Shadow the Hedgehog
Format: Xbox | Released: 11/18/05 | Reviewed: 07/01/2006 | Words: RobotRocker
"Where's those DAMN chaos emeralds?"
Not what you would expect in the opening cut scene from a 15 year long franchise mainly aimed at kids and has a spin off cartoon airing on The Den at the minute. But the 12+ rating in the bottom left of "Shadow the Hedgehogs" box seems to show that Sega expect a more mature audience than the normal young audience the blue hedgehog you know and love attracts. So much, that the internet conglomerate of video game critics seem to have dubbed it "Shadow the Motherf***ing F***hog" in honor of Sega's new attitude filled spin off. For those that just joined us, Shadow is a relatively new entity in the sonic universe, introduced in Sonic Adventure 2(For the Dreamcast and Gamecube for those keeping score). The self proclaimed “Ultimate life form” and rival to Sonic who was once bad, then good, then bad again, then a little more good and now he doesn't know what he is. So its up to you to decide by taking missions for yourself, goody-two-shoes Sonic and his friends, the always villainous Dr.Eggman and his robots or the new bad guy on the block, the Black doom and his alien army to help poor ol' Shadow to regain his memory and place in the world.
Since the attitude has changed a bit, the environments have changed quite a bit also. Out goes the pastel primary colors, the light rock and roll music and the levels set on beaches, jungles and canyons. In comes dull browns and grays, thundering heavy metal and industrial music and levels set in war torn cities, Computer mainframes and a violent theme park. Its all a bit out of place, for what was at its roots, a fairly happy-go-lucky game. Sadly, any sort of innovation or drastic change with the new attitude went out the window with the horrific controls and gameplay. First of all, Shadow can wield a gun, now this would be useful if you could aim the bloody thing, but you cant hit the broadside of a barn with it unless you slaughtered the whole farmyard first. Adding to that is the Good and Evil meters on the top of the screen where if you perform good(Protect the Human Soldiers, protect nature, help the good guys by defeating the aliens) or Evil(Destroy the humans, destroy everything around you, do bad guy missions) your meter fills up and gives you a special power to unleash when they fill up, but since your tearing through the level most of the time, you wont know what you hit half the time spent running through.
Not only that, Shadows jump attack is pretty useless, since the auto-aim on it can send you the opposite way of where you want to go, and most of the time sends you straight off a cliff into the black abyss. The arbitrary life system rarely hands you an extra chance to finish the level and the continue points within a stage are pretty much camouflaged. Its Really frustrating when you realize that some stages take up to 25 minutes to complete. The missions given to you by the good and evil sides during the stages are also monotonous and very testing since it asks you to pick up 400 rings or destroy 50 soldiers. Its impossible sometimes to find that last soldier and finish of the stage. Its horribly annoying at times.
Its not all bad really though. When you finaly nail that last alien or heal the last scientist, its very satisfying. The game is huge and has a lot of lifespan and the good and evil system adds some replay value as you can get one of 13 endings. The branching system used for the stages is quite innovative and gives you different story outcomes and stages depending on your alignment and theirs a total of 13(!) different endings too see. The story grabs your interest because of the way you can affect it up until the last stage. The sound is quite decent too, the game was made to be played loud, blasting thundering guitar riffs and heavy drums along with the loud explosions. The voices sound quite twee compared to everything happening around them, though the voice actors are reprising their roles from the “Sonic X” series that is shown on the Den. Plus, it looks really, really good while moving really, really fast on the X-Box and Gamecube (The PS2 takes a massive graphics and speed hit and should only be considered if you haven't got a 'box or 'cube).
If anything “Shadow” is like the good and evil system, infuriating moments with some parts of sheer amazement. Its split personality leading to frustration or triumph and either way, It will have you swearing. Shadow the MotherF***ing F***hog indeed.
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