- Genre: Platformer
- Platform: Gamecube via Dolphin
This is such a Sonic team game. It’s a strange concept that could seemingly only come out in the early 00s. It’s a 3D platformer that completely skips the lessons that Nintendo was giving out with their own games. It has every single problem that the Sonic Adventure games have. But despite that, it’s still surprisingly fun.
The one thing that really stood out to me was how fun the egg mechanic was. Besides eggs giving you core abilities (faster movement, jumping, attacks, etc), it was just fun to see what would come out of them. Sometimes it’s little helper dudes with elemental powers that can help traverse levels (ex: a water-based seal that can put out fires). Sometimes it’s hats that can provide additional benefits to your eggs (Ex: iron egg that increases attack power). Sometimes it’s useful items (ex: TNT that you can toss at enemies). You can learn over time what the eggs are, but because they are sort of scattered around the levels haphazardly, you’re encouraged to rapidly grow and hatch the eggs and move onto the next one so you can build your arsenal up throughout a single mission. By the end of the level, you’ll typically have some partner animal, some hat, some item, and be able to use them to achieve whatever the specific goal of the mission is.
More often than not I was kind of ignoring where I was trying to go and just looking around to find eggs for the sake of finding new things to hatch, which is an interesting change from what is otherwise a pretty standard platformer setup. Each world has a set of missions that you do one at a time, where you kind of traverse different sections of the area during a specific mission. Disconnected from the egg stuff, it’s not really all that different from a Mario 64 pattern. However, the eggs provide a distraction and thing to go after that Mario or even Sonic Adventure really didn’t have.
However, it’s pretty obvious that this is a Sonic Team game because it has all of the hallmark problems of the rest of their 3D titles of that era. The game starts out pretty manageable, with simple flowing level designs that really encourage the higher pace egg rolling, but it starts to slowly go off the rails. Levels start concentrating more on platforming, which works fine but isn’t really a strong point. In a lot of cases, it just feels like there isn’t much flex room in the platformer timing. Gaps aren’t quite forgiving enough or platforms are a little too tall for the jump height to where it doesn’t necessarily feel hard but feels unnecessarily frustrating.
In particular, you start running into wonky physics issues as things get more complicated. Sometimes it’ll be that your egg gets on top of a platform but you don’t, causing you to fall to your doom. Sometimes it’s a slightly unpredictable way that your character’s speed works that causes you to roll off the edge of a platform instead of stopping. Sometimes it’s a set of rails that you’re trying to roll onto that you instead clip through. This is all distinctly not aided by a typical Sonic Team camera. It has a habit of turning when you don’t want it to. It has a habit of not ever being focused on the boss that is attacking you. It has a habit of clipping through the environment and completely blocking your view.
However, those were all things that I was expecting. I know it sounds weird to go into a game expecting some subset of bad things to be there, but with Sonic Team that’s just kind of the experience I know I’m getting into, for better or worse. Nights had these problems. Sonic Adventure had these problems. Post-Sega games like Balan Wonderworld still had these problems. It’s just one of those things that I go in expecting, so I was annoyed but not unhappy about it. The thing that kept me playing was the rest of the stuff around the known garbage, and that was fun. The core egg stuff was all just kind of fun enough for this to still be good 20 years later. It’s a weird little 00s with all those problems, but it’s still a totally fun experience despite the issues.