If you have, like me, been a long-time Sonic fan, you know the series has had its share of highs and lows. While playing Sonic Frontiers, I couldn’t shake the thought of revisiting another Sonic game—something from the era I grew up with.

For reference, my first Sonic game was Sonic Adventure 2 – Battle. I love that game, and I’ve 100% A-ranked it several times. Being fair to it, though, it’s actually not that great of a game; nostalgia is definitely making me enjoy this game more than it probably deserves… and that’s fine! But what about the others?

Sonic Adventure 2 is the only game I’ve consistently gone back to. I’ve played the PC port of Sonic Adventure, and while I liked it last time, it doesn’t hold the same nostalgia.

I hadn’t played Sonic Heroes since my GameCube days. Given that it’s inaccessible outside of emulation, I decided to revisit it after watching some retrospectives on this Sonic era.

So, while I liked SA2, I think it aged like milk. But does Heroes hold up any better—or did time only make its flaws more obvious?

A Troubled Decade for Sonic

I usually don’t get into history for my reviews, but I think this game’s history is too interesting to not mention—and sorry for all the older players reading, but this might actually qualify as a retro game now. A lot of people might not even be familiar with it. The embedded video above covers Sonic’s development cycles in depth, but I’ve bookmarked it at the Sonic Heroes portion. I’m sharing my thoughts here but it’s a much more nuanced dive if you’re interested.

Anyway, Sonic Heroes was developed and released at a very troubling time for Sonic. This was Sonic’s first game after SEGA decided to stop producing consoles and became a third-party developer. It was also the next game after the aforementioned Sonic Adventure 2 which, while it has always has its detractors, was mostly well-received back in the day, and it’s still a game people hold very dear to them. This was the first Sonic game a lot of people would ever play, given that it was going to be the first one released on non-SEGA hardware. So, with all these expectations, and the new challenge of a multi-platform release, you’d think that Sonic Team would get ample resources and time for its development cycle, right?

Wrong! Sonic Heroes saw some extreme cuts for its development cycle. Sonic Adventure 2 had a team of around 100 developers working for 18 months, using a refined version of the Sonic Adventure engine. In contrast, Sonic Heroes was instead developed by only 20 people over 20 months, with a brand-new engine to boot.

Game director and level designer Takashi Iizuka reportedly lost 10 kg of weight due to stress and pulling all-nighters to finish the level design by himself after his co-level designer fell ill mid-development.

I bring this all up because, before I criticize the game, I want to acknowledge that Heroes being playable at all is nothing short of a miracle. It also foreshadows what would happen to the Sonic games that followed it – Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic ‘06 – where obviously this practice was not sustainable.

This doesn’t make the game any better or worse to play, but I find it shocking that we even had a game, let alone one that a lot of people are fans of. Indeed, some say this marked the start of Sonic’s downfall, others see it as the last good one.

So, where do I land?

The Peak of Sonic’s Style

One thing this game absolutely nails is how cool it feels. The set pieces, level themes and sense of excitement are so good that it’s painful to acknowledge the game’s flaws. In terms of thematic design, this might be the best Sonic has ever been: beautiful seashores, casinos, spooky mansions, and a climactic assault on Eggman’s armada. All of this is enhanced by one of the franchise’s best soundtracks, with Jun Senoue returning to deliver the perfect rock music that drives the game forward. I’m posting a couple of my favorite tracks because of course I am.

This is, without a doubt, Sonic Heroes’ greatest strength—the game feels like a cool adventure. Set pieces complement the gameplay, rarely interrupting it and always keeping the action going.

The iconic team-based gameplay adds to this: characters can switch back-and-forth on the fly, making the challenges feel grander—after all, you need the specialized abilities of three different people to overcome them! Characters are mostly portrayed very faithfully, since this was developed before Sonic’s writing took a nosedive.

Adding to the excitement is something new for Sonic: combat integrated into its action-platforming. How does that fare?

Combat, Speed, and the Team System

For a first attempt—especially back in 2003—Sonic Heroes handles combat surprisingly well. While Sonic is known for high-speed platforming, the way Heroes integrates combat into it is relatively seamless: sometimes enemies are meant to be dispatched quickly while you blitz through them, adding to the excitement of speedy sections, sometimes combat is used as a change of pace where your combat skills are tested to advance quickly, and sometimes combat is used when failing to achieve a faster route, effectively punishing the player by slowing them down in true Sonic fashion.

I know a lot of people will disagree with this, and for what it’s worth, there are truly some annoying parts about the combat—particularly, later enemies in the game will be fully invulnerable to attacks until certain conditions are met, and sometimes those conditions can literally be “stand still until I put down my shield”. Most of the combat feels snappy, it’s the game’s jank bringing it down—and we’ll get to that in a moment.

The team mechanic also makes combat dynamic. The Power formation is very good at destroying a big cluster of enemies, the Fly formation allows you to long-range stun or snipe them when platforming, and the Speed formation allows you to quickly dispatch weak enemies to push through quickly or disarm the stronger ones.

Many fans argue that combat slows Sonic down, and I get it. But Heroes actually integrates it in a way that, at its best, enhances the pacing rather than ruining it.

Lastly, the “Team Blast” move that charges relatively quickly, and wipes out every enemy on screen, helping to mitigate tedium. All things considered, Heroes is a very respectable first attempt at combat in Sonic, and honestly, with its track record, it might be the one that nailed it the best.

…But it’s Not All Good Things

I wish I could call Heroes an excellent game. Honestly, I wish I could even recommend it, but its strained development cycle left a clear mark on it: this game is simply not finished.

If you’ve played Sonic Heroes then images like the one above are enough to make you flinch. This game is a massive step back in character control (playstyle notwithstanding)—controls are infamously slippery, you cannot switch characters midair, your team constantly gets stunned which delays switching, the homing attack doesn’t work, the physics doesn’t work properly… I could go on forever about this. It’s just an endless amount of jank, and not in the sense of “ooh, this is a retro game, it’s over 20 years old”, when by this era of gaming we had perfectly functional 3D platformers—it’s jank from a game that was simply not fully polished.

After getting sent into a bottomless pit twice at the end of Final Fortress because there are no safeguards for rail switching, I just quit the game for the day. I cannot in good conscience fully recommend this game knowing how common an occurrence this is. Even in speedruns and in score attack videos, you will see players do moves to avoid getting blindsided—they will switch to character formation to turn around corners, they will jump in Power formation to attack instead of sliding… they’ll always play it safe instead of fun, lest they die to the game malfunctioning.

The one mechanic that is probably the most broken is rail grinding. This mechanic worked fine in SA2, with proper acceleration, balancing and jumping being an integral part of its game emphasis on score attack, but it’s completely nerve-wracking to get into rail-based sections in Heroes and to not know if you’re going to actually jump into an adjacent rail or jump off to a bottomless pit. I think this is the biggest mechanic impacting the game because of how much rail grinding is present in the latter half of the game: there is one zone completely focused around it, and some of the later, marathon-length 8-minute stages frequently challenge you to make these quick jumps, always risking death in the process.

That’s without mentioning how non-functional the special stages are, which you will need to do countless times to get all the Chaos Emeralds and unlock the last story. Which brings me to…

Repetition, Repetition

Originally I was considering maybe doing an all A-rank run, and while I enjoyed my time playing Heroes, I simply got too frustrated with how much I had to work against it to play it at all.

As cool as the set pieces were, many of them amount to nothing more than padding, especially on repeat playthroughs. There are endless times where your player characters get spun into a pole like (as shown above), and all you can do is wait for it to finish. It’s always the same thing every time but with a different backdrop. There are a lot of pace breakers in just breaking boxes or looking around for a hidden switch just to open a door. I don’t want to be too hard on the devs, given the constraints they had just to release this game.. but I hope you love slowly and inconsistently pulling switches—because you’ll be doing a lot of it!

Despite all its flaws, I think Heroes remains an enjoyable game to play. But you really need to fight for that. The level design gets better as the game progresses, and every level feels fresh, but it simply cannot make use of it in its current state. We can only imagine how good this game would have been if it had been polished more.

What About the Bosses?

Much like in traditional 2D Sonic games, after two acts in a given zone, you are pitted against a boss. This is easily this game’s weakest point, with three different types.

The first one is a “robot spam” fight, where Eggman throws a bunch of mooks at you for you to plow through. While I spoke well of the combat in this game, that’s in the context of the stages—as a stand-alone gameplay style, they are honestly a bit boring. I don’t mind them too much, but there was probably a better way to stage them.

Then there are the Eggman fights. All of them involve chasing after him and wacking him repeatedly, and while the idea of chasing an Eggman-controlled robot to destroy it is cool in theory, but actually destroying them is dull and repetitive. Also very skippable, though I’d really like the music and design of each route’s final boss.

Lastly, there are character fights, where you encounter one of the other playable teams. Unfortunately, they miss their mark yet again in Heroes—they are easily cheesed, and their plot justifications are laughable.

Oh, did I mention that there is a plot and different character perspectives here?

Big Cast, Small Story

Like the Adventure games before it, Sonic Heroes opts for a multi-perspective story. Unlike the Adventure games, it does absolutely nothing with it.

Heroes goes with mostly self-contained stories (which have the aforementioned arbitrary fights with the other members), and all of them are pretty simple: it’s “fight Eggman”, “do missions”, “find the team’s pets”. There’s really not much to say in plot quality, it really is that simple, and for what it’s worth, since this game is trying to mimic the original 2D game’s structures, I think the barebones plot works fine. It contextualizes on what is going on and then moves on.

I think there are still some noteworthy details, though: for one, the zones get progressively more industrial as you approach Eggman—a detailed which eluded me until I saw it in another review. Secondly, character interactions and banter are pretty well-done here: for the first time in the franchise, characters will banter and comment on what’s going on in the zone. While a lot of them are annoying or grating, I like how much character it gives to each team, and I like how this complements the team-aspect of the gameplay to make it feel like these people are actually a well-established team; 20 years later, we are still calling Shadow, Rouge and Omega “Team Dark” despite this and ‘06 being the only games where they cooperate at all.

Some of the characters also feel like dumbed down version of their former selves. Amy is regressed to once again being just a Sonic fangirl, even if I enjoyed seeing her lead her team. Knuckles gets dumbed down to being dumb muscle. Tails’s voice actor is kind of annoying. Still, Team Dark’s interactions made me want more from them, Sonic Team feels like a, well, great team, and Team Rose manages to capture a cute and funny feel to their interactions. I’m a fan of the IDW Comics, and I really like how Cream is portrayed as an adorably earnest child hero—it’s really charming.

It’s very rudimentary, and I wish we had more of it. Star Fox Assault released a couple of years later, with an only slightly larger plot, but it was brought alive with how cool it feels to see the characters interact with each other. I just wished Heroes leaned more into that, but for a 2003 game it’s an okay start.

So, How Does it All Come Together?

I completed Team Sonic, Team Dark, and Team Rose, and that felt like enough. I had zero interest in collecting Chaos Emeralds or enduring a fourth playthrough with a tedious mission-based structure, and I didn’t even mention how underwhelming the final story is.

Still, I think Team Sonic and Team Dark are solid experiences, and they alone can justify giving the game a try. If you want a 3D Sonic game that actually captures the feel of the classic 2D titles, this is one of your few options. I’d love for SEGA to remake it with the proper polish it deserves, but after two decades, that seems unlikely.

Sonic Heroes is an ambitious game weighed down by its unfinished state. If you’re willing to fight against its jank, there’s still enjoyment to be had—but it won’t come easy.

What about you? Did you grow up in this era of Sonic? Do you think
Sonic Heroes—or any of the games from this time—still hold up? Let me know in the comments!