The single best collection of games of all time, it has Sonic Heroes after all!

Much like Advance 3 (though not as bad, of course), Heroes doesn't know what it wants to be. Its a homing-attack-spam game for the most part, and tries to segue it into fast paced gameplay. And it almost works, except for the unavoidable "bring things to a complete stop just because" sections that half of the levels have, which completely ruin any flow the game has and make the homing attacking, wall ninja-ing, tornado spinning and extreme grinding flashiness just seem like flowery crap put in to hide how rough it actually feels.
Now, I'm not one to get involved in the "pinball physics/hill physics/whatever" arguments as I find them a tad pretentious, but I can tell you flat out that Heroes sucked by any standard. First of all and most glaringly, you can't stop. Pull back on the stick and instead of slowing apreciably down you just get flung off into the left or right, depending on what direction the stick was closest to facing. Compounding the problem is that the later levels seemed to be bits of scaffolding floating above bottomless pits rather then actual stages (and the game occasionally didn't bother with the "stop right on the edge" animation and sometimes just let you fling off).
Next, Bingo Highway and the special stages, two things which should have been fantastic, come off as barely playable because they simply did not work in any rational way. The momentum is completely illogical, movement seems to be random with barely any influence on the player, and the game acts as if none of this is the case and spits out various challenges along the way. Its like playing the Sonic 2 bonus rounds using only diagonals on the D-Pad. The rail physics, after being so intuitive and fun in Adventure 2, are presented here more as an ends to a means; suffering for the same reason as the special stages do and essentially just being boring and frustrating.

Heroes is the first Sonic game I had to finish spurts. Even as a kid, it wore me out. The controls on their own are too haphazard to become comfortable with, ranging from slipperiness on the ground, heavy stalling when bouncing on things in mid-air, to those really finicky rails. The mechanics of the team gimmick don't make up for it either, being so specialized that the potential for interesting strategy and puzzles are reduced to a veritable game of rock, paper, scissors, as it lacks an undercarriage of unique design elements and enemies throughout the game to contextualize the maneuvers at your disposal in different ways and make it a little less brain dead. Where there was real opportunity for some interesting puzzle-platforming and room for some "aha! I know what to do!" moments, instead there's flow-breaking combat moments that only get more frequent the more you go on. The monotony of it all is further hammered home by the fact that the four campaigns are nearly identical- no different level order (which makes one wonder how they even met up at all before the ending), no exclusive levels for different teams. Just the same seven or eight areas, in the same order, with the same mechanics that beat the same enemies and obstacles every time.

The controls have lost all sense of friction and physics and feel like trying to play Sonic R with boxing gloves on. This combines with the fact that the hallway level design comes with the asterisk that the hallways don't have walls and are suspended thousands of feet in the air. The type of level design that only Sonic Adventure 2's more questionable levels had is now the name of the game, and even the likes of Final Rush and Chase use vertical space and cluster objects together more to give you opportunities to make decisions and take shortcuts. Sonic Heroes dripfeeds you obstacle after obstacle that you're supposed to have a mostly binary response to. You can mismatch abilities with obstacles to take cheeky shortcuts or abuse checkpoints to level up Sonic and clean out the badnik mobs with ease, but this isn't actually all that fun. It's more like when your math teacher teaches you a "fun" short cut and math is interesting for like 3 minutes before the shortcut gets boring.

The poor controls and abilities are disguised somewhat by the fact that there isn't much in the way of actual platforming in this game. Sonic Team seemed to have sensed on some level that the controls don't work and chose to lean on straightaways, rail grindings, "obstacles" and level gimmicks where you just toss out the right ability to progress, and pseudo beat em up stages where you mash the B button to clear out waves of robots so the door in front of you opens. Almost everything in the game deliberately feels like it's here to drag out play-time rather than be interesting or fun. Fuck the rolling physics being gone: we've reached the antithesis of what Classic Sonic is all about at this point. It's a far cry from the Adventure games which are already a far cry from the classic games in terms of sheer game design. Imagine liking Sonic Heroes.

Imagine treading the dangerous but kind of interesting idea of letting the player switch between Sonic Tails and Knuckles on the fly but falling into every game design pitfall imaginable. Linear level design combines with shallow abilities that have been nerfed from the Adventure games into the ground to create the ultimate case of linear square block in square hole obstacle design. You use the same abilities in the same way over and over again across the entire game because they aren't built with the range of anything else. The game's idea of taking the training wheels off is putting in less of those switch gates that literally press the button to switch characters for you. The spindash from Sonic Adventure has been replaced by the rocket accel ability which combines the worst of the SA1 spindash with the SA2 one. It's flimsy, slow to charge and underwhelming when it finally let it loose. Knuckles's glide and wall climb have had their wings clipped so aggressively that glide is used to take advantage of wind currents and only that. It's use to cross horizontal gaps has been gutted so you use the more context sensitive triangle jump instead and climbing walls has been removed entirely because straying from the path Omochao intended is a terrible thing, my child. These abilities don't change at all over the course of the game unlike the level up items in the Adventure games. Instead, you "level up" your characters in a stage to access some basic quality of life stuff like the homing attack one shotting enemies like it's supposed to and an area-of-effect attack for your power character that helps you deal with the robots that surround you. You'll be doing the same shit again though because it doesn't stick stage to stage. That is the essence of Sonic Heroes.

The worst part about Heroes is that you essentially have to beat the game four times in order to actually beat the game. The teams barely have any differences. Each has a power character, a speed character, and a flight character. They all function exactly the same, except for the Team Attack bonuses and some other little things (Amy doesn't have triangle jump, power characters' attacks are slightly different, etc.). Replaying the same level 4 times is incredibly tedious and boring. It just feels like artificial padding to increase the game's length.

The bosses are all terrible. Some of them barely qualify as bosses, like the halloween level boss. It's just a bunch of enemies. That's not fun. And then you to beat the Egg Bird Thing several times since they couldn't be bothered to make something else. The Metal Sonic fight at the end feels stupid and rushed. I get that Sonic Team was trying to go for a big, crazy, atmospheric boss fight when you're Super Sonic and beat up some primordial beast thing like in Sonic Adventure 1/2 but this fight just feels so awful.

The physics range from bad to just okay. I don't remember ever getting thrown off of loops or clipping through the floor which is good. The rail grinding sections were awful though. Rail Canyon was a nightmare, as well as that one part of Egg Fleet with the laser. This wouldn't be that big of a problem if you didn't have to revisit these levels 4 different times to beat the game.

Sonic Heroes was the start of the downfall of Sonic. It was the first truly mediocre core series Sonic game. It also brought back Shadow, who should have just stayed dead. This game is why we got ShTH which made the franchise look like a joke at the time (as it does now).

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Honestly, I know the Heroes came out over a decade ago, but even back then, the highest this game deserved was just a 5.5/10 AT BEST. Let's see here:
>Outdated graphics. This just looks like a Dreamcast game. And it's supposed a Gamecube, Xbox and PS2 game? Bleh.
>Horrible camera system. I don't understand Sonic Team. The camera sucked in Sonic Adventure. The camera sucked in Sonic Adventure 2. So why the **** didn't they fix the camera for this game?
>Horrible control. The power and flight characters move alright I guess, but the speed characters control like MARBLES. Expect to see characters fly off the screen because they control like crap.
>Horrible collision detection. Run into a wall. Next thing you know, you're zig-zagging in opposite directions. Or you'll just fall through the floor.
>The "team" system sucks. Am I playing a Sonic game? Or am I playing some crappy brawler? Why do I have to switch the style I'm using? Why can't I just play as SONIC and GO FAST? Isn't that the POINT of a Sonic game?
>The glitches/bugs. Why do the characters fall through floors? Why don't the springs always work? Why does the game randomly decide when to give the player control of the characters, thus leading them to fall into bottomless pits because they don't know when to move and when not to move?
This game sucks. Compare the Sonic/Shadow stages from SA2 to this crap. They're MUCH better. Fuck Shitnic Queeroes and anyone who likes it.

no user, i expect you to kys

"No!"

>that one part of Egg Fleet with the laser
You mean Final Fortress? You can just hold the B button to go faster on rails and dodge it easily. Y'know, like in SA2.

>READING THINGS IS LE BAD BECAUSE…. IM AN ADD REDDITOR WHO CANT HANDLE THE READING OKAY!!!!!!!!!!1!
good writeups, you’ve more or less explained why i dislike this piece of shit game. anyone who can tolerate this garbage is either a redditor who heard some eceleb do mental gymnastics for why it is “le sovl” or “underrated” or some shit or a midwit contarian retard.