Sonic Heroes

The Good
Some of the Team Rose levels are quite fun, as are early levels some of the other teams have to make their way through. The graphics look nice and characters like Big are finally doing something useful.

The Bad
The characters are often completely out of control. You're trying to make your way across narrow bridges, platforms, grind-rails three pixels wide and the like and your character is darting about all over the place. The ability to switch characters could have made for an interesting game, but instead you spend half your time fiddling about with controls trying to select the correct character (the character-selection control often selects the wrong one). The camera angles are dodgy, all too often you can't see what's right in front of you until it's too late, and sections like the 'rising lava' are rendered impossibly hard. Some of the bosses are just tedious - Robotnik's big ships need about 300 hits or something like that. And why did they have to include those grind-rails? They were a stupid gimmick in Sonic Adventure 2 used to promote some hideous brand of trainers or other. These games need good ideas, not pointless marketing ploys. The storyline and the 'humour' are just terrible, especially compared to games like Twinsanity. 'Humour' in Sonic Heroes seems to mainly revolve around spaceships with 'egg' in their name. In Sonic the Hedgehog 2, released in 1992, the Death Egg was a humorous send-up of the Death Star. Now, thirteen years and many Sonic games later, the 'egg' jokes are wearing very thin. So Dr Robotnik is fat and bald! We get it!

The Bottom Line
You must choose one of four teams in order to make your way through varied 3-D levels. Each team contains a fast member, a tough-nut and a character able to fly. You can switch between characters in order to cross the levels filled with platforms, dangerous robots, collapsing scenery and the like.