NOTE: I give Sonic Adventure a 7/10, however, this port of the game is extremely bad, and I mention why at the bottom of this review.
SonicNOTE: I give Sonic Adventure a 7/10, however, this port of the game is extremely bad, and I mention why at the bottom of this review.
Sonic Adventure is a fun game overall, but has some issues and quirks that do stand out.
Presentation
The graphics are nothing special, and the lip syncing was never changed from the original Japanese game, so the mouths don't match up at all. The music, however, is really good, comprised of many memorable tracks, and a few mediocre tracks, but nothing that sounds outright bad. The voice acting is nothing spectacular, but it gets the job done.
Gameplay
The gameplay is fun, for the most part. The game is comprised of 6 characters' stories, and one final, general story.
Sonic is very simple gameplay, platform to the goal. He controls well, but sometimes you may run into a physics quirk.
Tails is very similar to sonic, but instead of simply running to the goal, he has to race Sonic on many of the same stages that you play as Sonic. Tails can also fly, but otherwise, he's identical to Sonic.
Knuckles has to look for three pieces of the master emerald, and his gameplay is more exploration centered because of that. In his stages, you run around a piece of a level you played on as Sonic, and you win once you find all three pieces. He controls okay, but not as well as Sonic or Tails.
Amy's stages involve running away from an invincible robot towards the goal. Her acceleration is awkward, and she's a little slow, and her stages aren't that interesting because of those issues.
E-102 Gamma is a robot built by Eggman who becomes self-conscious and goes rogue. His gameplay Involves running around shooting everything with a lock on gun. It's actually quite fun, as Gamma controls as you would expect, and everything flows nicely. It's not fast, no, but it's still very fun. One of the best characters. He also has a really interesting story.
And then we have Big the Cat. He's a giant Cat that goes around fishing. Yes, fishing. In each of his stages, you hunt down his frog "Froggy" and fish for him. This was apparently made for a add-on fishing controller on the Dreamcast, but in case you haven't noticed, this port isn't for the Dreamcast. The fishing... actually works somewhat alright. It's nothing phenomenal, but if you understand how it works (nothing tells you this by the way) it's somewhat fun. Big himself, on the other hand, controls horribly. His jump is painfully low, and his top speed is tiny. This makes him a pain to play as.
The story is nothing special, most plots are rather simple, and don't have much depth.
Sonic's story is just prevent Eggman from doing evil.
Tails' story is to help Sonic prevent Eggman from doing evil.
Knuckles' story is to find the pieces of the Master Emerald.
Amy's story is avoiding one of Eggman's robots and helping a bird.
Gamma has the most interesting story of all, involving self-awareness, and has quite the powerful ending.
Big's story is just catching Froggy.
And the final story wraps up the little pieces of plot sprinkled throughout all the other stories. It's nothing special, but it's better than nothing.
Overall, Sonic, Tails, Gamma, and somewhat Knuckles are quite fun, and Big and Amy are meh.
However, with this review, I would like to bring light to how awful the 2010 release is. The 2010 version is the version that was released on Steam, XBLA, and PSN. It features textures worse than the dreamcast, no mip-mapping, some broken collision, and a awful resolution cap.
There is a mod, called Better SADX, that replaced this version with the 2004 physical PC release, which has modding support. From there, you can improve the texture quality, use a non crappy config editor, and best of all, it has proper widescreen support, which doesn't stretch, but instead increases your FOV. It's a really great mod, and makes this crappy port into the definitive SADX experience.… Expand
