing most people can agree on. Sonic is of course a series that’s known for having really good soundtracks and it’s unsurprising that, especially as one of the series’ higher-profile releases, 06’s soundtrack is definitely good. It’s not my personal favorite Sonic soundtrack out there - there are a handful of tracks I do find pretty forgettable - but there are others that I really like. Among my favorites are the game’s main theme, His World, in addition to Crisis City, Kingdom Valley, the theme for Wave Ocean’s mach speed section and Dreams of an Absolution. I also like the mix of Sweet Dreams that plays at the end of Sonic’s story… mostly because it’s the only English dub I can find of the song.
Visually, this game is… iffy. I guess it looks fine for an early 360/PS3 game, although I did notice a lot of pop-in and slowdown. I will say I personally played the PS3 version of the game, since, well, I actually have a PS3 and don’t own a 360, plus the game isn’t backwards compatible on Xbox One (for probably obvious reasons). I’ve heard the slowdown is worse in the PS3 version than in the 360 version though, so make of that what you will.
But as far as the art style goes, I’m not a fan of it. The game goes for a more “realistic” look with it’s human characters and environments, and frankly I don’t feel like it fits the more cartoon-y nature of the actual Sonic characters. Most of the NPC characters look like stock assets (the sales guy in Soleanna in particular always looked like Coach from Left 4 Dead to me), and while some environments like Crisis City do look pretty good, others give me the vibe of those “fangames” where someone just puts a model of Sonic in a stock field in Unreal Engine. White Acropolis was a particular level that pretty much looked straight out of one of the SSX games to me.
Also, Realistic Robotnik/Eggman. Fucking terrifying.
I will say the FMV cutscenes done by Blur Studio look really good. The ending cutscene of the Sonic story in particular was one where I really felt Sonic was animated in a way that was expressive and retained that animated nature. It is still brought down a bit by the game’s art style (there’s been a constant joke of the intro cutscene looking like a Final Fantasy game), but the animators can’t really help that I suppose.
The in-game cutscenes though don’t look very good. I feel like since the series’ introduction up to this point, Sonic Team really struggled with animating the characters within in-game cutscenes. And despite this being on at the time next-gen hardware, the animation still ends up looking really stiff and stilted a lot of the time. The mouth movements in particular feel pretty janky to me, and the body movements just feel lacking in emotion. Again, in-game animation has been an issue since the Adventure games, but I feel like here it looks worse considering this fourth or fifth major 3D game in the series (depending on if you count Shadow), in 2006, and on newer hardware. I can give the Adventure games a bit of a pass since it was still early on in the field of 3D platformers, but here, I really can’t.
Gameplay
Man, it’s already been 5 pages according to my Google Doc and I haven’t even touched upon the gameplay.
To start, let’s just talk about the elephant in the room - the glitches, probably the thing Sonic 06 is most infamous for. This has always been one of the biggest talking points of this game, and frankly, this is one of those games that’s been notable for being buggy, a similar boat to that of games like Fallout 76 or Cyberpunk 2077 at launch as I mentioned. And well, I definitely ran into my share of them. I think one that’s often cited is that in just the game’s first level, some of the loops have two potential issues - sometimes you can literally clip through them when you touch one of the speed panels, and other times Sonic can defy gravity and just walk on them as if they were just a normal path.
The most frequent one I personally encountered was within Knuckles and Rouge’s stages. As you could expect, both of them keep their abilities to glide and climb on walls, like in Sonic Adventure 2. That said, I often found myself climbing on walls… only to get stuck on them. Often when I tried to jump off the walls, Knuckles or Rouge would appear to be trying to jump off only to remain stuck on the walls. I often found myself mashing the jump button or in some cases having to walk to the top of a pillar, wall or whatever to get unstuck.
On top of those, a few others I encountered were:
But I gotta be perfectly honest for a second.
The game’s glitches, surprisingly, weren’t my biggest issue with this game. Yes, they were definitely noticeable, but I actually found myself finding bigger issues I had than that.
I sort of bring this up because I feel like there’s always been somewhat of a sentiment that’s especially become pretty widespread in the past few years or so where people say the game could’ve been good if it weren’t for the rushed development and glitches. And, well, as I continue talking about the gameplay… I’ll shed some light on why I don’t agree with this notion.
One thing I often hear when it comes to this game’s formula and structure is that it makes for, essentially, a de-facto Sonic Adventure 3. According to the Sonic wikia, this game was intended to build off a lot of the “Sonic Adventure” elements, and while one could make the case that Heroes could also be considered Adventure 3, I sort of get more of a vibe that with Sonic 06, they wanted to return to that formula and build off of it. I feel like this is pretty much made clear in the first stage you play - Wave Ocean being more or less a reimagining of Emerald Coast.
Like in the Adventure games, you have multiple individual playable characters with their own playstyles, albeit with some overlap between certain characters. The game’s divided into four stories, three of which you have to unlock. Obviously Sonic’s story is where you start, but as you play through it you unlock Silver and Shadow’s respective episodes, and playing through all of those unlocks the “Last” story, which consists of one final level and the final boss, Solaris.
But even within those stories, there are moments where you control other characters - mostly two in addition to the main characters of the respective stories. In Sonic’s story, you sometimes play as Tails and Knuckles, in Shadow’s story you sometimes play as Rouge and E-123 Omega, and in Silver’s story you sometimes play as Blaze and Amy Rose. Also for some reason there are times where you control the “main” characters in another’s story. I recall moments where you play as Silver in both Sonic and Shadow’s stories, and Sonic and Shadow in Silver’s story. Not entirely sure what the point is of that, but alright. But even with all those characters aside, you have sub-playstyles within the main three characters. In addition to Sonic’s core gameplay, you also have Mach speed sections of levels, levels where Sonic carries Elise giving him some different abilities, and snowboarding sections of levels. In addition to Shadow’s core gameplay, you have a few different vehicles that show up in different levels.
Just after starting the game and watching the intro cutscene, I get introduced with a major issue I have with Sonic 06’s level structure. You start off in Soleanna, a hub world like that of Sonic Adventure.
Now, I’ll be frank - I never cared for hub worlds in Sonic games. I can understand them in collectathons and non-linear platforms like Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie, but games like Sonic where levels tend to be more linear, it just kind of slows the pace of the game and worst case scenario just feels like I’m going on wild goose chases looking for the next level.
I didn’t care for them in Sonic Adventure, and here, I find myself disliking them even more. They just tend to feel extremely bland and confusing to navigate - especially in the case of the “jungle” hub world that pretty much just feels like a giant open space with little going on. The NPCs generally don’t have anything interesting to say and I feel like everything within the hub worlds just tends to blend together, sometimes just making me feel lost especially when coming to this game for the first time.
But back to Sonic’s story, before you even get to play the first stage, you have to do a town mission where you go through red rings. And when you’re done with that, you have to buy the Light Chip to obtain the Light Speed Dash so you can use the path of rings to get to the entrance of Wave Ocean.
And this is only the first time you have to do a town mission before entering a stage. There are a few times you have to do so in all the three main story lines - sometimes involving fighting hordes of enemies or escorting NPCs to areas. There’s also three “trials” you have to do as both Sonic and Silver before entering Kingdom Valley. But be careful - if you don’t manually save after doing any of these mandatory town missions, you will have to do them all over again if you die within the succeeding stage.
But okay, let’s finally talk about how the game plays.
As far as Sonic’s core gameplay goes, it’s about what one would probably expect. You try to get from point A to point B within his stages as fast as possible utilizing the moveset and level design. This game does employ more of a Sonic Adventure 1 approach to level design where levels are generally more open and allow for greater exploration. And in theory, I do like the idea of returning to this style - I really liked how Sonic Adventure’s speed stages generally just felt more open and akin to the classic games, and along with his control felt like a good transition from the classic 2D games to a more open space. It wasn’t perfect, but I really like how it gave the player different ways to traverse the levels using Sonic’s movement and the environments to their advantage.
That said, I feel like there was something about those levels that worked well that 06 sort of lacks. When playing this game’s stages, I felt a similar vibe I did with Shadow the Hedgehog where stages just felt empty and uninteresting to play through. I mostly felt like levels in this game just consisted of a weird mixture of giant open spaces and linear pathways, either way with little going on. I never really felt like I could find other ways to take advantage of the level environment or seek alternate pathways to go along. Often there are portions of levels that just feel automated where it just feels like speed panels and ramps are pushing the character along - somehow I feel like it was more noticeable here than in Forces, a game people often talk about feeling too automated.
And what doesn’t really help either is the control and movement of the characters. Whereas in the Sonic Adventures games and Heroes there was generally more of a flow to the controls, here they all just feel sluggish to me - all walking/running at a slow pace. Sonic is technically the fastest in the game (aside for E-123 Omega at top speeds supposedly), and even then he feels slow compared to previous 3D titles.
But regardless, when the game released, both critics and fans alike didn’t have very nice things to say about Sonic 06. The game was panned, with people pointing out issues such as the game’s camera, controls, the story, constant and long loading screens, and most infamously, the glitches. The game did sell well, even earning a “Platinum Hits” label on the Xbox 360, but this game ultimately damaged the franchise's reputation - even after it had been somewhat declining in previous years. Not only was it often considered one of the worst games in the Sonic franchise, but outright one of the worst games of all time.
Unfortunately I wasn’t old enough to know what the reaction towards this game was right after it was released, but I kind of wish I was. I mean, after witnessing both the launches of Fallout 76 in 2018 and Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020 - both being hyped up games that turned out to be glitchy messes at launch - I could imagine Sonic 06 being in that same calibur.
Personal Experiences
That said… I do have a confession to make.
Sonic 06 was probably the first official Sonic game I had any experience with.
Now, I can’t remember if I actually “played” the game, but I do have memories of my brother renting the game from Blockbuster in their last few years and me watching him play it. Growing up, we had an Xbox 360, and I think I was about 7 years old when he played it.
And truth be told… we liked it. Obviously at the time we didn’t know anything about the game’s reception, and keep in mind that as kids - especially ones whose parents weren’t the most well off, and as such we didn’t have a lot to play - we just weren’t really aware of the game’s problems, and even if we were, we could easily overlook them.
Now, ultimately I feel like my earliest exposures to the franchise were through flash games, and the first “official” game I do remember playing was Sonic 1… for the Game Boy Advance, but I definitely remember Sonic 06 being one of the earliest exposures to the Sonic series, and to an extent, I might have not been as much of a fan of the franchise as I am now if it weren’t for that exposure. Which is kind of sad, but worth mentioning.
As I grew a bit older though, I remember being involved in the ROBLOX forums and on discussions of the “worst video games ever,” Sonic 06 was a game I remember being cited as among them. I didn’t really know that 06 in particular was the game we played, but I found that out and I was actually kind of surprised to find out that the game had the reputation it had. Really? People hated the game? I mean, me and my brother liked the game, it must have been decent, but I guess not.
But over time, as I looked more into others’ thoughts and opinions of the game, it sort of became clear why Sonic 06 was disliked. But I hadn’t actually played it since those early days - my brother’s Xbox 360 broke around 2014 and I didn’t really get a chance to play the game even when I was becoming invested in the series a couple years prior. I did jump on the bandwagon of bashing the game, but truth be told it had been years since I played it (even if I had played it at all). At the most I did try Project 06 when the first demos of that were coming out (although I don’t really remember what I thought of it).
But in 2019, after getting a PlayStation 3, I decided to pick the game up, and of course I played it for this review. And, well...
Story
First of all, I should mention that this game’s story, in a similar fashion to the Adventure games, Heroes, and Shadow the Hedgehog, is split into three “main” stories that after playing through all of them unlock a “Last Story” which represents the “true” ending. As far as Sonic’s story goes, the premise is relatively simple - At the Festival of the Sun, Dr. Eggman attempts to kidnap Princess Elise in order to reveal secrets of the “Flames of Disaster.” Sonic saves Princess Elise… only for her to get captured anyway and the rest of Sonic’s story largely follows the premise of Sonic trying to save Princess Elise with the help of his friends.
Of course, there is more to it than that, and of course, there are two other “episodes” that represent the entirety of the story and culminate into the “last” episode. Silver’s story starts out 200 years in the future where his world has been destroyed, and he and Blaze (who is now from the future and not another dimension I guess) frequently run into and fight an entity named “Iblis,” before they run into another character named Mephiles who misleads them into believing Sonic is responsible for the state of the world, and refers to him as the “Iblis Trigger,” before teleporting him to the past in order to destroy Sonic. But as the story progresses, he begins to reconsider whether it is morally right to kill Sonic before being transported 10 years into the past from then along Shadow where he finds out the truth about Iblis and Mephiles.
Shadow’s story begins with Rouge being set out by GUN to retrieve an artifact dubbed the “Scepter of Darkness,” and Shadow runs into her as he invades Eggman’s base. Rouge holds onto the Scepter of Darkness as she and Shadow run into Eggman again, before dropping and shattering the scepter causing Mephiles to escape, taking a similar form to that of Shadow and sending him and Rouge to the future where everything is of course destroyed. Later on, as they and Team Sonic meet up, find the Chaos Emeralds and use them to transport back to the past, Shadow runs into Mephiles once again who encourages Shadow to join him, to which Shadow refuses. He is eventually transported back in time, runs into Silver, and is transported alongside him 10 years in the past where he learns about the truth and origins of Mephiles before going back to present day.
Now, I’m obviously not going to go through every single thing that happens in Sonic 06’s story - in fact just my summary ended up being long enough - and chances are most of the people reading this already know about the events that take place within the story.
But I gotta say… I am not a fan of this plot. I’ve mentioned time and time again that stories in Sonic games aren’t really too important to me - it’s nice to have it there but I won’t lose sleep over a bad Sonic story as long as the gameplay is good. But I gotta say, 06’s story in general just felt really convoluted, with a lot of story aspects that just leave a lot of questions unanswered.
Time travel is obviously a major plot element here, and frankly I feel like the addition of it within the rest of the plot just didn’t really make that much sense to me. One thing I pretty much immediately didn’t understand was Mephiles’ origin story - Shadow and Silver being sent back to the past, and it is revealed Shadow was the one who sealed Mephiles. I’m not entirely sure how to explain this, but this game implies that Mephiles was sealed by Shadow, accidentally freed by Rouge, then appears 200 years in the future to send Silver back in time, and him and Shadow go back 10 years from then, where… Shadow seals Mephiles. So I guess there’s just some sort of feedback loop going on where Shadow is sent back 10 years ago to seal Mephiles, then accidentally free him to send him and Silver back to seal him.
Just… how does time travel work in this game? Maybe I could look at this as the Shadow that seals Mephiles being Shadow from 10 years in the past, but that doesn’t work when you consider that he was encapsulated as he was in Adventure 2.
And then there’s Mephiles himself who just kind of feels like a generic “edgy” villain to me, and it’s never explained what his motivation was as part of his intention to destroy the world. And also on further reflection I don’t quite understand why he came up with this complicated plan - his intention was to release the Flames of Disaster by having Elise cry, but I don’t quite understand why he uses Silver to kill Sonic instead of just doing it himself - I mean he outright does so in the Last Story. And hell, if he has these powers of time travel, why doesn’t he just go back to the time period between his creation and the events of the game and either kill or upset Elise to the point of crying?
Oh yeah, and on the subject of Princess Elise… She's an incredibly bland, forgettable character. I feel like that’s a point people have made multiple times, but I feel like she’s pretty much devoid of any personality and just sort of serves as a run-of-the-mill “damsel in distress” type of character. A lot of people comment on the whole “romance with Sonic” plotline and yeah… it’s pretty dumb.
Now, to be fair, this isn’t the first time any piece of media has shown a human + anthro-animal ship - some point to Jessica Rabbit in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and admittedly I haven’t seen that movie so I can’t really comment, although I think what kind of makes 06 stand out here is just how seriously it is played compared to other examples in cartoons and whatnot. I feel like a lot of the human/anthro romances I’ve seen in cartoons are often played for laughs and not really meant to be taken seriously. With Sonic 06, the whole SonElise thing is a core element of the plot, and it doesn’t really help that Elise’s design just does not fit the Sonic art style - looking more like a rejected Final Fantasy character than anything - and that’s why I feel so many people joke about Sonic and Elise’s relationship within the game.
But, whatever. The plot doesn’t even matter anyway since, spoiler alert, Elise literally erases the events in this game from the timeline at the end. I guess even this game wanted to retcon itself.
Presentation
One positive thing I do have to say about this game is that it’s soundtrack… is pretty good. I feel like this is the one positive thing most people can agree on. Sonic is of course a series that’s known for having really good soundtracks and it’s unsurprising that, especially as one of the series’ higher-profile releases, 06’s soundtrack is definitely good. It’s not my personal favorite Sonic soundtrack out there - there are a handful of tracks I do find pretty forgettable - but there are others that I really like. Among my favorites are the game’s main theme, His World, in addition to Crisis City, Kingdom Valley, the theme for Wave Ocean’s mach speed section and Dreams of an Absolution. I also like the mix of Sweet Dreams that plays at the end of Sonic’s story… mostly because it’s the only English dub I can find of the song.
Visually, this game is… iffy. I guess it looks fine for an early 360/PS3 game, although I did notice a lot of pop-in and slowdown. I will say I personally played the PS3 version of the game, since, well, I actually have a PS3 and don’t own a 360, plus the game isn’t backwards compatible on Xbox One (for probably obvious reasons). I’ve heard the slowdown is worse in the PS3 version than in the 360 version though, so make of that what you will.
But as far as the art style goes, I’m not a fan of it. The game goes for a more “realistic” look with it’s human characters and environments, and frankly I don’t feel like it fits the more cartoon-y nature of the actual Sonic characters. Most of the NPC characters look like stock assets (the sales guy in Soleanna in particular always looked like Coach from Left 4 Dead to me), and while some environments like Crisis City do look pretty good, others give me the vibe of those “fangames” where someone just puts a model of Sonic in a stock field in Unreal Engine. White Acropolis was a particular level that pretty much looked straight out of one of the SSX games to me.
Also, Realistic Robotnik/Eggman. Fucking terrifying.
I will say the FMV cutscenes done by Blur Studio look really good. The ending cutscene of the Sonic story in particular was one where I really felt Sonic was animated in a way that was expressive and retained that animated nature. It is still brought down a bit by the game’s art style (there’s been a constant joke of the intro cutscene looking like a Final Fantasy game), but the animators can’t really help that I suppose.
The in-game cutscenes though don’t look very good. I feel like since the series’ introduction up to this point, Sonic Team really struggled with animating the characters within in-game cutscenes. And despite this being on at the time next-gen hardware, the animation still ends up looking really stiff and stilted a lot of the time. The mouth movements in particular feel pretty janky to me, and the body movements just feel lacking in emotion. Again, in-game animation has been an issue since the Adventure games, but I feel like here it looks worse considering this fourth or fifth major 3D game in the series (depending on if you count Shadow), in 2006, and on newer hardware. I can give the Adventure games a bit of a pass since it was still early on in the field of 3D platformers, but here, I really can’t.
Gameplay
Man, it’s already been 5 pages according to my Google Doc and I haven’t even touched upon the gameplay.
To start, let’s just talk about the elephant in the room - the glitches, probably the thing Sonic 06 is most infamous for. This has always been one of the biggest talking points of this game, and frankly, this is one of those games that’s been notable for being buggy, a similar boat to that of games like Fallout 76 or Cyberpunk 2077 at launch as I mentioned. And well, I definitely ran into my share of them. I think one that’s often cited is that in just the game’s first level, some of the loops have two potential issues - sometimes you can literally clip through them when you touch one of the speed panels, and other times Sonic can defy gravity and just walk on them as if they were just a normal path.
The most frequent one I personally encountered was within Knuckles and Rouge’s stages. As you could expect, both of them keep their abilities to glide and climb on walls, like in Sonic Adventure 2. That said, I often found myself climbing on walls… only to get stuck on them. Often when I tried to jump off the walls, Knuckles or Rouge would appear to be trying to jump off only to remain stuck on the walls. I often found myself mashing the jump button or in some cases having to walk to the top of a pillar, wall or whatever to get unstuck.
On top of those, a few others I encountered were:
- Characters going into a 45 degree angle when walking along curbs
- Characters getting stuck at the end of grind rails unless I jumped (often causing the camera to freak out)
- Doing Sonic’s spin kick move on top of boxes in Soleanna causing them to fly upward and outside the game’s boundaries
But I gotta be perfectly honest for a second.
The game’s glitches, surprisingly, weren’t my biggest issue with this game. Yes, they were definitely noticeable, but I actually found myself finding bigger issues I had than that.
I sort of bring this up because I feel like there’s always been somewhat of a sentiment that’s especially become pretty widespread in the past few years or so where people say the game could’ve been good if it weren’t for the rushed development and glitches. And, well, as I continue talking about the gameplay… I’ll shed some light on why I don’t agree with this notion.
One thing I often hear when it comes to this game’s formula and structure is that it makes for, essentially, a de-facto Sonic Adventure 3. According to the Sonic wikia, this game was intended to build off a lot of the “Sonic Adventure” elements, and while one could make the case that Heroes could also be considered Adventure 3, I sort of get more of a vibe that with Sonic 06, they wanted to return to that formula and build off of it. I feel like this is pretty much made clear in the first stage you play - Wave Ocean being more or less a reimagining of Emerald Coast.
Like in the Adventure games, you have multiple individual playable characters with their own playstyles, albeit with some overlap between certain characters. The game’s divided into four stories, three of which you have to unlock. Obviously Sonic’s story is where you start, but as you play through it you unlock Silver and Shadow’s respective episodes, and playing through all of those unlocks the “Last” story, which consists of one final level and the final boss, Solaris.
But even within those stories, there are moments where you control other characters - mostly two in addition to the main characters of the respective stories. In Sonic’s story, you sometimes play as Tails and Knuckles, in Shadow’s story you sometimes play as Rouge and E-123 Omega, and in Silver’s story you sometimes play as Blaze and Amy Rose. Also for some reason there are times where you control the “main” characters in another’s story. I recall moments where you play as Silver in both Sonic and Shadow’s stories, and Sonic and Shadow in Silver’s story. Not entirely sure what the point is of that, but alright. But even with all those characters aside, you have sub-playstyles within the main three characters. In addition to Sonic’s core gameplay, you also have Mach speed sections of levels, levels where Sonic carries Elise giving him some different abilities, and snowboarding sections of levels. In addition to Shadow’s core gameplay, you have a few different vehicles that show up in different levels.
Just after starting the game and watching the intro cutscene, I get introduced with a major issue I have with Sonic 06’s level structure. You start off in Soleanna, a hub world like that of Sonic Adventure.
Now, I’ll be frank - I never cared for hub worlds in Sonic games. I can understand them in collectathons and non-linear platforms like Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie, but games like Sonic where levels tend to be more linear, it just kind of slows the pace of the game and worst case scenario just feels like I’m going on wild goose chases looking for the next level.
I didn’t care for them in Sonic Adventure, and here, I find myself disliking them even more. They just tend to feel extremely bland and confusing to navigate - especially in the case of the “jungle” hub world that pretty much just feels like a giant open space with little going on. The NPCs generally don’t have anything interesting to say and I feel like everything within the hub worlds just tends to blend together, sometimes just making me feel lost especially when coming to this game for the first time.
But back to Sonic’s story, before you even get to play the first stage, you have to do a town mission where you go through red rings. And when you’re done with that, you have to buy the Light Chip to obtain the Light Speed Dash so you can use the path of rings to get to the entrance of Wave Ocean.
And this is only the first time you have to do a town mission before entering a stage. There are a few times you have to do so in all the three main story lines - sometimes involving fighting hordes of enemies or escorting NPCs to areas. There’s also three “trials” you have to do as both Sonic and Silver before entering Kingdom Valley. But be careful - if you don’t manually save after doing any of these mandatory town missions, you will have to do them all over again if you die within the succeeding stage.
But okay, let’s finally talk about how the game plays.
As far as Sonic’s core gameplay goes, it’s about what one would probably expect. You try to get from point A to point B within his stages as fast as possible utilizing the moveset and level design. This game does employ more of a Sonic Adventure 1 approach to level design where levels are generally more open and allow for greater exploration. And in theory, I do like the idea of returning to this style - I really liked how Sonic Adventure’s speed stages generally just felt more open and akin to the classic games, and along with his control felt like a good transition from the classic 2D games to a more open space. It wasn’t perfect, but I really like how it gave the player different ways to traverse the levels using Sonic’s movement and the environments to their advantage.
That said, I feel like there was something about those levels that worked well that 06 sort of lacks. When playing this game’s stages, I felt a similar vibe I did with Shadow the Hedgehog where stages just felt empty and uninteresting to play through. I mostly felt like levels in this game just consisted of a weird mixture of giant open spaces and linear pathways, either way with little going on. I never really felt like I could find other ways to take advantage of the level environment or seek alternate pathways to go along. Often there are portions of levels that just feel automated where it just feels like speed panels and ramps are pushing the character along - somehow I feel like it was more noticeable here than in Forces, a game people often talk about feeling too automated.
And what doesn’t really help either is the control and movement of the characters. Whereas in the Sonic Adventures games and Heroes there was generally more of a flow to the controls, here they all just feel sluggish to me - all walking/running at a slow pace. Sonic is technically the fastest in the game (aside for E-123 Omega at top speeds supposedly), and even then he feels slow compared to previous 3D titles.
On top of that, the game’s physics… well, they have a lot to be desired. I'm not entirely sure how to describe them, but I felt they tended to feel pretty float-y, awkward and (I guess unsurprisingly) buggy. It's fairly noticeable just in Sonic's gameplay with what I mentioned about Sonic just being able to walk through a loop, but it feels even worse when playing as some of the other play styles that are more reliant on physics.
And well, to describe my overall issue with this games' controls and movement, I just don’t feel like any of the characters have much flow to them. When playing as Sonic especially, the main characters of a franchise with an emphasis on speed, this game just does not feel very, well, speed-y to me. The only times I felt any sense of fast pace were the automated sections I mentioned and, well, the Mach Speed sections.
And the mach speed sections themselves? I dislike them. In them, Sonic continuously runs forward and you’re given no way to stop him. And these honestly just felt like complete trial-and-error level design, made worse with a pretty major issue I had where you can’t correct your jump. So if you make a bad jump, you’re basically just screwed.
There’s also levels where Sonic carries Elise as I mentioned, but I don’t really have much to say about them. Sonic mostly plays the same here, although lacks his spin dash or any of the gem abilities, but Elise gives him a “shield” ability that allows him to walk on quicksand or water. Pretty much all of my criticisms towards Sonic’s core gameplay apply here too.
Something I also haven’t mentioned yet is that there’s combat in this game. This isn’t new to Sonic games - both Heroes and Shadow utilized elements of combat - but man I feel like in this game it really kills the pace. With Heroes, it did make sense to me as it encouraged use of the “Power” characters, and with them could pretty easily be destroyed, and even with Shadow the Hedgehog, most of the time you could easily just take them down with Shadow’s weapons. Here, it just kind of gets in the way for the most part and once again often just feels sluggish and unsatisfying. For both Sonic and Shadow especially I just feel like I’m mashing the jump/homing attack button to take down enemies, and other times I just found myself skipping over any combat sections unless they were mandatory for progression. I just don’t really feel like the combat adds anything to the game, and if anything just slows down the game even further.
And the mach speed sections themselves? I dislike them. In them, Sonic continuously runs forward and you’re given no way to stop him. And these honestly just felt like complete trial-and-error level design, made worse with a pretty major issue I had where you can’t correct your jump. So if you make a bad jump, you’re basically just screwed.
There’s also levels where Sonic carries Elise as I mentioned, but I don’t really have much to say about them. Sonic mostly plays the same here, although lacks his spin dash or any of the gem abilities, but Elise gives him a “shield” ability that allows him to walk on quicksand or water. Pretty much all of my criticisms towards Sonic’s core gameplay apply here too.
Something I also haven’t mentioned yet is that there’s combat in this game. This isn’t new to Sonic games - both Heroes and Shadow utilized elements of combat - but man I feel like in this game it really kills the pace. With Heroes, it did make sense to me as it encouraged use of the “Power” characters, and with them could pretty easily be destroyed, and even with Shadow the Hedgehog, most of the time you could easily just take them down with Shadow’s weapons. Here, it just kind of gets in the way for the most part and once again often just feels sluggish and unsatisfying. For both Sonic and Shadow especially I just feel like I’m mashing the jump/homing attack button to take down enemies, and other times I just found myself skipping over any combat sections unless they were mandatory for progression. I just don’t really feel like the combat adds anything to the game, and if anything just slows down the game even further.
But as I mentioned, there are... a lot of other playable characters, and I will say this - I do like the idea of having characters “transition” into others as levels progress while retaining the main platforming gameplay and whatnot. It feels like an interesting evolution of the Adventure titles that sort of provides a compromise to those looking to play as other characters with their own abilities and those who don’t enjoy the alternate playstyles of the Adventure games.
That said, the other playable characters aren’t any more fun to play as.
That said, the other playable characters aren’t any more fun to play as.
Tails feels really slow on the ground for some reason, so often I find myself having no other choice than to use his flight ability to navigate. And I noticed while playing as him, if you hit a wall above him while flying, the camera appears to freak out.
But anyway, Tails also has his own combat ability to destroy enemies - the dummy ring bomb. I don’t really have much to say about the actual ability that I didn’t already go over with the game’s actual combat, but I do get annoyed with how it drops fake rings. This always tended to cause the game to severely slow down and chug along, and what also doesn’t help is that if you lose any rings you’re actually holding, it’s hard to tell what rings are real, and what rings are fake ones dropped by the dummy ring bomb.
As for Knuckles, admittedly I don’t have too much to say about him. He does have his own share of abilities, including his signature glide and climb as I mentioned (where again, he tends to get stuck on walls) and some of his sections did include some sort of exploration element. I guess the added combat abilities does make that aspect of the game somewhat more interesting, but once again he still feels more slow and sluggish than Sonic himself, and in addition combat with Knuckles still feels awkward and janky even with his moveset.
Shadow plays fairly similar to Sonic, but is a bit slower and from what I can tell his levels felt a bit more reliant on the whole combat element. Although once again, this combat just feels like mashing the jump/homing attack button and in general Shadow feels even less fun to play as than Sonic. He still retains most of the same control and movement issues I had with Sonic, and with the increasing emphasis on combat it was definitely even more of a pace breaker than it was in Sonic’s story.
But in addition to that, Shadow has different vehicles - a bike, a glider, a buggy, and a hover vehicle, which can also shoot missiles or machine guns depending on which ones are available. Unfortunately, this game’s physics don’t do these vehicles very much justice. As far as the bike, buggy and hover vehicles go, it feels like just about anything you run into causes the vehicle to tip over, and it’s really bad when you consider that when using the hover vehicle, you’re usually not on hard ground - usually over water and quicksand, meaning if you do tip over 180 degrees, you die with no chance to recover. Controlling these vehicles also just tended to feel awkward and janky to me.
The glider in particular… well, I recall it being used in three levels, and in at least two of them, I found that I could literally get past those sections without even pressing anything. Stuff does get in your way that drains health, but your health bar is so big that even if you don’t press anything, you can still have a bit of health left by the time you’re finished with these sections. I think what also adds to this is that the hazards within these sections - mostly the caves, walls, and pillars - you literally just clip through. They still damage you, but other than, they do not stop you and you can glide right through them. I guess Shadow’s a ghost or something.
The other characters you play as in Shadow’s story are Rouge and E-123 Omega. Rouge plays similarly to Knuckles (and has his same climbing glitch), but doesn’t have his same combat abilities, rather being able to throw bombs at enemies, like Tails’ dummy ring bomb without the slowdown. And one thing I will say is that if you didn’t like the Treasure Hunting stages in Sonic Adventure 2, there’s one level in the game where you have to hunt for keys in a giant open space without a radar at all. And when playing for the first time, I found myself getting lost within the stage and fairly annoyed. The blast radius on her bombs also feels a bit short, and when taking out enemies who are on the wall, it can be pretty hard to grasp how close you should plant them.
As for E-123 Omega, he is a bit more unique - being able to lock on and shoot enemies similar to that of E-102 Gamma in Sonic Adventure, although truth be told half the time I didn’t really know what I was doing when it came to that sort of thing. You can’t really tell which enemies you have locked onto and the whole shooting mechanic just felt pretty hit-and-miss. There were times where I felt like I was shooting, but doing no damage to the enemies, and I feel like the way it works just ended up being pretty confusing. Otherwise, I don’t have too much else to say - I don’t like the way he controls at low speeds, feeling just as clunky as the mechs in Sonic Adventure 2, but oddly enough he feels pretty fast when you reach his top speed. Supposedly you can also abuse his “descent” to skip over large areas (even getting into areas that are supposed to be inaccessible), but I didn’t really try that for myself.
Silver’s story was the last I played aside for the, well, “Last” story, and I will say I did like the overall concept and idea his gameplay is going for - using his "telekinesis" abilities within the gameplay to pick up and throw multiple objects, but like the rest of the characters... he still has problems.
His combat once again feels pretty monotonous - pretty much just coming down to picking up nearby objects and throwing them at enemies. You do get an upgrade where he can ground pound and shock nearby enemies, although I kind of felt like this ability was a bit hit-and-miss. Combat is still a huge focus in his story, like in Shadow’s, and once again, it just feels repetitive and pace breaking. It doesn’t really help that you always have to be looking for boxes or other objects to throw at the enemies or trying to get close to and stunning them.
And of course, he feels extremely slow, and I felt like his levels actually tended the drag the most out of the three stories. I already went over the combat which is plentiful within his stages, but sometimes you have to wait for his energy to recharge to “float” over platforms, forcing you to stop entirely for a few seconds or if you're a dumbass like me, constantly forget that you're supposed to do so and end up falling between platforms right after realizing you don't have enough energy. Okay, obviously that's entirely my fault, but when developing muscle memory for the rest of the game, I really found it hard to remember and get used to.
But anyway, Tails also has his own combat ability to destroy enemies - the dummy ring bomb. I don’t really have much to say about the actual ability that I didn’t already go over with the game’s actual combat, but I do get annoyed with how it drops fake rings. This always tended to cause the game to severely slow down and chug along, and what also doesn’t help is that if you lose any rings you’re actually holding, it’s hard to tell what rings are real, and what rings are fake ones dropped by the dummy ring bomb.
As for Knuckles, admittedly I don’t have too much to say about him. He does have his own share of abilities, including his signature glide and climb as I mentioned (where again, he tends to get stuck on walls) and some of his sections did include some sort of exploration element. I guess the added combat abilities does make that aspect of the game somewhat more interesting, but once again he still feels more slow and sluggish than Sonic himself, and in addition combat with Knuckles still feels awkward and janky even with his moveset.
Shadow plays fairly similar to Sonic, but is a bit slower and from what I can tell his levels felt a bit more reliant on the whole combat element. Although once again, this combat just feels like mashing the jump/homing attack button and in general Shadow feels even less fun to play as than Sonic. He still retains most of the same control and movement issues I had with Sonic, and with the increasing emphasis on combat it was definitely even more of a pace breaker than it was in Sonic’s story.
But in addition to that, Shadow has different vehicles - a bike, a glider, a buggy, and a hover vehicle, which can also shoot missiles or machine guns depending on which ones are available. Unfortunately, this game’s physics don’t do these vehicles very much justice. As far as the bike, buggy and hover vehicles go, it feels like just about anything you run into causes the vehicle to tip over, and it’s really bad when you consider that when using the hover vehicle, you’re usually not on hard ground - usually over water and quicksand, meaning if you do tip over 180 degrees, you die with no chance to recover. Controlling these vehicles also just tended to feel awkward and janky to me.
The glider in particular… well, I recall it being used in three levels, and in at least two of them, I found that I could literally get past those sections without even pressing anything. Stuff does get in your way that drains health, but your health bar is so big that even if you don’t press anything, you can still have a bit of health left by the time you’re finished with these sections. I think what also adds to this is that the hazards within these sections - mostly the caves, walls, and pillars - you literally just clip through. They still damage you, but other than, they do not stop you and you can glide right through them. I guess Shadow’s a ghost or something.
The other characters you play as in Shadow’s story are Rouge and E-123 Omega. Rouge plays similarly to Knuckles (and has his same climbing glitch), but doesn’t have his same combat abilities, rather being able to throw bombs at enemies, like Tails’ dummy ring bomb without the slowdown. And one thing I will say is that if you didn’t like the Treasure Hunting stages in Sonic Adventure 2, there’s one level in the game where you have to hunt for keys in a giant open space without a radar at all. And when playing for the first time, I found myself getting lost within the stage and fairly annoyed. The blast radius on her bombs also feels a bit short, and when taking out enemies who are on the wall, it can be pretty hard to grasp how close you should plant them.
As for E-123 Omega, he is a bit more unique - being able to lock on and shoot enemies similar to that of E-102 Gamma in Sonic Adventure, although truth be told half the time I didn’t really know what I was doing when it came to that sort of thing. You can’t really tell which enemies you have locked onto and the whole shooting mechanic just felt pretty hit-and-miss. There were times where I felt like I was shooting, but doing no damage to the enemies, and I feel like the way it works just ended up being pretty confusing. Otherwise, I don’t have too much else to say - I don’t like the way he controls at low speeds, feeling just as clunky as the mechs in Sonic Adventure 2, but oddly enough he feels pretty fast when you reach his top speed. Supposedly you can also abuse his “descent” to skip over large areas (even getting into areas that are supposed to be inaccessible), but I didn’t really try that for myself.
Silver’s story was the last I played aside for the, well, “Last” story, and I will say I did like the overall concept and idea his gameplay is going for - using his "telekinesis" abilities within the gameplay to pick up and throw multiple objects, but like the rest of the characters... he still has problems.
His combat once again feels pretty monotonous - pretty much just coming down to picking up nearby objects and throwing them at enemies. You do get an upgrade where he can ground pound and shock nearby enemies, although I kind of felt like this ability was a bit hit-and-miss. Combat is still a huge focus in his story, like in Shadow’s, and once again, it just feels repetitive and pace breaking. It doesn’t really help that you always have to be looking for boxes or other objects to throw at the enemies or trying to get close to and stunning them.
And of course, he feels extremely slow, and I felt like his levels actually tended the drag the most out of the three stories. I already went over the combat which is plentiful within his stages, but sometimes you have to wait for his energy to recharge to “float” over platforms, forcing you to stop entirely for a few seconds or if you're a dumbass like me, constantly forget that you're supposed to do so and end up falling between platforms right after realizing you don't have enough energy. Okay, obviously that's entirely my fault, but when developing muscle memory for the rest of the game, I really found it hard to remember and get used to.
But other than that, there are occasionally puzzles you have to solve.
Like the ball puzzle in Dusty Desert that I swear was designed by Satan himself. At the end of the level, you have to move a ball to a hole that is preceded by a hallway with bottomless pits. You have to slap the ball to move it, but you only have 9 hits - and what makes it worse is that the number sometimes goes down without me hitting it. I guess it’s not supposed to hit walls or something but it seemed pretty inconsistent on that front.
EDIT: So I made another mistake here - the ball's countdown is actually timed, albeit it takes a little while for the number to count down, and hitting the ball of course makes it go down automatically.
And to navigate the ball itself? You have to angle yourself so that it goes the direction you want it to go, but if you’re just slightly off, or mess up and either charge your hit too little or too much, it’s very likely that’ll just end up falling in a bottomless pit or going in a completely different direction - wasting one of your only 9 hits. And if it falls, or you hit it too many times, you have to start back from the beginning. There were times where I got the ball to the end, but either couldn’t position myself to slap it into the hole, or put too much charge and slapped it too far in a different direction. There is supposedly a glitch where you can use a box to clip yourself through the door at the end, but, y’know, I love pain and I chose to do it the way you’re supposed to.
I think another issue I have with Silver’s gameplay is one that relates to this game’s physics. When trying to fire objects with his telekinesis ability, I noticed times where the items just smashed into and bounced off of each other which, as you can guess, got pretty annoying. Other times I felt like the aiming didn’t feel very precise and some of the objects I threw, even if I was just holding one, would fly right past the enemy I was trying to hit.
I will say it did feel pretty satisfying when I caught bullets and missiles that were being thrown at me and throwing them back, but even then I kind of felt like the detection was a mixed bag where sometimes I felt like I was getting hit by objects being thrown at me while I still had enough power and was using the telekinesis ability.
And here’s the thing, I do like the concept that Silver’s gameplay is going for. I definitely think it’s one that could be improved upon with better movement and more variety if Sonic Team were ever to put Silver as a playable character in a future Sonic game. But it’s execution here just feels messy and repetitive, and aided by the problems with the general gameplay. It’s definitely a unique playstyle, but here, it really misses the mark.
On the other hand, the two last playable characters I have to talk about - Amy and Blaze. I will say that Blaze was probably the second best character to play other than Sonic himself. That’s not much of an achievement, but I do appreciate her as another character that feels faster and more straightforward. She does still retain the problems I have with Sonic’s gameplay, and I did find her homing attack to be awkward to use in some cases, but in general she was probably the least harmless secondary playable character in the game.
Amy though… well, if you didn’t like her gameplay in Sonic Adventure, you probably won’t like her here. In fact, I didn’t mind her gameplay in Sonic Adventure too much, but here she definitely feels worse. Once again, she feels really slow, and unlike her gameplay in Sonic Adventure, she doesn’t even have any of the moves she could pull off with her hammer. In fact, as far as combat goes, her hammer has a really short radius that makes it hard to hit enemies unless you’re just close enough to them while still not outright getting hit. Also, she can turn invisible for… some reason that isn’t explained.
But okay, that’s all the playable characters in the game. None of them are really fun to play as and they all share pretty consistent issues - largely with control, movement and combat. And I did talk about the level design and how uninteresting I find it so we got that taken care of.
I guess one more thing I could touch upon are the bosses, in which… they’re not very good either. I feel like a lot of them had similar issues where it just felt like waiting for an opportunity to damage them. Which, to be fair, is the case for a lot of 3D Sonic bosses, but there were some bosses where their attacks just felt too dragged out, making them feel padded and longer than they needed to be. This is especially case in the Iblis fight as Sonic and Shadow where you have to wait through multiple different attacks, then make your way up to the platforms at the beginning to light the rocks, and then wait for him to come in.
Like the ball puzzle in Dusty Desert that I swear was designed by Satan himself. At the end of the level, you have to move a ball to a hole that is preceded by a hallway with bottomless pits. You have to slap the ball to move it, but you only have 9 hits - and what makes it worse is that the number sometimes goes down without me hitting it. I guess it’s not supposed to hit walls or something but it seemed pretty inconsistent on that front.
EDIT: So I made another mistake here - the ball's countdown is actually timed, albeit it takes a little while for the number to count down, and hitting the ball of course makes it go down automatically.
And to navigate the ball itself? You have to angle yourself so that it goes the direction you want it to go, but if you’re just slightly off, or mess up and either charge your hit too little or too much, it’s very likely that’ll just end up falling in a bottomless pit or going in a completely different direction - wasting one of your only 9 hits. And if it falls, or you hit it too many times, you have to start back from the beginning. There were times where I got the ball to the end, but either couldn’t position myself to slap it into the hole, or put too much charge and slapped it too far in a different direction. There is supposedly a glitch where you can use a box to clip yourself through the door at the end, but, y’know, I love pain and I chose to do it the way you’re supposed to.
I think another issue I have with Silver’s gameplay is one that relates to this game’s physics. When trying to fire objects with his telekinesis ability, I noticed times where the items just smashed into and bounced off of each other which, as you can guess, got pretty annoying. Other times I felt like the aiming didn’t feel very precise and some of the objects I threw, even if I was just holding one, would fly right past the enemy I was trying to hit.
I will say it did feel pretty satisfying when I caught bullets and missiles that were being thrown at me and throwing them back, but even then I kind of felt like the detection was a mixed bag where sometimes I felt like I was getting hit by objects being thrown at me while I still had enough power and was using the telekinesis ability.
And here’s the thing, I do like the concept that Silver’s gameplay is going for. I definitely think it’s one that could be improved upon with better movement and more variety if Sonic Team were ever to put Silver as a playable character in a future Sonic game. But it’s execution here just feels messy and repetitive, and aided by the problems with the general gameplay. It’s definitely a unique playstyle, but here, it really misses the mark.
On the other hand, the two last playable characters I have to talk about - Amy and Blaze. I will say that Blaze was probably the second best character to play other than Sonic himself. That’s not much of an achievement, but I do appreciate her as another character that feels faster and more straightforward. She does still retain the problems I have with Sonic’s gameplay, and I did find her homing attack to be awkward to use in some cases, but in general she was probably the least harmless secondary playable character in the game.
Amy though… well, if you didn’t like her gameplay in Sonic Adventure, you probably won’t like her here. In fact, I didn’t mind her gameplay in Sonic Adventure too much, but here she definitely feels worse. Once again, she feels really slow, and unlike her gameplay in Sonic Adventure, she doesn’t even have any of the moves she could pull off with her hammer. In fact, as far as combat goes, her hammer has a really short radius that makes it hard to hit enemies unless you’re just close enough to them while still not outright getting hit. Also, she can turn invisible for… some reason that isn’t explained.
But okay, that’s all the playable characters in the game. None of them are really fun to play as and they all share pretty consistent issues - largely with control, movement and combat. And I did talk about the level design and how uninteresting I find it so we got that taken care of.
I guess one more thing I could touch upon are the bosses, in which… they’re not very good either. I feel like a lot of them had similar issues where it just felt like waiting for an opportunity to damage them. Which, to be fair, is the case for a lot of 3D Sonic bosses, but there were some bosses where their attacks just felt too dragged out, making them feel padded and longer than they needed to be. This is especially case in the Iblis fight as Sonic and Shadow where you have to wait through multiple different attacks, then make your way up to the platforms at the beginning to light the rocks, and then wait for him to come in.
The final boss, Solaris, was a weird one for me. It's a bit confusing at first - You can switch from Sonic to Shadow and then to Silver by pressing the triangle button (and I'm assuming the Y button on 360), but you can't just damage Solaris with any character. You have to start out by attacking him as Silver, but this isn't made very clear, especially since you start the boss fight as Sonic. And then the boss occasionally switches who's attacks can hurt him, and it took me a few tries to even notice that. For the first phase, you have to start attacking with Silver, then attack him with Shadow in the middle, and then use Sonic to attack him, and this game doesn't explain that.
That said, once you understand what you're supposed to do, the boss can be defeated pretty easily and... admittedly isn't too bad or annoying as far as final boss fights go.
But speaking of Silver, the bosses where you battle against him are pretty bad, and for one major reason - he literally has no cooldown. This isn’t as much of a problem when he catches you and throws you from a distance, but if he ends up cornering you, you’re pretty much screwed - even if you have rings he’ll just take you out as soon as Sonic gets back up. Sometimes you can glitch this by getting into a position where you’re cornered to a wall but are able to continuously catch a ring, which ends up causing a loop of Silver saying “IT’S NO USE” and “TAKE THIS!”, more or less softlocking the game unless you reset or quit.
Also, the loading times are another thing the game is infamous for and, well, yeah, they’re bad. Apparently if you have an Xbox 360 you can install the game to the hard drive (potentially even an SSD) which dramatically decreases the loading, but again, I played this on PS3, and the loading times really started getting on my nerves after just a little bit of playing.
The worst part is that this game has to load pretty much every time there’s some sort of scene change, and you see this as soon as you just first start playing. When you do the red ring mission at the start of Sonic’s story, you have to wait through a loading screen just to see the guy speak a single line of dialogue, and once you press the button to progress, you have to sit through a second loading screen. And this occurs every time you do a town mission - including the three “trials” you have to do before Kingdom Valley.
And if you die during one of the missions, you don’t just reset at the beginning of the mission - you are kicked out, and you have to accept the mission again, meaning two more loading screens. I’m not sure how the length of the loading times themselves measure up to other games from this period, but they’re definitely more frequent, noticeable and pretty damn annoying when the game has to load for pretty much every scene change.
Conclusion
Whew, this definitely turned out to be one of my longer reviews.
As you can probably tell… I don’t like this game. I mentioned that glitches weren’t my biggest issue with this game, and if I had to point to anything, the control, movement and physics were pretty much my biggest problem - all the characters just feel really stiff and sluggish, and lacking in any sort of flow. On top of that, the level design just feels so bland and uninteresting that both lacks in terms of Adventure 1’s more open style and Adventure 2’s speed and flow-based gameplay. Hence why I don’t think the game being “polished” would’ve really helped my opinion of it. It might not have been as infamously bad, but I’m not sure if it’s a game I would still enjoy much even if the glitches weren’t there.
In general I kind of just Sonic 06 to be a pretty boring, dull game that is made even worse by a clearly rushed development cycle and technical issues, and it's not really a Sonic game I can recommend outside of dedicated fans, including those losers who waste their time playing the games and writing long ass reviews. Haha, yeah.
But speaking of Silver, the bosses where you battle against him are pretty bad, and for one major reason - he literally has no cooldown. This isn’t as much of a problem when he catches you and throws you from a distance, but if he ends up cornering you, you’re pretty much screwed - even if you have rings he’ll just take you out as soon as Sonic gets back up. Sometimes you can glitch this by getting into a position where you’re cornered to a wall but are able to continuously catch a ring, which ends up causing a loop of Silver saying “IT’S NO USE” and “TAKE THIS!”, more or less softlocking the game unless you reset or quit.
Also, the loading times are another thing the game is infamous for and, well, yeah, they’re bad. Apparently if you have an Xbox 360 you can install the game to the hard drive (potentially even an SSD) which dramatically decreases the loading, but again, I played this on PS3, and the loading times really started getting on my nerves after just a little bit of playing.
The worst part is that this game has to load pretty much every time there’s some sort of scene change, and you see this as soon as you just first start playing. When you do the red ring mission at the start of Sonic’s story, you have to wait through a loading screen just to see the guy speak a single line of dialogue, and once you press the button to progress, you have to sit through a second loading screen. And this occurs every time you do a town mission - including the three “trials” you have to do before Kingdom Valley.
And if you die during one of the missions, you don’t just reset at the beginning of the mission - you are kicked out, and you have to accept the mission again, meaning two more loading screens. I’m not sure how the length of the loading times themselves measure up to other games from this period, but they’re definitely more frequent, noticeable and pretty damn annoying when the game has to load for pretty much every scene change.
Conclusion
Whew, this definitely turned out to be one of my longer reviews.
As you can probably tell… I don’t like this game. I mentioned that glitches weren’t my biggest issue with this game, and if I had to point to anything, the control, movement and physics were pretty much my biggest problem - all the characters just feel really stiff and sluggish, and lacking in any sort of flow. On top of that, the level design just feels so bland and uninteresting that both lacks in terms of Adventure 1’s more open style and Adventure 2’s speed and flow-based gameplay. Hence why I don’t think the game being “polished” would’ve really helped my opinion of it. It might not have been as infamously bad, but I’m not sure if it’s a game I would still enjoy much even if the glitches weren’t there.
In general I kind of just Sonic 06 to be a pretty boring, dull game that is made even worse by a clearly rushed development cycle and technical issues, and it's not really a Sonic game I can recommend outside of dedicated fans, including those losers who waste their time playing the games and writing long ass reviews. Haha, yeah.
But yeah. I know there are some people who do actually like this game, and of course, that's fine, but overall, Sonic 06 was just an outright chore for me to play and by the time I was turned with, I just felt incredibly burned out and really wanting to move on.
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