VG Mad

Sonic Adventure DX

System: PC & Dreamcast & GameCube & PSN & XBLA
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: Sega

20 Feb 2015

You load up seeing what was an impressive intro at the time of its release. The intro is still good, it slightly lets you down by modern day graphics standards. The introduction is a cinematic experience, showing a city being flooded as if it were the end of the world.

The plot revolves around Sonic fighting against Dr Robotnic, over the possession of the Chaos Emeralds.

There are six playable characters, all having their own motives, and therefore game styles. Sonic and Tails are to prevent Dr Robotnic getting the Emeralds. Knuckles is to restore the Master Emerald. E102 wants to free his fellow robots. Amy is to search for her bird friend. Big Cat keeps losing his frog companion.

The gameplay involves a lot of high paced courses, all in 3D. You feel this game is certainly fast and incredible, especially when a killer whale appears in the first stage, chasing you down the pier whilst destroying the path behind you.

Unfortunately, Sonic Adventure DX has a few problems.

After the first stage you suddenly gasp, 'WTF!', as you are now in an area of the game that is now adventure based, that isn't at all adventurous. Even though you can obviously jump high enough to leave the first adventure area, you can't. You hit an invisible wall instead.

Confused as hell, you wonder around talking to people, who sound very wooden. Not only do they sound unrealistic, so do you. The speech acting is dull for the majority of the time, and Sonics attitude and cockiness seems without passion, and feels like it's trying too hard.

There are monitors in these adventure areas, in some cases they are totally pointless, and in others they are very in-depth.

In all, the adventure areas break the game down to a snails pace, as you wonder around aimlessly looking for an orb to give you your mission objective.

Another gripe with Sonic Adventure, is the awful camera position, it moves around supposedly to help you, which it doen't at all. In the core game where you go from point to point, the camera is fine for the most part, yet in the adventure areas, not only is it unhelpful, but it also judders, clips into walls, as it struggles to decide where it should be.

There's also a virtual pet area, where you breed and grow Chao creatures, for racing. Another futile attempt at trying to distract you from the core game.

If it wasn't for the adventure areas, and the Chao areas, this could have been a great game, because of this, it's just shy of a good game.