Review - Shadow The Hedgehog

Renegade or Hero? It doesn't really matter, so fuck it.

Shadow The Hedgehog, for those two of you there that are unaware of it, was a spin-off game of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise, technically being a sequel to Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes, being canonical to boot. This game has... quite the mixed critics, although most people tend to take as a fact that it was quite the bad game. Developed by SEGA Studio USA (Sonic Team's former US division) and published by SEGA for the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube.

Let's start by giving credit where credit is due, despite the fact that the mechanic itself has been bashed and beaten several times now, the gameplay mechanic in on itself is actually a very helpful thing. Enemies have health bars in this game, and unless you really enjoy doing Homing Attack chains that do some really miserable damage, the game really encourages you to use guns. Yes, it's ridiculous, yes, it's out of place for a Sonic game, but it's a good implemented mechanic nonetheless. Not to mention that the game rewards you with some pretty nice guns once you complete a route, and it gives it a bit of replayability... just a bit.

Nothin' personnel, kid

Okay, now it's when I'm gonna get my hands dirty. Let's speak graphics first, the game has a very bleak environment, shades of gray are the most prominent thing in this game except for those levels that go a bit more colorful like Mad Matrix or Digital Circuit, despite that, even though they're colorful they're not in a very... "Sonic" sense, they mostly used shades of red or orange and also purple, fitting for this game but very out of place for a Sonic game where every level is colorful and really nice looking, but those are only exceptions. Like I said, the levels are really uninteresting, they all look really devoid of any sense of style and you'll most likely get bored of them pretty soon. The character models... well, for Sonic and the gang they ripped their models straight out of Sonic Heroes except here they're a bit shinier looking, for humans or enemies however, they look fucking awful, it is notable how little effor it took, but quite frankly that's not even the biggest issue with this game, it's something that in the end you literally pay little mind to at all.

Now it's when we're gonna get broken, the controls and the gameplay. Let's start with the controls, for some fucking reason people thought the slipperiness of the Speed characters in Sonic Heroes wasn't enough and they made this game even worse. Shadow goes from 0 to 80 in less than 5 seconds which can be really disorienting until you get used to it. Gunplay mechanics however are of great help like I said before and there are two types of weaponry. Melee and Ranged, Melee sucks and quite frankly it's not worth it, ranged weapons however are really useful and honestly it's the meat of the game (you'd think speed would be but nope), from your basic pistol to a gatling gun, Shadow can find and use a large variety of guns, ranging from standard military issue weapons to alien blasters, and you're gonna need them because there are some enemies that can really take some freaking shots to the face, not to mention bosses, enemies don't care which side you're on by the way, even if you're working with Eggman, his robots will still attack you, the enemy AI in this game is really that god awful.

Aside from this you have two Chaos powers, Chaos Control and Chaos Blast, the first one is a double edged sword but I'll get to that later, the second one is basically an explosion with a pretty average blast radius. However the best thing about these two power-ups is that by the reminder of their duration, Shadow is completely invincible and guns don't consume ammo, which basically outclases both abilities in terms of usefulness. There are also vehicles Shadow can ride... but don't, Shadow is naturally faster than the vehicles anyway which comes off as not being worth it except for those points in the game where the game forces you to ride something.

Defeating evil foes makes your Hero meter go up (Chaos Control) while viceversa for Chaos Blast

The good things this game has to offer (which are few, but they are there) don't really matter when the level design is pure, unadulterated horse shit, I'm not exaggerating, this game really sucks because of this and this alone mostly. This game is basically the mechanic of the Team Chaotix in Sonic Heroes (Find X Thing, Defeat X number of enemies, etcetera) only UP TO ELEVEN AND BEYOND. The game really varies according to the level and objective at hand, with only the Neutral pathway being going from Point A to Point B. This is why I have a problem with Chaos Control in this game, basically Chaos Control lets you skip a chunk of the level at a button's press, this however is a reeeeeeally bad thing to do if you're on the Hero or Evil sides, because skipping part of a level means skipping something the game wants you to find. It's useful in the Neutral path but only in the Neutral path where your sole objective is going to the Goal Ring. Aside from the fact that you may leave one thing/enemy behind and you're essentially looking for something equivalent to a needle in a haystack there's also some levels which are fucking huuuuge, take Lost Impact for example, the Hero goal for that level is to find 35 Artificial Chaos and destroy them, however the level is big and there is nothing to help you, no map, nothing.to guide you and you'll pretty much finish with half an hour or even an hour on the timer, it's that bad, and it's one of the reasons I dislike this game which could've been easily fixed by adding more enemies/items than the set number they give you and thus make it more easy to complete certain level objectives, but this is not the only flaw this game has, and now it's time to take it to the plot.

Careful Shadow! You might cut yourself with all that edge

The plot to this game is... quite the inconsistent fuck. Okay so there's this comet that comes down to Earth to say hello every 50 years, except it's filled with aliens that want to fuck over the world. One of these aliens, the leader named Black Doom, comes up to Shadow and tells him he has to deliver the 7 Chaos MacGuffins "as promised" with Shadow clearly confused as to what the fuck he is talking about. With that out of the way, the plot in the game shits all over the place because of how levels are handled. You might have Shadow become evil and then wonder if he's an android or make him go hero just to turn evil at the last moment to be a complete jerkass to Sonic. It's inconsistent and the worst thing is that the whole reason this game even exists (The "Renegade or Hero" shtick) is completely shot in the foot because THERE'S A TRUE, CANONICAL ENDING, which basically means that all the other endings? Yeah, they were pointless, good job SEGA, nice one. Aside from this is the way you unlock the True Ending. You have to complete every other ending the game has, and let me actually explain the problem with this one. There are five possible routes, Evil, Neutral/Evil, Neutral, Neutral/Hero and Hero. However every single route has two possible endings, one Hero based (even in the Evil one) and one Evil based (even on the Hero one). The endings range from Shadow killing Eggman because he thinks he's an android, to Shadow being the guardian of the ARK to Shadow wanting to beat Sonic to prove he's superior (this is actually the Evil ending of the Hero route, by the way). However the endings themselves aren't the problem (although they are fucking ridiculous), it's how you get them. You have to complete every single level in that route twice. This is padding, padding in a way you have not seen in this category, you can't just use level select or anything to get there, you have to beat the game ten times to get to the True Ending (which isn't even worth it), it's so awful it even kind of makes me angry because there's really a lot of proof SEGA didn't even care that much for this game, the way it's all designed is so lazy that even the good points of this game (Which were really small, to be honest) aren't enough to make up for it.

Despite all that, I don't really hate the game. And it's not because I've played worse, since I think criticism should still be the same wether you've played something worse to compare to, it's because... despite all it's flaws, it's still a decent Sonic game. There are rings to collect, the levels themselves aren't that bad (it's the way their objectives are designed what really angers me) and I just don't think it's the worse Sonic game ever, don't misunderstand me, this game overall is bad, it's really, really bad and I wouldn't recommend it to you unless you're really that comitted to play every Sonic game or if you find it interesting for some reason because everyone has a different opinion, honestly I'd guide you towards Sonic 3 & Knuckles or even Sonic Adventure, but not this one.

He's not letting him shit on the franchise anymore

There's one other thing I wanna discuss before finishing this off and that's the music, while the game might be bad, if there's one thing Sonic games are known for it's for having a really nice soundtrack and this game is not an exception. The music is really good and to be honest it's the most polished thing in this game. The instrumental tracks of the levels are good but the vocal songs like I Am... (All Of Me) or Never Turn Back are even better.

Well, I have finished and.., I get the general consensus of hating this game forever and beyond and while I accept that, I still think hate is a pretty strong word, I just don't feel so angry for the existence of this game, there has to be mistakes for something to go right and SEGA realized this. After Shadow The Hedgehog and Sonic 06 (specially Sonic 06) SEGA realized they had to go another direction and thus, Sonic Unleashed happened which is actually a really nice game. My thoughts overall are that this game is really bad as a game overall but as a Sonic game it's... decent if you can ignore it's flaws... somehow. I just didn't really feel bored with it, or outright angry I just... didn't care, I didn't care for the plot, I didn't care for the fact that he was suddenly swearing, I didn't care about the gunplay mechanic, it's just there, in the sense of being a Sonic game it manages, however as a game overall it's so bad with flaws I can't let slide for the life of me. In any case, proceed with caution on this one if you wanna try it out.