- Original Release: 30th December 2003
- Developer: Sonic Team USA
- Publisher: Sega
- Original Platform: GameCube, PS2, PC
- Version Played: GameCube
Sonic Heroes takes on the trend from the Adventure of having many playable characters and ups the amount to a whopping 12. They’re all set into teams of three: Team Sonic (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles), Team Dark (Shadow, Rogue, Omega), Team Rose (Amy, Cream, Big) and Team Chaotix (Epsio, Charmy and Vector).
The most notable thing about Sonic Heroes is that you play as a whole team at once, with you changing the “leader” at will. Each team has three kinds of characters: Speed, Flight and Power, each with a different formation. In Speed, the characters will line up behind the leader, with power they will be at the leader’s sides and in flight you have the hilarious image of them standing on top of each other.
Unfortunately, each team doesn’t feel that different to each other, and some abilities are a bit strange. Knuckles, for example, uses his glide to get height from fans, but Vector and Big also have this ability, even though it’s a bit odd. A bit more variety in the powers would be nice, but the levels would have to be designed with the different powers in mind. Instead, the main portion of each level is built for all teams.
To reach the ending, you have to play the game as all four teams (and collect the chaos emeralds). You play on slightly different versions of the same levels, so you effectively have to beat the game four times. Teams Sonic and Dark are versions of the main levels where you just have to get to the end, Team Rose has shorter and easier versions, and Team Chaotix has to complete boring tasks (like collecting 10 things), so has flowers that can be used to warp back to the start if you miss anything.
So you’ll be replaying each stage a lot. On top of this, the way to access the special stage is rather difficult: you need to find a key in act 2 and make it through the rest of the stage without falling or getting hit, which is easier set and done.
For the most part, I quite like the stages. There’s a good variety, all with their unique looks and feelings. Casino Park is the main exception, it felt really out of place as most levels feel like part of a world, while Casino Park doesn’t feel like it’s connected to anything else as it’s very abstract, and the pinball segments are a nightmare due to the physics of Sonic Heroes.
Those physics are pretty much broken. Nothing feels consistent in Sonic Heroes, and it feels you can make the same jumps with different outcomes. One one segment of Lost Jungle, there was a grind rail that drops you on a vine. I had to re-do this bit many times due to later sections, but occasionally Sonic would just miss the vine and shoot off in a different direction. And this is a part where you just hold B. The homing attack is a lot less reliable than the Adventure games, and while moving between grind rails is much better, jumping onto them is very hit-and-miss. I also encountered a strange issue where Tails became unavailable during Casino Park during a pinball segment, and I had to jump to my doom because there was no way to progress.
Making matters worse is the camera angles, especially during the fly stages. The camera pretty much points upwards, so you can’t see where you’re landing half the time. Sometimes the bottom character even dangles at the bottom of the screen, leaving no space to see the platforms you’re supposed to be landing on. Another issue are that some ramps are designed for the speed character, and if you use the fly character you can overshoot the platform you’re supposed to automatically land on.
It’s a big shame because without these issues, Sonic Heroes would be a lot of fun (even with the repetition). The buggy nature of the game just leads to many unfair deaths, made worse by the low amount of lives in the game and some checkpoints that are very far apart. Whenever I finished a difficult level, I just felt relieved that nothing glitchy happened more than a feeling of satisfaction that you would get from a fair difficulty. I’d love to see a remastered version, as with some bug fixes and extra checkpoints, Sonic Heroes could be a really good game.
One thing I do have to give credit for is the soundtrack. The stage music is great (except for Casino’s Park out of tune music), and the songs are great, especially the final boss music “What I’m Made Of”.
Where to get
- ROM Status: Available
Browse Games By Year
1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999
2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
Sonic Heroes feels like a half finished game, not just in terms of polish & technical bugs, but in terms of design as well. The fact that every team plays the same ends up defeating the whole point of having multiple teams.
The decision to make the game multiplatform (dropping their bespoke engine in favour of Renderware & having to relearn everything no doubt didn’t help either), combined with a tight development timeline forced Sonic Team to hastly salvage what they could and cobble together something vaguely resembling their original concept. And it really comes across in the final product.
Credit to Sonic Heroes though, it’s OK enough that Vector isn’t too embarrassed to appear in it.
Vector’s frequency is a pretty decent barometer for how good or bad a post-Chaotix Sonic game is. That’s how I know that Sonic Chronicles (Where he delivers one line at the start and is never seen again afterwards) is worse then Shadow the Hedgehog (Where he mostly fobs off helper roles to Espio and Charmy, electing only to show up in one of the harder to get to final levels and endings. He actually manages to make that ending more interesting then the other 9, because he delivers a line, changing the tripe ending format that game repeats all the time. Master of improv, that croc!)