Shadow the Hedgehog (Reloaded) ★★☆☆☆

This is the skeleton of a functioning Sonic the Hedgehog game under this that you can sometimes catch a fleeting glimpse of before the mess of bad decisions piled on top of it re-asserts itself.

The addition of weapons is not inherently a bad thing, I enjoy the Gamma stages in Sonic Adventure, and having auto-lockon guns to blast stuff with as you run through a level is fun, and the way the rage mode gives you infinite ammo that lets you keep firing as long as you can destroy enough to keep your meter filled can be a cute little balancing act sometimes.

The weapons that don’t lock on are borderline unusable, though. Aiming is difficult at the best of times with these controls and rockets seem to have a habit of going straight through enemies and hitting a wall behind them and mêlée weapons are not something that works in conjunction with contact damage and knockback on hit. There is a reason that Freedom Planet excised those things from the basic formula.

But those are petty and mostly avoidable problems compared to the mission system. The Reloaded mod tries to smooth out some of the tedium but it does not solve the fundamental problems with it.

The levels are largely designed like Sonic the Hedgehog levels (and are often pretty fun when played like ones) with a linear structure but with some branching paths and shortcuts, shortcuts that you absolutely cannot use if you are trying to do missions because you will skip over a bunch of the sixty fucking individual soldiers you need to kill in order to do the dark mission so you can explore more branches of the story than the neutral pathway.

Absolutely no consideration seems to have been made for the mission system and branching story structure. The chaos control power is entirely useless to you if you are doing any mission other than the neutral one as it will simply skip you past your objectives. You must disengage with much of the games mechanics and rewards systems in order to experience more than half of the game.

The branching story structure that this is in service of doesn’t seem to have any consideration put into it at all either. The same cutscene will often play at the end of a level regardless of which mission you did, the CIA mainframe will be hacked regardless of if you did that mission or not, the events of any previous level are never mentioned because they all just exist in complete isolation and make no reference to anything that came before. Every character will act surprised that you are not doing what they say at all times regardless of if you have spent the entire playthrough so far ignoring them.

The path where you only do hero missions is really emblematic of this. Black Doom will continue giving orders that he apparently expects Shadow to obey till the end, despite Shadow not having listened to him once. But Shadow himself is similarly ridiculous on this path, which contains the infamous line “This is like taking candy from a baby, which is fine by me!” On the path where you only do the good missions! This path also has you fight the Black Bull boss twice. Surely it should have been obvious that this would be a path that many if not most players would end up doing and that it shouldn’t have the same boss fight twice on it.

Another path that stood out to me is the neutral path, which alternates level themes between ancient ruins and overgrown jungle tech base which made it feel like you were going backwards repeatedly with Glyphic Canyon, Prison Island, Sky Troops and then Iron Jungle. It really gives the impression that levels were made and then just randomly distributed between the different story paths without any thought whatsoever.

And of course the structure of this requires you to replay the same levels over and over in order to explore branches that you haven’t done yet. The Reloaded mod at least allowed me to to have to play Westopolis ten times just to unlock Last Story but the five times I had to play it to be able to at least play every level once was still far too much.

And it’s all stills sometimes actually quite fun. It’s very frustrating to have this core game that is enjoyable but with a mountain of shit piled on top of it that consistently gets in the way of satisfaction.

Expert mode almost fixes these problems, simply offering the levels one after the other, mostly just letting you play them by getting to the end without having to worry about missions, but then throws in some blatantly unfair changes to some levels on top of removing continues entirely.

Overall I still somehow feel positively about this game but I am not going to go back to it any time soon.