Shadow The Hedgehog review

by Piyoz on Feb 20th, 2014

I must have been crazy to call Shadow the Hedgehog a good game. Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Sonic the Hedgehog games. I like colorful, unique platformers, though! Just something about recent Sonic games never clicked with me. Don’t ask me why.

So imagine the shock on my face when I see the GCN Shadow the Hedgehog box in the back of my games drawer. I’m embarrassed at how scratched this game disc is. Did I really play this game that much? Why? Can I go back in time to slap this game out of my teenage hand and replace it with Metroid Prime? Or Killer 7? Or Baten Kaitos? Or maybe I should start actually reviewing the game?

Shadow the Hedgehog is a 3D platformer made by the Sonic Team in 2005. The game stars the “ultimate life form”, a black and red synthetic rodent who is functionally identical to a blue rodent. Both of them can run/skate faster than the speed of sound. There is also a mutant fox, a physics-defying chinchilla, and a slew of other deformed animals who are never properly introduced or explained. You play as Shadow as he makes his way through different parts of the Sonic world in search of the truth of his past. He teams up with this weird alien entity called Black Doom. Doomey claims to know the secret behind Shadow’s past, and will restore his memory in exchange for helping Black Doom’s Black Arm invasion of Earth. I’m not saying it was aliens….but it was aliens.

No other game series would get away with something this dumb.

The first dumb mistake of this game is the mission setup. Each stage gives the player three options: Evil mission (follow Black Doom and kill people), Good missions (help Sonic and co. destroy robots), and a morally Neutral mission (reach the glowing, rotating ring at the end of the stage). Each mission leads to a different next stage. In order to explore the whole game, the player has to complete different missions.

For one, it’s really strange that Shadow is able to agree to help Black Doom and then turn and help Sonic and then go help Eggman and then go help Black Doom again. This mission system doesn’t make sense in terms of story. Worse yet, it’s too easy to accidentally switch between missions mid-level. What if you accidentally blow up Eggman’s robots? Even if you’re trying to win the evil mission, you could unintentionally complete someone else’s mission instead. The real flaw in this is shown through the game play itself.

The game play isn’t too different from other 3D Sonic games. Run really, really fast and jump-attack at robots. This time, though, the game gives you weapons! Guns, mostly. Nondescript rifles and bizarre energy guns litter the runways. This mixture of 3D platforming with third-person shooting is awkward in a way that I can’t accurately describe. It’s like my high school’s Mother-Son Dance of 2005. Or when my room mate had drunken sex in our room while I pretended to be asleep. Or when a Chinese girl asked me how many guns I owned. These things all leave me quivering and speechless.

The mission-based nature of Shadow the Hedgehog means that you have to stop your fast running and rail-grinding to pick up weapons and attack things. Here focus is taken from high-speed platforming in favor of third-person shooting. The awful, inconsistent camera doesn’t make this any less terrible. There’s no auto-aim so you’re left guessing what direction your enemy is or where exactly your gun will shoot. Attacking enemies with guns and swords is a matter of chance. Might as well do that jump homing dash thing.

Where this game truly embarrasses itself is the story. Shadow is wandering around in search of the secrets of his creation. From level to level, we don’t actually learn anything. There’s no actual story unfolding or any real characters. Why are we watching these cut scenes when they don’t teach us anything about what we’re playing? We don’t learn a damn thing about Shadow’s past that isn’t already covered in Sonic X. Dr. Robotnik, the moon base, Maria, all that vacuous, meaningless garbage of a plot.  Yes, some of the CGI sequences look nice. But nothing actually develops in any of these scenes. Nothing builds and changes. No direction or purpose to any of it. This attempt at narrative is so dull and empty. It’s literary vomit.

I don’t want to judge a game so hard on its story. After all, it’s the game play that really counts. Besides the bad use of weapons, the stage design of Shadow the Hedgehog is worth talking about. I want to say that there are some levels in this game that are pretty fun to play. Despite my previous vitriol, I think that the Mad Matrix world is pretty cool. It’s inside a computer, and you follow circuits to advance through a big hard drive. There’s the Sky Troops, and Lava Shelter. There levels are pretty well-designed. Some of the music to these levels really pulls me in, too. Shadow moves fast, and these stages have segments that use his speed very well. Why can’t the whole game be this? Everything works so much better when there are no weapons and no idiotic joke of a story.

Shadow the Hedgehog is a game that blows. The inclusion of weapons in a speed-based 3D platformer just doesn’t work. The story starts nowhere and goes nowhere. There is some good stage design here and there. It’s overshadowed by drab textures, boring enemies, and nearly no animations. Missions are difficult to stick to. Technical issues abound, and we haven’t even mentioned the voice acting.

Please don’t make me talk about the voice acting.

2/5
Sucky

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