This game is awful, but I do think the actual level design might be the best in a 3D Sonic game yet. Do yourself a favor and play Project 06, it is literally this game with better controls, no shit boss fights, no shit hub worlds and no bestiality.
ITS NO USE!!!
Tenía de todo para ser el mejor juego de Sonic de la historia, pero al final tuvimos un monumento a la apresurada y un montón de potencial desperdiciado.
YIKESSS this is bad
I started this game out of morbid curiosity waiting for it to suck, it hasn't sucked so far and i've finished sonic's story
I finally found him... the Iblis Trigger!
One might argue about Sonic 06 being the worst Sonic game out there, or even one of the worst games ever made, but as someone who just got into the series a while ago, I personally don't share that sentiment. It has a fair share of issues, like universally reused levels across the three different routes and a really bad camera, but as an actual game, I think it's playable enough.
That being said, I do need to mention that I played it exclusively on Xenia, so the infamous long loading screens did not affect my enjoyment at all, as they were cut short to about a tenth of their supposed normal time. There's really a lot of them and it's silly how you even find them randomly popping up in the middle of a level. So if you're playing on original hardware, bring a book for the trials in Sonic's and Silver's routes.
Sonic's campaign is the most normal out of the three, he retains most of his Sonic Adventure moveset, but with a worse spindash and special mach speed sections. These speed sections are pretty much the prototype to the boost segments in Generations, except the speed is incredibly overtuned here and you're likely to crash every other second or get sent across the stage with just a slight misstep. It's especially frustrating when the camera shifts back and forth like in the Crisis City tornado chase, because it completely messes up your inputs and steers you in the wrong direction despite going for the right way before it shifts. But I'm not just going to limit my issues with the camera to the mach speed segments, it stays problematic for the entire game. For starters, the camera controls are inverted and you can't change it in the options at all. While this might seem jarring to get used to at first, the real culprit when it comes to 06's camera, is especially how it automatically "fixes" itself during homing attacks. Every time you attack an enemy with it, the auto camera shifts away from the ground and gives you a front view on the enemy - this is especially horrible for airborne enemies, when you don't have solid ground beneath you. It's definitely one of the worst cameras I have ever seen in a game and it made platforming much more worse than it had to be.
Silver's playstyle is mostly centered around projectile-based attacks and he has no normal melee moves at all, the closest thing you'll get is his electric ground pound, which allows you to throw most of the enemies you electrify afterwards - something I realized in Silver's final level, because the game does NOT tell you about it. So if you play through his campaign without knowing about this, two issues arise. The first one is clearly the dependency on throwables in the nearby vicinity, most of the time these are crates, but more than often also barrels or the bullets of enemies. In many scenarios a few crates just respawn indefinitely at certain locations to supply you with enough stuff to throw at the bad guys, but there are a few times where it's really bothersome when they don't respawn. My favorite example for this is the escort mission near the end of Silver's campaign, where you have to bring an NPC from one side of the town to the other, but you only have a few barrels on the way at your disposal and it takes a long time for them to respawn and I'm sure some didn't even respawn at all. I still think it's pretty strange that the playable Silver can't pick up the tables and chairs on the plaza, as he could do it perfectly fine in his boss fight in Sonic's campaign. Now, putting the scarcity of throwables aside, another big point is how reliant you're on the auto-aim. In most cases it works fine when you throw it in the general direction of an enemy, but when you're fighting a good amount of them at once, the aiming gets messy and can't really decide which enemy to go for anymore. I also found it extremely difficult to get the homing shots to hit the screws of the big robots when they're on the ground, so I had to skip finishing them every now and then just because most og the crates I threw just bounced off the robots instead of going for the screws. Again, a little melee move to just deal that final blow would have changed so much already. That being said, ultimately Silver was a nice change of pace from Sonic (even if it meant considerably slower combat) and it was fun to skip a few sections by abusing the horribly broken levitation mechanic - try mashing A instead of holding it, and you can fly like 50% over the intended distance to access areas where you're definitely not supposed to be.
Shadow the Hedgehog is a great character, but he's also the character with the worst opening level, which caused me to postpone his campaign until after Silver's. For the most part he plays similar to Sonic, but trades the spindash for an extended aerial combo and... armed vehicles? There clearly still was some Shadow 05 inspiration left behind, except he doesn't have guns this time. Either way, Shadow's campaign is no marvel in gameplay design, as the stage recycling is very apparent in this route and I'd say about 90% of the content (including bosses) are taken from Sonic's Story. Gameplay aside, the story direction in this campaign is pretty interesting and I like the emphasis on Mephiles as a villain, he also has a very cool theme. Shadow's conflict here feels like a more refined version of Shadow 05 and I think Mephiles plays a large part in this, as Black Doom just had that cartoonish tone to him, which didn't make him as imposing as... Shadow's literal shadow. So that was nice.
To round it all off, the Last Story truly is the cherry on top after all the already established misery and one-ups it with arguably the single most nerve-wracking and unfair level in the entire game. The End of the World consists of several smaller sections, where you play as the entire cast back-to-back in order to reclaim the Chaos Emeralds. Conceptually this sounds like a great way to end the game, a best-of consisting of... entirely copy pasted segments from the main levels, randomly spawning and unfairly placed insta-kill black holes and a random blue-ish color filter slapped on everything, but at least the background track gets you pumped. It's just not a good level and especially the black holes make things way more frustrating than they should be, the fact that they can just randomly pop up in your face is awful too. You get the point. As for the final boss, it's unfortunately just a really unengaging fight, but atleast the ending is alright.
And of course you can't miss the soundtrack in a Sonic game: His World, The Water's Edge and Kingdom Valley are some of my top picks for 06. (Those vocals in the Kingdom Valley track remind my a lot of NieR Automata, pretty nice.) Just another all-around great soundtrack overall and I'm glad to see that even haters of this game can admit the OST is good at the very least.
Would I recommend Sonic 06 to a friend? Probably not, you're likely better off playing Project 06 when it's finished.
Did I have fun regardless? Yeah.
One might argue about Sonic 06 being the worst Sonic game out there, or even one of the worst games ever made, but as someone who just got into the series a while ago, I personally don't share that sentiment. It has a fair share of issues, like universally reused levels across the three different routes and a really bad camera, but as an actual game, I think it's playable enough.
That being said, I do need to mention that I played it exclusively on Xenia, so the infamous long loading screens did not affect my enjoyment at all, as they were cut short to about a tenth of their supposed normal time. There's really a lot of them and it's silly how you even find them randomly popping up in the middle of a level. So if you're playing on original hardware, bring a book for the trials in Sonic's and Silver's routes.
Sonic's campaign is the most normal out of the three, he retains most of his Sonic Adventure moveset, but with a worse spindash and special mach speed sections. These speed sections are pretty much the prototype to the boost segments in Generations, except the speed is incredibly overtuned here and you're likely to crash every other second or get sent across the stage with just a slight misstep. It's especially frustrating when the camera shifts back and forth like in the Crisis City tornado chase, because it completely messes up your inputs and steers you in the wrong direction despite going for the right way before it shifts. But I'm not just going to limit my issues with the camera to the mach speed segments, it stays problematic for the entire game. For starters, the camera controls are inverted and you can't change it in the options at all. While this might seem jarring to get used to at first, the real culprit when it comes to 06's camera, is especially how it automatically "fixes" itself during homing attacks. Every time you attack an enemy with it, the auto camera shifts away from the ground and gives you a front view on the enemy - this is especially horrible for airborne enemies, when you don't have solid ground beneath you. It's definitely one of the worst cameras I have ever seen in a game and it made platforming much more worse than it had to be.
Silver's playstyle is mostly centered around projectile-based attacks and he has no normal melee moves at all, the closest thing you'll get is his electric ground pound, which allows you to throw most of the enemies you electrify afterwards - something I realized in Silver's final level, because the game does NOT tell you about it. So if you play through his campaign without knowing about this, two issues arise. The first one is clearly the dependency on throwables in the nearby vicinity, most of the time these are crates, but more than often also barrels or the bullets of enemies. In many scenarios a few crates just respawn indefinitely at certain locations to supply you with enough stuff to throw at the bad guys, but there are a few times where it's really bothersome when they don't respawn. My favorite example for this is the escort mission near the end of Silver's campaign, where you have to bring an NPC from one side of the town to the other, but you only have a few barrels on the way at your disposal and it takes a long time for them to respawn and I'm sure some didn't even respawn at all. I still think it's pretty strange that the playable Silver can't pick up the tables and chairs on the plaza, as he could do it perfectly fine in his boss fight in Sonic's campaign. Now, putting the scarcity of throwables aside, another big point is how reliant you're on the auto-aim. In most cases it works fine when you throw it in the general direction of an enemy, but when you're fighting a good amount of them at once, the aiming gets messy and can't really decide which enemy to go for anymore. I also found it extremely difficult to get the homing shots to hit the screws of the big robots when they're on the ground, so I had to skip finishing them every now and then just because most og the crates I threw just bounced off the robots instead of going for the screws. Again, a little melee move to just deal that final blow would have changed so much already. That being said, ultimately Silver was a nice change of pace from Sonic (even if it meant considerably slower combat) and it was fun to skip a few sections by abusing the horribly broken levitation mechanic - try mashing A instead of holding it, and you can fly like 50% over the intended distance to access areas where you're definitely not supposed to be.
Shadow the Hedgehog is a great character, but he's also the character with the worst opening level, which caused me to postpone his campaign until after Silver's. For the most part he plays similar to Sonic, but trades the spindash for an extended aerial combo and... armed vehicles? There clearly still was some Shadow 05 inspiration left behind, except he doesn't have guns this time. Either way, Shadow's campaign is no marvel in gameplay design, as the stage recycling is very apparent in this route and I'd say about 90% of the content (including bosses) are taken from Sonic's Story. Gameplay aside, the story direction in this campaign is pretty interesting and I like the emphasis on Mephiles as a villain, he also has a very cool theme. Shadow's conflict here feels like a more refined version of Shadow 05 and I think Mephiles plays a large part in this, as Black Doom just had that cartoonish tone to him, which didn't make him as imposing as... Shadow's literal shadow. So that was nice.
To round it all off, the Last Story truly is the cherry on top after all the already established misery and one-ups it with arguably the single most nerve-wracking and unfair level in the entire game. The End of the World consists of several smaller sections, where you play as the entire cast back-to-back in order to reclaim the Chaos Emeralds. Conceptually this sounds like a great way to end the game, a best-of consisting of... entirely copy pasted segments from the main levels, randomly spawning and unfairly placed insta-kill black holes and a random blue-ish color filter slapped on everything, but at least the background track gets you pumped. It's just not a good level and especially the black holes make things way more frustrating than they should be, the fact that they can just randomly pop up in your face is awful too. You get the point. As for the final boss, it's unfortunately just a really unengaging fight, but atleast the ending is alright.
And of course you can't miss the soundtrack in a Sonic game: His World, The Water's Edge and Kingdom Valley are some of my top picks for 06. (Those vocals in the Kingdom Valley track remind my a lot of NieR Automata, pretty nice.) Just another all-around great soundtrack overall and I'm glad to see that even haters of this game can admit the OST is good at the very least.
Would I recommend Sonic 06 to a friend? Probably not, you're likely better off playing Project 06 when it's finished.
Did I have fun regardless? Yeah.
its not teeeeeeeeeerrible but its super dysfunctional as a game
Boy oh boy where do I even start, Sonic 06 you are genuinely the most beautiful amazing most handsome intelligent game on this earth, the world without you would crumble and would be a very dark place. My Dearest Sonic 06, With every dribble, you enchant the systems, weaving tales of glory and triumph. Your prowess on the systems resonates with the beating of my heart, for in your game, I find the essence of greatness. boy oh… Sonic 06…Sonic…..king….ever since i laid my eyes on you i’ve never played games the same. The way you run through the zones just motivates me to get up everyday. In a world where legends rise and fall, there exists a titan among titans, a colossus whose greatness transcends the bounds of the systems and touches the very fabric of our collective imagination. Its name? Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. To merely call it a game would be an injustice, for Sonic 06 embodies more than just a game's prowess. It's a paragon of excellence, a maestro orchestrating. In the realm of gaming, one name shines bright, Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, a beacon of might. With a loading screen, it claims its reign, Inspiring millions with its game. Oh boy oh boy.. Sonic 06, huh? heh Ever since I joined the store.. It's been the epitome of excellence and kindness. It's wonderful in every way possible. It's my everything.
I'd jam out to the opening screen of this and that embarrassing......
"If the world chooses to become my enemy, I will fight like I always have"
🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐
🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐
they will never make me hate you sonic 06