395 replies to this topic

[Black Hedgehog]

I just wanted to ask all my fellow Sonic fans out there, what they thought of my all time favorite Sonic game Shadow The Hedgehog. I liked it because of the solid story, gameplay, graphics, and the fact that you had a partner with you all the way through the game.

[True Eggman Fan]

It's like that child you had high hopes for. You wanted him to be an athlete, a scholar, you wanted him to go to the most prestigious schools, you wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer. You wanted him to be a player, but not let his mom check on. You wanted everything for him.

But he was born with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around his neck.

Edited by WIttyUsername, 05 July 2012 - 01:11 AM.

[Azure Yakuzu]

For fuck's sake, how many times are we going to open the same topic?

[Ekaje]

Mediocre at best. All the efforts to be dark came off as lame, to the point of being funny at some points, and the gameplay felt slippery, just like in heroes. The weapon system wasn't bad, but it still didn't feel fitting, and all it did was make the healthbar crap slightly more bearable. Some of the missions, like hunting for every last enemy, were terrible. And the alternate endings were pointless and just forced you to replay the game again and again to beat it.

Edited by Ekaje, 05 July 2012 - 01:20 AM.

[Crow the BOOLET]

It had promise but then it falls flat on its head.

Honestly I do like ShTH but its rather..... Lackluster to the point that I can say it had potential but failed to bring anything home. Fortunately Shadow's character got better after this game so its like a double edged sword, though the blade is pretty much stabbed the person.

Edited by Crow the BOOLET, 05 July 2012 - 01:28 AM.

[Soniman]

Don't we already kinda have a topic like this?

[Balding Spider]

I just wanted to ask all my fellow Sonic fans out there, what they thought of my all time favorite Sonic game Shadow The Hedgehog.

I thought Shadow getting his own game was the worst idea ever concieved by Sonic Team at that time (which later turned out to be the second worst idea, the first being killing off Sonic and have him be revived by locking lips with a useless princess). I found the controls to be loose, the dialogue bad, most of the music forgettable, the gunplay mechanic clunky, the characters once again terrible (but at that point I had expected as much), and the story just uninteresting.

Edited by Balding Spider, 05 July 2012 - 01:45 AM.

[Crazizzle]

I enjoyed the game, but I bought it used for about 15 bucks. It was an average game that had nice replay value, but nothing special. Nothing horrible either, though.

[colorfulzones104]

Ehh..it was okay, I guess. Not incredible, but I did like some things in it.

Edited by colorfulzones104, 05 July 2012 - 02:35 AM.

[Tornado]

Strangely, my thoughts on the game haven't changed one iota in the 2 weeks it's been since the last topic asking my thoughts about the game.

Edited by Gilda, 05 July 2012 - 02:36 AM.

[Jayhawker30]

What a dumb game.

It would have been better if it didn't try to take itself so seriously while also failing to make things darker and edgier.

[True Eggman Fan]

It would have been better if it didn't try to take itself so seriously while also failing to make things darker and edgier.

Funny enough, it's almost like it didn't.

[Jayhawker30]

Yeah, probably because of how most of it came across as so lame.

[Diogenes]

Where to fucking start.

First off, this:

It's like that child you had high hopes for. You wanted him to be an athlete, a scholar, you wanted him to go to the most prestigious schools, you wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer. You wanted him to be a player, but not let his mom check on. You wanted everything for him.

But he was born with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around his neck.

...is a charitable interpretation, as the game was largely poisoned very early on. In terms of raw Bad Ideas, ShtH is probably the worst the series has had, to the point where I don't think anything during its development could have saved it, short of starting over from scratch. Even '06 likely wasn't doomed as early on as ShtH.

The story is bad. They shoved an ugly wad of backstory into a character already bloated with it (relative to anyone else in the series, at least) to drive the story, rather than working with the elements they had set up in Heroes. Like, the one time they actually laid down some groundwork for a future game's story, and it's all but ignored, shoved into two levels that are basically irrelevant to everything else in the game. And the Shadow androids probably would've made for a better story than a generic evil alien shoehorned into Shadow's backstory so they could pretend the game has anything to do with Shadow. And really, the game isn't about Shadow, aside from in the most superficial sense; yeah he's the guy you play as, and they throw a few nods to SA2 and Shadow's memory loss, but he wanders through the story having essentially no impact to it (largely due to having to write around the crappy mission structure/level progression) until the Last Story, where he's the only one who can do anything because of magical paralysis gas, we have a retread of SA2's last story (and I want to pause for a moment to point out how stupid it was to do an amnesia plot with a character who already had an altered memories plot. We already fucking had a scene of him remembering shit back in SA2!), and then everyone gathers around to give him a handjob because he's just that awesome. And of course they were so busy with their B-movie reject villain and the fake morality choices that the only attention they gave to the question that people actually wanted answered is about two sentences of dialogue shoved so deep into the background chatter of the final boss fight that you'd never hear it if you weren't intentionally fucking around, and it is of course the most boring and meaningless resolution possible.

The game is ugly. I will give them credit for the CG scenes, as they were genuinely pretty good and worlds better than Heroes' cheap plastic, but everything else was just terrible. Aside from the characters almost everything looks like old meat; it's all muddy grays and browns and reds, it all just looks dull and sick, and not in a way that actually carries a theme or that is appropriate for the series, just in a way that makes me not want to look at it. And I really don't think the digital levels are any better, as they still use largely the same palette and what doesn't fall under that still looks dull (if anything it's GUN Fortress and its electric blues that is the aesthetic standout of the game). The character models are basically the same shiny shit that Heroes had, except for the enemies which are dull and easily lost against the background. And the animation sucks.

The music is...subpar. I'll admit I'm not a music guy and I typically have very low standards because of that. But ShtH has very few memorable tracks and even fewer that are memorable in a good way. Overall I'm inclined to describe it as "droning". Also how can you write the lyrics "All Hail Shadow" and not want to kill yourself.

The gameplay, oh my fucking god. Let's get this out of the way first, the guns, most of them suck and the best strategy is almost always get a machine gun, get a lot of ammo (or ideally a full hero/dark charge), and put all that ammo into the bad guys, end of strategy. Thankfully that works because otherwise the game would be practically unplayable with so many damage-sponge enemies and Shadow's natural abilities doing fuckall damage. Anything bigger than a basic Black Arms soldier is too beefy for Shadow to finish off unarmed in any reasonable amount of time, and there's not even any variety in abilities to make doing so interesting. I don't even know why they bothered giving Shadow that melee combo given that it's piss-weak in a game where your other, stronger, physical attacks quickly become worthless. And this from a guy who can flip a bus one-handed (where the hell did that strength come from all of a sudden, anyway?). And melee weapons are fucking worthless given their crap damage and low "ammo". While this may make sense for picking up broken street signs and lamp posts it damn sure doesn't make them fun to use, and it doesn't make much sense for the giant alien swords to do all the damage of a Nerf sword. Chaos Blast is at least efficient against normal enemies, if boring, but against bosses it's generally not worth it and your energy's better saved for the inexplicable infinite ammo that a full charge gives you. And now I've spent so much time bitching about just Shadow's attacks that I have to break to a new paragraph for readability's sake.

Vehicles suck. They're slower than Shadow and most don't confer any real benefit besides some armor, which isn't nearly worth it given that the game is plenty generous healthwise. Even the motorcycle that they were so eager to show off drives about as well as a child's tricycle, which is a damn shame; if nothing else we should've at least been able to ramp some shit properly. About the only vehicles that they could justify existing are the alien disk (which lets you cross hazardous terrain...slowly and clumsily) and the jump mech (which is genuinely useful in a climbing section, and landing on a dude is one of the few things approaching fun in the game...but it's rare, and it'd be crap anywhere that wasn't designed exclusively for it anyway). Shadow's controls and abilities suck. He's so slippery that anything above a jog is a recipe for disaster. The Homing Attack is as reliable as it was in Heroes, which is "not". The spindash is useless between the crap damage and with running being as fast or faster anyway. The triangle jump tries to predict when you're close enough to jump to solid ground, but it isn't very good at it. Climbing poles is slow as balls unless you're jump-climbing, which is faster but no less boring. Hover-shooting looks cool but it's basically useless and too finicky to bother caring about. Chaos Control playing the level for you is stupid enough in itself (if the game were any good you'd want to actually play it) but it's doubly stupid in a game that's mission based such that skipping a chunk of the level just means you're going to have to backtrack to it anyway. The bosses suck. Most fall to the basic strategy of "shoot it a lot". Those that have some defense against this just end up making a boring battle take longer. Diablon is especially bad as, aside from playing it in one very specific way (that being, get a good (read: machine) gun and build up the dark meter, then unload with infinite ammo) I've never seen any way to fight him that doesn't take longer than every other boss combined. And that's not mentioning how much it shits on Sonic, reducing him to a stepping stone.

The mission system is absolutely terrible. First off, any attempt to spin this as a morality system is a fucking joke, because you have not one reason to give a shit about who you're shooting. There's no attempt to have the player empathize with either side, and only the most basic attempt to make them dislike either side (basically, "aliens bad, humans kind of good but also bad!"). The "decision" basically comes down to who you want to spend the level shooting, which is better decided by which level you want to play next (or which side has the least tedious mission) rather than anything related to morality. And even if there was something in there, there's no consequence to it, since all it does is choose your next level, and you're free to slide up and down the morality scale without the story even beginning to give a shit about what you do (which is all ignored by the Last Story anyway!). And the missions themselves are never fun, with most of them being nothing more than genociding one side of the conflict, which means hunting every corner for half of the dull blobs shooting at you and hoping you don't miss one so you don't have to run through the now-almost-empty level again just to find it. And it's no better when they try to get creative, as most other missions are variations on "go touch some things" or "shoot a big thing until it explodes". And then there's shit like Mad Matrix Dark mission, which can take well over half an hour, if you're lucky, if you aren't using a map, and most of that time is spent watching Shadow whirl around in the circuit until he approaches a junction and you can make a guess as to where one of the thirty fucking bombs you have to run into is.

And the tone is shit. This is the poison that wrecked the game before a single line of code was written. This pathetic attempt to be dark and mature and edgy with a cartoon hedgehog. This childish worship of guns and motorcycles and shooting aliens and soldiers, paired up with a heavily stylized talking animal trying so very hard to be a cool badass right out of the animes. The only way this game could have come into existence is if the people behind it decided to make the most cynical cash grab targeting the worst of the terrible fanboys who think this shit is the height of entertainment, or if they actually agree with those kids and think this shit has any value, and I'm not sure which would be worse.

God I hate this game.

[Deaf Guy in Music Plant]

C'mon guys, quit being nice.

This game is a huge piece of shit.
It tries so many things at once (darkness, mystery, multiple storylines, weapons, vehicles) and they all crash and burn so damned terribly. The story is boring when it isn't laughably hard to watch, and the awful cutscene animation and shiny models don't help.

Shadow himself controls like ass. You will find yourself having to jump and homing attack furiously to save yourself from barreling off of cliffs. And trust me, there's plenty of those.
The vehicles don't control much better and are incredibly fucking unnecessary. Shooting the guns at the speed the game wants you to travel is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, except the hay is shit and the needle doesn't exist.

DAMMIT DIOGENES NINJA'D ME

[Azure Yakuzu]

So I heard you guys hate this game?

[Soniman]

Sonic Heroes is better and is actually fun..
...
..
.

please stop staring at me like that.

[Black Hedgehog]

Sonic Heroes is better and is actually fun..
...
..
.

please stop staring at me like that.

Sonic Heroes is VERY fun, my 2nd fav actually.

[/_JXJ_\]

lol Diogenes straight up killed it, agree with almost everything he said.

[Nix]

*Holy shit*

God I hate this game.

Fucking beautiful. Somebody publish this shit.