TITLE: Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1
PLATFORM: PSN, XBLA, WiiWare, iOS
DEVELOPER: Dimps/Sonic Team
PUBLISHER: Sega
ESRB: E
RELEASED: October 7

By Justin Polak
Co-Founder, Ambassador to the Mushroom Kingdom

I hate to start out this review in a cliche or predictable manner, but there is no other way to say it:  I am a huge old school Sonic the Hedgehog fan. Any frequent readers might remember my top ten list on the music of the Genesis titles a couple of months ago.  Yeah, I’m one of those people that over analyze video game music when I fall in love with a series.

After many years of seeing Sonic trip all over the place in questionable 3D iterations and bizarre experiments involving swords and werewolves, I felt some sort of vindication knowing that Sega is getting back to it’s roots and creating a Sonic game as it should be. Hey, both Mario and Mega Man adopted their own style of “what is old is new again” games, so it seems natural that another beloved mascot would go the retro route.

Then Sega had to screw it up anyway. I wanted to like this game, I really did.  I thought at worst Sonic 4 would turn out to be marred bumps in the road here and there, but the overall experience would be satisfactory. Alas, Sonic remembers who he has been in the last 10 years.

Image from blogs.sega.com.

By the time this review is released, I am sure anyone who follows the gaming community will have heard of the horrendous physics Sonic is attached to. Well my friends, I came to that conclusion as well. Personally, I felt as if Sonic had a small film of glue to him as he seemed way too slow to get up to speed. It’s also easy to lose momentum if you graze an object, which mainly happens when Sonic is in the air. Jumping itself feels like a chore, and it is built around the homing dash mechanic. Though the dash mechanic is integrated beautifully—which I thought wouldn’t have been prior to playing the game)—when homing into enemies, but when you jump with nothing to home on to, Sonic is very stubborn moving anywhere but up at times. While the Genesis Sonic games had their gameplay quirks, rarely did they get in the way as much as the physics in Sonic 4 does.

The level design itself is uninspired and boring. I appreciate an homage as much as the next gamer, but Sonic 4 takes it a little too far. Mega Man 9, 10 and the New Super Mario Bros. games had homages to their older games, but they also had tons of originality to their game designs. I think Sonic Team got the idea in their head that the more references they crammed in their levels, the easier all we old school Sonic fans would buckle our knees and hail the return of Sonic. The only exception to this is the Mad Gear Zone, as it does a great job of balancing familiarity with a fresh feel.

The music feels phoned in as well. Again, the Mad Gear Zone escapes my criticism, but the rest of the soundtrack is very bland and forgettable.  The problem, I think, is looking too much into the past once again. The more I listen to the soundtrack the more I think most of it is trying to sound like the older zones the levels themselves are emulating.

While Sonic and his enviroment look beautiful, the animations are downright terrible.  At first I thought I might have been viewing the Genesis titles with rose tinted glasses, and I was thrown off by a more cartoonish look, but the more time I spent with Sonic 4 the more I didn’t like the way it was presented. If anything, it looks like a fan made game that would be impressive for indie developers, but I expect a lot more out of Sonic’s home base.

The most offensive part about all this is that this is only the first episode, and it cost $15.  We are only presented four normal style levels and one boss rush style level, and the only real challenge to ramp up replay value is attempting to get the Chaos Emeralds. I don’t know how many other parts are planned, but fifteen dollars a pop is asking way too much for such a poor effort. I’m already not looking forward to playing the rest of the game.

Image from blogs.sega.com.

I’ll sum up how I feel about Sonic 4 with a story about my favorite basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan. Though I don’t follow or care for basketball now, I was a kid when the Bulls were on top of the world throughout most of the 90′s. Like any boy my age, I thought Jordan was the coolest athlete on the planet. Although there was a brief period that he retired, he and the Chicago Bulls managed to work their way back up to repeat three Championship titles in a row, bringing their grand total to six. Jordan called it quits again, and boy did he go out on a high note as the final game he played in summed up his career, as he was the player who made the winning basket. However, Jordan would come out of retirement a second time, well past his prime on an awful team.

He sucked. Okay, maybe that’s too harsh. For his age, he was a good player, but it was like watching a random basketball player that just happened to look like an old Michael Jordan play.  While some fans were glad that he was back, many turned away and thought of his finer hours.

RATING: 5/10

Front page image from blogs.sega.com.