Sonic Shuffle | DJcube

Original Release: 14th November 2000
Developer: Hudson
Publisher: Sega
Original Platform: Dreamcast

This is Sonic’s attempt at Mario Party. It has some neat ideas of its own, but the execution is not so good.

Instead of rolling a dice, you choose a card from your deck to move around. In multiplier, these are displayed on the Dreamcast memory card’s screen (if not everyone has one, then they’re shown on screen and you can shuffle them around after your turn). If you don’t have a card you want to use, you can pick a random card from an opponent and hope for the best.

After you pick your card, you then choose which way around the board you want to go, heading for the stone to collect. An action will then happen based on the tile you land one. This will mainly be gain or lose coins, but there are also ones that trigger mini events, minigames or battles – including the tiles to earn a precioustone. The battles work by the enemy showing a card and you picking a higher one. There will then be a roulette and you have to stop it on a number matching or higher than the enemy to win the prize.

The levels are a bit of a mess, though, with annoying layouts and paths that get blocked. There are also some tiles that only certain characters can get past. Sonic has none of these and instead gets double movement when playing the same number two turns in a row – which I found to get in the way more often than being useful.

Sonic Shuffle has a storyline that is not only way to complicated to explain why everyone is playing a board game (a villain has taken over the dream world and put the goddess to sleep, shattering the stones that were protecting dreams), yet it fails to explain why Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy are all competing against each other. In the story mode, if you don’t come in first place, you have to do the stage again – and this is with the full amount of stones which can take 3-4 hours to complete.

On top of this, the AI cheats at the game and will almost always win. They have the ability to pick the card they want from any player. With this and the length of time to try a stage, I instead tested the levels out in Verses instead.

With four players, Sonic Shuffle can be a really fun game with some really nice ideas that make it more than just a bad Mario Party clone, but the moment an AI is introduced, it ruins the fun.