Who would of guessed 20 or so years ago that the mere mention of a new Sonic game would send cold shivers down the spine of almost any hardcore gamer. That Mario’s greatest rival and challenger would be the star of a series of immensely disappointing games and spin offs and that seeing the words Sonic Team at the opening of a game would cause fear and not joy. That the only way to experience that true speed rush on a console was with hit and miss controls on a Nintendo platform. It’s a dark, dark tunnel we find our speedy Sonic in. But all is not lost! I want to scream that from the rafters every time someone bashes the current state of Sonic, because if you’ve played “Sonic Rush” on the DS you know that great level design, fast running and classic Sonic gaming is still alive an well.

In fact Rush might have made it better than ever. Two screens to run up and down large intricate levels, with the ability to replay them for better scores and the inclusion of a trick simple trick system that garnered you more points as you flew through the air or did grinds. Yes the king of speed was back in action and his levels were bright and vibrant and had nifty three dimensional aspects thrown in. Even the bosses, usually sub par in any Sonic game, were pretty creative and clever. The best part? You could play through the entire game as Sonic. No being forced to play as some other slow ass character, no over world where you had to wonder around not running fast. This was level by level Sonic fun with the option to play as another character (Blaze the Cat, who was also fast and pretty much played like Sonic) but not the necessity. It was beautiful, it was everything a Sonic fan could really hope for and it looked like Sonic had a bright future on the DS.

Enter “Sonic Rush Adventure.” See that word Adventure on the end? It should be taken out and shot, then brought back to life and brutally stabbed and then stepped on as it lay bleeding in a gutter where poison was flowing into its mouth and causing it to die twice from both the stab wounds and the poison, and then someone should feed it to sharks for good measure. You see Sonic team seems to think that adding more makes a game better. So if you have a great gameplay and well designed levels shoving in more unneeded aspects between the good gameplay will really make your game better. They are dead wrong.

In this case it is boating that comes between you and your fun. Yes Sonic and sailing together at last. You see, Sonic (and Tails, thankfully relegated to a non-playable aspect) find themselves sucked into a Hurricane while flying their plane and the crash land on an island in the middle of an unknown ocean where they meet Marine the Raccoon, an irritating little character who is Australian, this being signified by the abundance of times she calls herself a “Sheila.” Turns out what has happened is that Sonic and Tails have been sucked into Blaze’s world and must once again save the universe from evil. Problem is all the levels are stretched out over the ocean on separate islands and to get to them you must use different boats that tails builds for you out of materials you collect from beating levels.



Once you get to the level and start running you are going to have a blast. Once again Sonic Team delivers some really interesting and creative levels making full use of the dual screens and 3D effects. For instance on one level your blasted into the foreground or the background while running, in another you are launched bouncing of drums around the screen. It’s fun, creative and includes all your favorite Sonic norms like electric shields and rings galore. The controls are tight and responsive and it harkens back to the Genesis days of Sonic where each level was like a speed puzzle you had to figure out the best way to complete. It also includes time challenges and a host of other fun and not so fun mini-challenges. Add to this online rankings for levels, online multiplayer battle modes for racing through levels and in game rewards like decorations for your island and you’ve got what sounds like a very strong Sonic game. The material system is even pretty creative since its challenges to perform better and figure out the best, fastest route through each level in order to get more of the materials you need for your next ship so that you can sail to the next level which is conveniently blocked by whatever thing blocks the previous ships ability to sail.

Sailing. And with that single solitary word Sonic runs head first into a brick wall composed of suck and held together by lame. Sailing to islands is awful, you are forced to control all your crafts with the stylus and while it works fine it’s insanely pointless. You have four crafts: a jet ski, a sailboat, a hove craft and a submarine.

Basically you draw a line and explore that area of sea for any new land where a level might be, once you set sail you start following the line and you basically play a little mini-game as you move towards the destination. The jet-skit moves forwards as you push the styles left and right to dodge objects, the sailboat is a shooting mini-game in which you point at the targets, the hover craft plays like the jet-ski but you can shoot and the submarine is some sort of hybrid rhythm shooting thing. None of them are truly fun, and the best one is the Jet Ski, which becomes pretty useless early on. In fact the hovercraft is the least fun but you have to use it the most. Most importantly though it delays you from playing the next level and this is incredibly aggravating since the levels are actually really good. On top of this you have to add in an aggravating interface where you must actually run up to each ship in the over world in order to board it and mini-challenges only being unlocked by talking to random people and you’ve got yourself a lot of annoying busy work before you can actually play the levels you want.

The other thing these boating segments do to the game is shorten it. Seems that Sonic Team thought that since they were giving us boating they didn’t need to put that many full levels into it (a full leveling being two normal stages and a boss) and instead they would scatter around 15 mini-stages that tease you at greatness but are really far to short for true fun and in the end are only re-designs of the main stages. And these mini-stages are even more annoying and harder to find than the main ones since you don’t get hints to their whereabouts on the map you just sort of have to sail around uncharted waters. If I wasn’t going to write a review about the game they wouldn’t have been worth finding.


What happened Sonic? You use to be cool.

Moving away from the teeth grinding aggravation of having to play crap in order to experience greatness I’d like to talk about the music. You either fall into two camps with Sonic music, camp one hates it and camp two hates it even more. Thick techno beats sometimes with crazy odd vocals that only the most out of touch person would call cool permeate every modern Sonic game. Well I’m starting a new group. I love it because it is hated. By now Sonic’s bad music is a wonderfully camp cliché. I’ll play through a level tapping my toe to the beat and smiling because I know that Sonic will always deliver something that’s so bad it’s good. “Sonic Rush” had some “great beats” that got stuck in my head and Adventure is not different. It all flares from Sonic’s cooler than cool attitude and builds from there, he’s so cheesy, so over the top that the music can’t be any other way. I love it and always will.

So is it really worth going through all that bad gaming in order to experience the new levels? Yes, if you’re a Sonic fan it will be worth it especially for the online components and the flood of mini-challenges you can get once you Wade through the crap. While the normal game is pretty short, probably two-three hours max, if you just charge through there’s enough extra stuff and enough rewards for going back and playing well that you’ll get a lot more time out of the game. In fact just picking up the DS and playing through one of the levels to get an “S” rating is one of the best time killers around. Still you can do this with “Sonic Rush” and not have to sit through all the boating crap so unless you’re tired of that game (and I’m assuming you’ve played it because you’re a good person) its really not wroth rushing out to get, especially during this already crowded holiday season.

Rating: 6.5. Now you saw the number go back up and read the article.