Sonic the Hedgehog Review

A fifteenth anniversary release that shipped several months short of finished, and it is genuinely instructive to watch how a game comes apart. Three campaigns across Sonic, Shadow, and Silver reuse the same levels with different physics, none of them tuned, so momentum builds and then dumps you into a wall or straight through the floor. Loading screens interrupt entering a building, leaving a building, and starting a mission, and they run long enough that you can time them.

The camera cannot decide whether it is chasing you or fighting you. Homing attacks lock onto nothing, scripted sequences desynchronise from the geometry they depend on, and collision detection is broken rather than merely loose. Wrapped around all of that is a plot in which a human princess falls for a hedgehog and revives him with a kiss, played without a trace of irony. There are handsome skyboxes and a decent soundtrack buried here. Nothing else survives contact with a controller.