Renegade or Hero? Uncover Shadow’s truth!
- NA release: 15th November 2005
- EU release: 18th November 2005
- JP release: 15th December 2005
- Developer: Sega Studios USA
- Publisher: Sega
- NGC Magazine Score: 51%
- Mods Used: Widescreen Patch
In an attempt to attract a more mature audience, Sega decided to create a Sonic game with guns and swearing. Now, they couldn’t do that to Sonic, so instead it was up to his counterpart, Shadow the Hedgehog, to take on the role. During the development, the American ratings board came up with an E10+ rating, so Sega decided to go for that instead of a Teen rating, reducing the swearing and making it so that the guns don’t kill humans.
As a platformer, Shadow the Hedgehog is certainly fun, but very wonky. You’ll end up getting hurt a lot due to bad physics and controls, but thankfully the game does not punish you for this as much as the Adventure games. Shadow can either do his homing attack, beat up enemies or use weapons, which is actually quite satisfying if you don’t care what you hit.
Getting to the end of levels isn’t the main goal (although you can do that in most levels) as each level usually has two other different objectives for the Evil and Hero sides of the game. For a lot of levels, this just means knocking out Gun soldiers Vs killing alien invaders, but others can involve looking around for switches. If you miss one. You can use warp points to go back to different parts of the level, so it’s not as much of a pain as Sonic Heroes.
Although, like Heroes, Shadow has a ridiculous way to reach unlike the actual final level. The various branches through the game will end up on one of five end levels, each with two objectives. Completing one of these gives you one of ten endings (including one where Shadow executes Dr Robotnik). Only when you have all 10 of these endings can you complete the game.
Still, at least the game is quite enjoyable when it works well.
Fun
Sadly not the Glock-buster Sega was hoping for, Shadow the Hedgehog is unfortunately doomed to do down in Sega’s history book as a terrible misfire.
Jon Hamblin
Remake or remaster?
A remaster implementing improvements seen in the Reloaded mod would be great,
Official Ways to get the game
There’s no official way to get Shadow the Hedgehog
Europe
Japan
North America
GameCube Games by Date
2002: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2003: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2004: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2005: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2006: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
