Sonic Heroes
Heroes, eh? Sounds more like an Adventure to me mate!
When I finally found my way onto Sega's brightly coloured stand at E3 last year (sadly too late to grab a Monkey Ball LCD game from the McDonald's Happy Meal promotion), I discovered that Sonic Team's dual delights of Billy Hatcher and Sonic Heroes were being demoed in fairly close proximity - the latter in varying degrees of completion on PS2, Xbox and GameCube. However as I sauntered over, desperately trying not to make eye contact with the Army recruitment officers lurking in the shadows a few feet away, it was Billy's eggs and not Sonic's loop-the-loop that drew me closest. Looking back, I suppose on some level I'd already decided that Sonic doesn't work in 3D, and that at a glance Heroes was unlikely to change my mind. Either that or Billy was under an air conditioning unit...
I'm holding out for a hedgehog
Ya see, after the initial excitement of Sonic - SONIC! - in three dimensions, tearing around glorious 3D environments, the perspective swinging this way and that to showcase the blinding speed and killer whale set-pieces, I was left with a lingering aftertaste of clunky presentation, dodgy cameras and a misplaced emphasis on exploration. Back in the day, irked by the demand for pixel-perfect jumps in punishingly difficult areas of other platformers, the original Sonic games offered Mega Drive owners unrivalled speed, detailed levels full of hidden areas, and ingenious boss encounters to compensate. It was also much harder to wind up dead as a hedgehog than a plumber - not least of all thanks to a general absence of bottomless pits, and the oft-imitated rings health system - and, although short, many levels could be played in a multitude of different ways, and mined for added value over countless smile-encrusted replays. God bless you Super Sonic.
In short, while cutesy gimmicks like the Chao Garden paved the way for Sega's continued relationship with frilly and unpopular peripherals (witness its virtual pioneering of the still-ignored GBA-to-GameCube adapter), and both Adventures undoubtedly had some good ideas, neither was the Sonic game that Sonic fans including myself really wanted. And judging by the vernacular I've been sprouting forth in frustration over the last few days, neither is Sonic Heroes. Which isn't to say it's a bad game, exactly - just that it still isn't the 3D representation of Sonic that we'd have hoped for. And that I want. It's Sonic Adventure 3 (despite the bizarre protestations to the contrary), blended rather than mixed - something that I'm going to be told off (again) for pointing out.
In other words, gameplay is once again split into three meaty chunks. At times you'll find yourself racing around at breakneck pace in Sonic's fiery white boots, launching yourself down massive slopes and brickwork rollercoasters, pausing to bop the occasional enemy on the noggin; other times you'll be hovering over lava traps underneath Tails' twirling twin appendages, trying not to run out of vertical thrust before you reach a floating balloon power-up full of, well, whatever foxes need to replenish their "hover" meters; and sometimes you'll be smashing your red-faced way through blocks, bad guys and anything else that happens to disagree with you, such is the life of Knuckles the Echidna. But rather than literally split things up - giving Sonic his turn in the limelight, throwing Tails in a mech suit and watching Knuckles climb cubes in the sky (was there any real point to that level?) - as they have in the past, Sonic Heroes' gives you control of all three characters at once, allowing you to switch between them like weapons using the opposing Y and B buttons, taking advantage of their individual strengths depending on the situation.
Project Sonic
This immediately throws up plenty of possibilities. While Sonic's previous Adventures may have grown wearisome, Heroes has the potential for sprawling, hugely complex levels that subtly draw out a character's strengths, gradually yielding to the player's intuition and still managing to encapsulate some of what made Sonic the Hedgehog such a desirable and magical series in the first place. Sonic may not work in 3D, yet, but much to my delight the central premise behind Heroes has more in common with something like Project Eden anyway. Core! And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, the actual game does not. Levels are split into chunks which obviously call for a particular skill - a huge gap with balloons dotted around the sky signposts a Tails section miles off, while big blocks with X written on the side generally require Knuckles' delicate touch. Sonic, meanwhile, is a jack-of-all-trades, whose fast pace and ability to gather lines of rings (by pressing X to snap to the right trajectory) often compensate for his relative normality. As if that isn't enough, when the game's worried you might not switch to the right character, it actually does it for you! At least most of the time it leaves it up to you, but big TV screens suspended in the air with "TAILS!" written on them remove any doubt in most situations. How thoughtful.
Even the enemies seem to have been catered rather obviously toward certain characters. Most ground-dwelling adversaries are ripe for Sonic's heat-seeking stomp attack, which wipes them out pretty quickly, while Knuckles mops up anybody with a spike that might cause problems, and Tails can kick his buddies at anything airborne, if not fly up and bop them on the head himself.
So far all I've really seen is a lot of what I saw in the original Sonic Adventure titles - fast-paced Sonic sections that were originally devised seemingly to show off Sega hardware than the player's nimble fingers, platform, rail grinding or vaguely puzzling sections that demand a mixture of clever jumps, switch-twiddling and enemy-bopping, and an awful lot of rough edges. In a sense, all this hectic action does is highlight occasional slowdown in our pretty-damned-near-complete Xbox preview version! Not a good start.
Rough cuts
I'm not going to pass judgement yet because, although this is undoubtedly very close to finished code, these things do sometimes change, but the presentation in the current version could definitely do with some tweaking - the menus, for example, are scruffy and pixellated, the pause menu doesn't actually respond to the A button (although at least in this case it doesn't reset your camera selection when you move between rooms - unlike the original Sonic Adventure's legendary "Director's Cut"), and it takes a good second for the victory jingle to kick in once Sonic, Tails and Knuckles strike a pose at the end of a level. Giving you ample time to consider just how shiny and unbelievable they look.
In-game visuals may be a cut above Sonic Adventure 2, with the Xbox version in particular benefiting from a much higher poly count, but there's only so much that polish can do for you. Enemy design is straight out of the Sonic Team book of unimaginative, mostly round blobs, while level construction and texturing seems rather vast for such small creatures. It all just looks menacingly bright and squeaky clean, and characters and enemies look rather too mechanical, like tech demos racing around under an artificial sun. You might gawp at your first sight of the second level stretching before you like a vast chiselled gauntlet in the sky, or Sonic and crew spiralling round corkscrews and the inside of huge translucent spheres, but there's none of the claustrophobic precision of the first Sonic The Hedgehog titles, and it's sorely missed.
There are also rather too many opportunities to fall to your doom (and lose all that level's progress once your lives have depleted), not helped in the slightest by a camera that seems to clip into the nearest object whenever possible, and a control scheme that doesn't mind binding "carefully grab hold of a lever on a narrow platform" to the same button as "dash maniacally off on a random tangent with little hope of regaining control until you get there". That's not the only mapping issue either, and you do get the feeling that Heroes needs a trio of buttons reserved for three specific character choices - at the moment you can rotate the three using Y and B but it's far too easy to lose track and pick the wrong one at the least convenient moment. For example, when you need to select Tails and grab hold of a hanging ring to hoist the group to safety (no mean feat in any event thanks to perspective issues), whilst simultaneously trying to avoid a pool of rising lava (sorry, "energy") as it nips at your heels several platforms behind. Select Sonic rather than Tails, for example, and A to jump followed by A to float up into the air quickly becomes A to jump followed by A to try and head-bop an imaginary enemy buried deep in the advancing pool and die in flames. Frustrating.
Hedging your bets
Obviously we'll be in a better position to talk about whether you should buy Heroes when Sega sends out final PAL review code in the near future, but any truly high hopes I had for Sonic Heroes have now more or less disappeared - and a darn sight quicker than a box of rebadged Cadbury's "Sonic" Heroes disappeared when they turned up here last week, which is saying something. (Note to Sega: send more sweets!) On the other hand, there is still a slight spark of promise glowing amongst the ashes. There's replay value aplenty here with four separate narrative takes on this year's showdown with Dr. Robotnik, thanks to rival trios from Team Sonic, Team Chaotix, Team Dark and Team Rose, and a multiplayer mode I haven't explored yet, and there are several more stages to go before I topple Eggman for the last time as well. There are certainly some standout moments already in Sonic Heroes, and Sega will be hoping that in the long run they far outnumber its worryingly numerous design failings. At this rate though, Heroes could well wind up slung in the "some good ideas" pile with its predecessors. You might want to wait for the review, eggheads.