Shadow The Hedgehog (2005) for Gamecube, Playstation 2 and Xbox

It's common in the videogame industry to take an existing concept, character or series, and try to make something new with it. Whether this involves making the jump from 2D to 3D, introducing new characters or gameplay elements, or rebooting a series in its entirety, it's common practise to try to innovate and make something old fans enjoy and hopefully bring in new ones.

Sometimes however, change can go too far, resulting in a game so tonally different that it looks and feels jarring considering what might have come before it.

One of these games, is Shadow the Hedgehog for the Nintendo Gamecube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

The game's cover art, owned by SEGA

History

Everybody knows Sonic the Hedgehog. He's one of the most famous game characters in history and has had just as many appearances as Nintendo's Mario.

However the big difference between the two gaming icons is that Sonic was designed to be "cool" and "rebellious", essentially characteristics that Mario didn't have in order to make Sonic stand out.

This theme continued for numerous instalments of the series until his first two major 3D outings, Sonic Adventure 1 and 2 for the Sega Dreamcast and later the Nintendo Gamecube. It was Sonic Adventure 2 though that would give us a character meant to be the opposite of Sonic, Shadow the Hedgehog.

Shadow's Sonic Adventure 2 look, his first appearance

Shadow was essentially an morally ambiguous character, who, in Sonic Adventure 2, did evil things but believed it was right. At the end of the game, Shadow is redeemed and helps Sonic save the day and presumably dies in the process.

This was supposed to be the end of Shadow, with the designers wanting him to be a one off character, but after the huge positive reception from fans for the character, they decided to bring him back in another Sonic game, Sonic Heroes for Gamecube, PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

Due to the popularity of the character, Sega decided to give Shadow is own entry, separate from a Sonic storyline. This fit well with Sega Studio USA's vision to create a more mature entry in the franchise, saying that they'd heard a lot of feedback from fans saying that they wanted Sonic to wield a gun. They didn't think this would be a good fit for Sonic but thought a morally ambiguous character like Shadow would work well.

And so, Shadow the Hedgehog was created. Featuring a more mature rating, guns, profanity, death and destruction. The game was very poorly received by critics and fans and is remembered for being one of the most overtop and pointless entries in the Sonic franchise.

Story

The story is where Shadow the Hedgehog already starts to go off the rails. It follows on from Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes, with Shadow not remembering his past and going on a journey to find out who he really is.

While pondering what little memories he has, the sky opens up and an army of aliens fall down and start wrecking havoc on humanity. A shadowy figure called Black Doom appears and tells Shadow it's time for him to fulfil his end of a plan by bringing him the seven Chaos Emeralds, jewels that contain extraordinary mounts of power.

After Black Doom disappears, Shadow questions his motives but believes that if he really knows anything about his past, he has to believe him and find the emeralds.

This is a simple premise, and works as a standalone story, however, Shadow The Hedgehog features multiple paths and multiple endings, all leaning into different moralities felt by Shadow that you can decide for yourself. This would be cool if it weren't for the way the decisions link together from a story perspective. You can start the game being a bad guy, to which Shadow acts like one in dialogue, only to then be a good guy and see his personality shift immediately.

It works in concept but the way it's tied together just makes the story you follow look like you're playing different stories all together rather than creating your own path.

The level select screen, featuring all possible paths Credit Gamecog

Gameplay

So the story isn't the best but what about the gameplay? The team at Sega tried something different with this one and had a big focus put on guns and other forms of weaponry like knives and swords. In previous 3D Sonic games, your main attacks came from on the ground rolling attacks and mid-air homing attacks, which are both still present here, but now you can pick up weapons off the floor or enemies and shoot enemies for more damage.

In my opinion, the guns in this game just don't feel right. They all feel the same except for a few that fire different projectiles, and aiming them means you need to slow down and try to aim it, which in a game about speed, isn't what you would want to be doing. There's also the fact that wielding firearms in a game series typically about a happy blue hedgehog destroying robots feels silly, which is why this game is memorable to fans, because of how ridiculous it is.

Shadow wielding an assault rifle.

There are some guns that I think are quite cool, and these are special, limited weapons that appear in "Shadow boxes" and they're unlocked by completing certain objectives throughout the game.

A "Shadow Box" which contains the best weapons

For instance there's a gun that sucks enemies inside it, one that will take out anything in one shot, one that essentially calls in orbital strikes and a few others. These are the most fun to use but you'd have to complete the game in its entirety to unlock them all, so by that point there's not much of a reason to care about them.

Controlling Shadow is also a bit of a nightmare in this game. Your sense of momentum is hard to gauge and can cause some problems during platforming segments or smaller areas that have something you can fall off. The camera doesn't help with this as it feels too low to the ground at times so it's hard to see everything at points.

Screenshot from the game

I'd also like to talk about two of the most pointless aspects of gameplay. The Hero and Villain bars. These are two bars at the top of your screen that charge up depending on how many good and bad enemies you take down, and filling them up lets you use a special power. The Hero bar when charged up lets you fly through a portion of the level at blistering speed until the bar runs out. The Villain bar lets you unleash a large blast of energy that damages everything in its path. These sound good on paper but from a gameplay point of view they make no sense. I'll start with the Hero power, called Chaos Control.

In a game where some of the objectives involve you meticulously searching a level for something, having a power that lets you skip over it is bizarre. Yes you don't have to use it if you don't want to but if that's the case why give it to you in the first place.

The same can be said for the Villain power, called Chaos Blast. In terms of damage, it only really effects smaller enemies, and in order for it to be most effective, you should ideally use it in a large crowd of enemies, which isn't something you really come across as you'll usually run into four or five enemies at a time on average.

I'm not saying these powers aren't cool, I'm saying they just don't fit with the game they were added to. If they were taken out, the game would be exactly the same, which can be said for a lot of its features.

I mentioned earlier that there are branching paths in the game that effect the story. This is shown in the form of different objectives within the levels. There are typically two to three objectives, Good, Neutral and Evil, usually tied to some sort of faction like the aliens, Sonic and friends, Eggman etc. These can range from eliminating a certain number of enemies from either the good or evil side, collecting something, blowing up objects and so on. Neutral doesn't have an objective and is basically going straight through the level to the end and finishing it.

Some of the characters you work with for certain objectives

These objectives are where I feel this game is at its weakest. Sonic games are about speed, they're about blitzing through a level as fast as you can and having fun doing so and while you can do that to some degree in Shadow The Hedgehog, most of your time will be spent backtracking through areas to find that one item you hadn't picked up, or kill that one enemy you hadn't seen the first time round and after a while it gets tedious.

They're also not very creative, they're usually the same if not incredibly similar and they end up feeling like a chore. What makes matters worse is that in order to finish the game properly, you have to work your way through all the levels, in various orders to get all ten possible endings in order to unlock the final level and ending. This will involve replaying the same missions with only a little bit of divergence, and again, is very tedious after a while.

I can respect that they wanted to try something new, but in the end it just doesn't work, which they obviously understood from the feedback as they've never tried anything similar again.

Audio

There's really not much to say about the audio other than it's passable. Gun sounds are fairly generic and most of the audio used is repeated from previous Sonic games.

I will say that the music is good, which seems to be a recurring thing with even some of the worst Sonic games. While the theme of the game is questionable, the music recorded for it fits the tone it's going for and some of the tracks are really good.

I'd also like to mention the dialogue used for this game. In order to meet the more mature theme they were going for, they gave Shadow some questionable dialogue choices that involve cursing and "sending people to hell", which coming out of a small cartoon hedgehog makes it comedic rather than "dark."

Conclusion

Overall, I can't say Shadow The Hedgehog is a good game. It's certainly creative, but not in the best way. I will admit though that if you ignore what the game is intending to make you feel, the comedic nature of the game shines through and I've had a good few laughs with friends over how silly and overtop it can be at times.

I would only recommend this game if you want a good laugh or if you're a really big fan of the character or Sonic games in general. If you're going in expecting a deep story and gripping gameplay, this isn't for you, frankly I'm not sure who this game is for.

One of the more edgier endings