“Baby, this makes us a team” – Sonic Heroes

**Sonic Heroes** (Sonic Team/Sega, PlayStation 2, 2003/2004)

As dad to a toddler, I have watched a fair bit of children’s TV. Sometimes it’s enjoyable for me to watch (I’ll get round to my ranking of every episode of Hey Duggee ever some day). Sometimes being bombarded with primarily colors and straightforward, volume-up sentiments isn’t pleasant. With the rare exception, though (I am so glad to never encounter Tree Fu Tom any more), it’s easy to let it pass over me. It’s not like the purpose is to watch it for my own enjoyment. It’s something that I thought of almost every time I got to a cutscene in Sonic Heroes.

The manual to Sonic Heroes makes clear that almost all of its characters are meant to be children themselves, so it’s not surprising that children’s TV is where we end up. It actually achieves a higher level of technical and acting quality than Sonic Adventure did, but the concepts and scripts get things across with enough of that limiter-breaking sledgehammer obviousness that it is a bigger challenge anyway. And not just when it comes to Amy telling Sonic “this time there’s no way out of marrying me!”.

It’s partly that there is really no break from its force, thanks to the gameplay involving teams of three heroes who pass the baton regularly and talk even more often. If you’re playing as Team Rose, you are going to be hearing the ‘hurr durr durr’ stupid voice of Big the Cat all the time. And yet, for all that I can see where a cringe factor comes from, I find it pretty easy to take it all with a practiced shrug. I may not get enjoyment from it, but it barely got in the way of the other bits of the game. The aesthetics and perspective of Conflict: Desert Storm and Max Payne were more off-putting to me on several levels, and yet criticism of them doesn’t seem to come from such a place of outright embarrassment.

The bigger problems the game faces come from its hero teams approach. It goes like this: You have a choice of four teams of three. During the game, you have one character in the lead and the other two alongside, with the leader determining the moves available to you, characterised as Speed, Strength, or Fly (as in flight, not style). You can press circle or triangle to switch to put another in the lead, though at some points gates automatically set you in the formation needed for the challenge ahead. Your formation options are represented on screen at all times by three circles of different colours, a scheme which follows through to level-up powerups and floating screens in the levels suggesting who to go for. The colours are blue, yellowy-orange, and red. The colours of Sonic, Tails and Knuckles.

This set-up works to give easy access to a range of moves, and an obvious way to open up ways of accessing alternate paths through the level by using different characters. That kind of branching was a big feature of the original Sonic games, and Sonic Heroes’ level design has a decent stab at translating the feel of those into three dimensions, in the same kind of way that Super Mario 3D Land/World would later do for the other biggest platformer of that era.
The swoopy set pieces of Sonic Heroes feel at least as satisfying as those of Sonic Adventure and fit into the structure more, control emerging from chaos. The range of moves for when you’re not plugged into the latest automatic propulsion machine have a tendency to feel vague and imprecise, though. The consequences range from unsatisfying to infuriating, with the speed homing move’s tendency to send you plummeting off edges the worst.

And the character set-up is similarly self-sabotaging. With every other team assigned the colours of its longest-running three heroes, Sonic Heroes itself seems to be presenting its new teams as knock-off own-brand versions, a series of superfluous shadows (pun intended). The game has to stretch to work with a wide range of characters but fails to give them their own identity beyond the shallowest level. This was a last new Sonic platformer to hit #1 in the UK charts, and we leave the series with some bright sparks but a lack of clear direction. Which is about right.