Sonic The Hedgehog Review on the PS3

I love Sonic. I have since the Megadrive and despite his fall from grace recently I always seem to try the games.  Sonic the hedgehog for the PS3 is an attempt to reboot the franchise for the more powerful consoles. Hence the lack of a 'V' or 'VII' etc etc. I remember being very excited about this game, even to the point of me waiting two hours to download a demo video of it on dial-up. Yes I was cheap and stuck with dial up for a while.  Was it worth it?

In a word 'No.' this game should be called 'Sonic the Fail-hog.' It's bad, really really bad.

Things start well enough with a nicely rendered into movie although it does stars lots of humans that actually look like humans. A princess is attacked and a really human looking Eggman shows up to capture said princess. Just like another platforming character...

It just goes downhill from there... you start in a hub world having to talk to people to open the way. It is sort of reminiscent of Sonic Adventure (SA), but a lot less enjoyable. When I played this, I found the hub Tedious, as it required me to get a powerup for Sonic, but the minigame (running through rings) just wasn't fun and it wasn't even tutorial styled. All it did was show you how bad the controls were. What was worse were the loading screens. Odd that once I found some old man to talk to for the powerup it would load. He would state what I had to do and it would load again (I kid you not). Do the challenge, yep, LOAD. Man congratulates you and says you have new shoes. LOAD. Back to tedious hub section. Sigh.

Once I had my powerup, I zipped off to the level hoping that it would be a spark of speedy joy. It was based on a beach just like SA (which was a cool level) but this one just sucked. The level stars off with you pushing forward and Sonic picks up speed real fast, you may need to jump to bash a baddy. Quite often though he will run over speed boosters that launch him up and through loops. Sadly these happen so often that I got to the point where I just put the controller down and was watching the game play itself.

Cool ideas happen like being chased by a large killer whale, just like in SA. Only in SA it is much much better. This game has no feeling of urgency even when being chased. After that bit a 'speedy' bit pops up, Sonic starts running into the screen. Again the player has little control, just jumping and left and right. Again even when the speed is top notch there is no sense of urgency. No fun at all.

Anyone who has played Sonic Adventure will recognise this, but it's worse here...

It even had the gall to through a slow as slow can be Tails section in there. I like Tails, he's cute and clever, but I had only just been playing as Sonic for not much more than 3 minutes and now I am forced to play as an extremely slow Tails with some wildly inaccurate fake ring bombs, which although a nice new addition suck majorly as weapons.

Don't force me to play another character unless I choose to.. Grrr i played this a while ago and got a lot further and aside from the minor excitement of playing as Blaze, who I think is quite a good character, the random changing of characters was just irritating.  Speaking of characters, this game has a new one, going by the name of Silver The Hedgehog.  He's from the future, mysterious (just like all the characters introduced so far) and he has psychic powers.  The ability to manipulate parts of the background would be a cool idea if implemented right, but they aren't.  It's just boring.  Worse still, Silver travels the same Hub world as Sonic, which appears to have been designed for Sonic, therefore it is rather large, allowing for traversal via speed running. Silver can't run very fast, so you have to walk a long way to the next section at an irritatingly slow pace...

Silver the Bore-hog.  Zzzzzz

The whole game just feels very tedious. Sadly that is the best word I can use and its spot on. Tedium. Attempts have been made for fun, but it just isn't there. Did they have people playtesting this game? It certainly doesn't feel like it!

What I find most laughable is the DLC for this game off the playstation network. Paying money for a boss attack mode? New type of racing time attack? How much? $3 something? You have to be joking!
This game is a major, major pass. I kind of want to play it but whenever I boot it up and spend more time looking at loading screens than playing the game it reminds me of why I never finished this particular sonic game. 

Overall, spend your money on something else and if someone gives you this game, leave it well alone or else you will want are refund on the hours of your life you spent playing it.  If I had to score it I would give it a 2/10 score.  I can't really think of any positive comments, except maybe play ANY other Sonic game for more fun...

Thanks again to Gamespot fr the screenshots and my friend for forking out his dosh on this rubbishy game and my scanner for scanning the disc.  Probably the best enjoyment I have gleaned from this game has been whingeing about it on my blog.

Speedy bit with little control

Yep, Shadow is in there too. Obviously he didn't think "Shadow the Hedgehog" was a bad enough game.