System(s): Xbox, Playstation 2, Nintendo Gamecube
Year of Release: 2005
By 2005, it was becoming painfully clear that the “Sonic” franchise was losing its luster; SEGA’s collapse as a first-party developer and the less-than-positively received “Sonic Heroes” certainly did not paint a pretty picture for the Blue Blur’s future. Thus did SEGA decide to try and get the franchise back on track by taking it in a bold new direction, ousting Sonic himself from the position of lead character and replacing him with his darker, edgier counterpart Shadow. With firearms, stolen vehicles, and Chaos Control at his disposal, did Shadow have what it takes to helm his own game? Or did he just wind up beating his chest?
<b>Story</b>
“Shadow the Hedgehog”’s plot picks up where “Sonic Heroes”’ left off: Shadow, super-powered artificial life-form, has mysteriously been resurrected following his seeming demise at the end of “Sonic Adventure 2” and is struggling with a bad case of amnesia, attempting to piece together his enigmatic past. Enter Black Doom, an alien overlord spearheading a hostile takeover of the planet. Doom apparently possesses key information regarding Shadow’s history and he’s willing to share, but only if the hedgehog agrees to help him and his army obtain the seven Chaos Emeralds that will guarantee their victory. Whether Shadow agrees to help this wicked mission or not, and where the story progresses from this opening premise, is almost entirely up to the player as the game offers a wide variety of branching story paths, but no matter what route you take you’ll run into many of the same problems. To its credit the story does a decent job of resolving the dangling plot threads from “Sonic Adventure 2” and “Sonic Heroes”, but the overall plot is almost insultingly sophomoric. The script’s transparent desperation to be grim and gritty is laughable, particularly since it is very hard to take its overwrought dramatics, dreadful voice-acting, and repetitive and poorly-written dialogue all that seriously. This is the kind of story that thinks peppering your sentences with the occasional “damn” or “dammit” automatically makes it more mature, and that really should tell you everything you need to know about “Shadow”’s overall depth as a story right there.
Score:
1/2 out of <b>Design</b>
If there is one area of “Shadow” which proves genuinely innovative, it is the approach it takes to game design. The single-player campaign has 22 levels in total, but you will only go through six in any given playthrough with a smattering of Boss Battles spread throughout. This is because the game’s levels are arranged on a grid, and how you move through that grid is determined by actions you take in each one; with the exception of those on the edges of the grid, every level has three missions to choose from, each of which will take you in a different direction: the Hero mission will move you up, the Neutral mission will take you straight forward, and the Evil mission will take you downward. Side characters will travel alongside Shadow through the level giving him advice on how to complete each mission, and you can toggle which character and mission you are on in the pause menu at any time in the level. In theory, it lends the game a certain level of strategy and replay value, as you will need to go through it multiple times to unlock all the levels and get to the final “true” ending. In execution, however, it proves more frustrating than fun. The biggest flaw is that there is almost no Mission variety; with only a handful of exceptions, they all boil down to killing a specific number of a certain kind of enemy before the end of the stage. This is made problematic by the game’s auto lock-on system, however, which does not distinguish between enemy groups and will always have you attack the enemy closest to you regardless of affiliation, rendering the game’s pace highly erratic as you’ll move gracelessly from zipping through a stage to taking exorbitant amounts of time to make sure you kill the right enemies while avoiding the wrong ones, lest you complete the wrong mission by mistake. Toggling what mission you are on does nothing to help this either; beyond what character is blabbering into your ear, it changes nothing in the actual game play. There is also a multiplayer mode in the game, wherein you take control of various flavors of Shadow or Metal Shadow and compete with up to three other players to see who can get the most rings by the end of a set amount of time, but it’s so painfully tacked on and unrefined that one visit is all you will ever need before you quietly leave it alone forever. All told, a single play-through of “Shadow” will take you about an hour and change, but the game offers a total of roughly six to eight hours of overall content; to get the most out of it, though, you’ll need to play through the game many times, and it is hard to feel like that is ultimately worthwhile.
Score:
1/2 out of <b>Gameplay:</b>
The core play mechanics in “Shadow” remain the same as they have been since the “Sonic” games went 3D on the Dreamcast: as Shadow, you can run, jump, spin-dash, and use your homing dash to automatically attack nearby enemies in a fully three-dimensional environment. It’s solid enough, but Shadow can prove pretty slippery to control at times; keeping him straight requires some focus, and making precise turns is nearly impossible. The big change-up here, however, is Shadow’s ability to pick up weapons and commandeer vehicles dropped by enemies and strewn throughout the levels. The weapons are certainly functional enough, and it can be quite fun to plow through enemies with a particularly powerful one; however, as mentioned before, the game’s auto lock-on system combined with its mission structure makes the weapons frustrating to use, as you will have to struggle with them quite a bit to make sure they hit the enemy you actually want to shoot at rather than simply whichever one is standing nearest to you. As well, outside of the two overall classes of weapons-close-range melee weapons like lead pipes and swords and projectile weapons like machine guns and pistols-there is very little to distinguish most of the weapons from each other in terms of their overall abilities. As for the vehicles, though, they are an absolute joke; even clunkier to control than Shadow himself, and frequently much less slower than he is to begin with, they serve little overall purpose other than to ape the popular “Grand Theft Auto” series (and quite poorly at that) and should be avoided altogether, save in those few sections where the game forces you to use them. Shadow also has two Chaos abilities he can activate after killing enough of a certain kind of enemy; killing “good” enemies lets you use Chaos Blast, which does damage to all enemies on screen, while killing “evil” enemies lets you use Chaos Control, which lets you zoom through the stage at hyper speed until it runs out of gas. In both cases, however, the powers are flashy but impractical; Blast does not do nearly enough damage to your enemies to justify all the trouble you have to go through to build it up, while Control is only useful for missions in which you simply need to get to the end of the stage in one piece, of which there are very few in the game. Of course, all the classic problems that have plagued three-dimensional Sonic games in the past return here too: the camera is frequently unreliable and tricky to control, and you will find yourself falling to your death in the less-than-perfectly designed stages far too often for comfort.
Score:
out of <b>Presentation:</b>
To its credit, the graphics in “Shadow” are pretty impressive overall for a game of its era. The visuals are nice and crisp, with well-rendered character models and a smooth overall frame rate that only ever encounters hiccups rarely. Likewise, the music, while perhaps a bit too hard-rock for some tastes, is nonetheless well-composed with crisp definition, and the sound effects likewise give real weight and power to the many wild happenings that go on throughout the game. As previously mentioned, however, the voice-acting is an absolute train wreck; this is the game that tagged in the voice-acting stable of the infamous 4Kids Entertainment, and with the exception of Mike Pollock’s decent if unremarkable job as Dr. Eggman, they all do a terrible job of making us care about these characters. The Chaotix in particular will make you want to tear off your ears just so you don’t have to listen to them anymore. Meanwhile, though the graphics themselves are nice, the overall art design of the game is a lot less impressive. Most of the stages look rather drab and unimpressive, while the enemy designs are monotonous and unappealing; the Black Arms aliens who are your most frequent adversaries in particular all look like they walked out of a bad Todd McFarlane comic book, and their look clashes violently with the more cartoonish looking “Sonic” regulars; this goes double for Shadow’s arsenal, which becomes impossible to take seriously when it frequently consists of weapons more than twice the hedgehog’s size, making him look less like a badass and more like a child messing around with his father’s toys.
Score:
1/2 out of <b>Overall</b>
Credit where it’s due, “Shadow the Hedgehog” is an intriguing experiment for the Sonic franchise overall, but ultimately an unsuccessful one. Far too often, playing the game feels more like a chore than it does entertaining, and the cloying attempts to play up Shadow’s baditude mostly fall flat on their face. Give it a look, but don’t expect too much out of it.
Score:
out of 
