Sonic X Shadow Generations

(available for Playstation 5, Xbox Series X & S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X versions used for this review.)

By the time this review goes out, I will be mostly done with live streaming this game, hence why I bought two versions- I was unaware at the time that the game would come with multiple file sizes. You can see some of my fly-by thoughts there. 

Short to say, this is a big year for the Sonic fandom. Not only are there more great products coming out including a new mobile game that will also go to PC, but there will also be the Sonic 3 movie, which will prominently feature Shadow the Hedgehog, hence why Sega have dubbed their initiative this year, ‘The Year of Shadow’. As such, they made the decision to remaster Sonic Generations as well as add extra content for a new game, Shadow Generations- hence the title of this game. 

The game originally came out in 2011, to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Sonic. I still stand by the fact that it’s the best 3D Sonic game. The level design is excellent, the new remixes for the soundtrack are great, I love trying to beat my time on various levels, everything is a joy to go back to; I find myself replaying Sonic Generations more than any other Sonic game, mainly because I saved my disc from the Xbox 360 and it’s backwards compatible on the newer consoles. 

I thought this would be a great addition to give Nintendo Switch users a version of this game, and Playstation users only had access to it via the Cloud gaming servers- which I tried to play, and trust me, you don’t want to play it that way. The lag made that game unplayable. 

If you have played the original Sonic Generations, then half of the game won’t give you anything new. Some of the cutscenes have been slightly altered and there are some new voice recordings with most of the cast returning (though there are some new cast members too), but the big difference is that they have added a new collectible, the Chao. In each level there are three Chao hidden for you to collect, and if you are having trouble finding them, the game does give you hints about where they’ll turn up.

The Shadow Generations segment is where we get most of the new content. It’s a fully single-player Shadow game, showing a side story that he was up to during the events of Sonic Generations and features levels from Sonic Adventures 2 onwards. It’s not much quicker than Sonic Generations, it comes at about 2 hours if you’re breezing through it, and it took me about 3 hours. 

Rather like Sonic Generations, it’s very replayable, especially considering they are not handing out the S ranks so easily. Unlike Sonic Generations, though, they have given a bunch of new powers to Shadow. The basic plot is that he gets brought into an extra part of the pocket  dimension as part of a plan from Black Doom.

Though the game doesn’t provide too much context for what’s happening (though Sega did release an animation on Youtube which acts as a prologue to his story), other than that, the gameplay is very similar. Shadow basically controls almost exactly the same as Sonic, but when his Doom powers are added, it does make replaying the levels very interesting as you can use them to skip some parts of the level and improve your time.

PROS

• Gameplay

The gameplay in Sonic Generations is amazing and it’s carried over well here. The team was smart enough not to alter Sonic Generations, and so Shadow Generations works brilliantly. It’s good fun and is a joy to play! 

All of the levels from Sonic Generations are very good and the level design carries over to the Shadow part of the game which is excellent too, especially considering they had to rework a lot of levels from previous games. I won’t give away what levels those were, since a lot of them were a nice surprise, but suffice it to say that most of the levels and boss fights in Shadow Generations bare more relation to Shadow’s character and his history.

The controls are also great. They did give you the reworked controls scheme from Sonic Colours as a default, but fortunately, you can go into the controls menu and turn it to Legacy Mode, which I did instantly- that’s something that is just muscle memory to me at this point. But either way, whatever control scheme you choose, the whole thing is just buttery smooth, Sonic has never controlled so well. Because they are building off the same idea, Shadow has the same effect too. I didn’t feel any issues with that, and any deaths I got were entirely my own fault.

• Visuals and Performance

Visually, Sonic Generations still looks really good. It runs now at a perfect 60 frames per second. I haven’t played the Switch version so I can’t say how well that one runs, but in my experience, it was really enjoyable to see how this game looks. The Shadow Generations levels do come with an option at the start, unlike Sonic, which has fixed visuals and framerate, Shadow’s was built on more modern hardware, so you can choose between visuals and performance. With this kind of game, you absolutely have to pick performance! Especially considering how fast paced these levels are. However, the game does start you in Visual Performance- change that as soon as you start.

Other than that, the performance is actually better than the original. There were a few instances in the older versions where the game lagged, but that doesn’t happen in this version. For example, the Green Hill Zone Modern stage was terrible in certain stages, but it’s vastly improved this time.

• Soundtrack

It’s a collection of the greatest music in Sonic history, of course it’s going to be amazing. The Shadow stuff does have to rework a lot of other songs, but because of a quirk in the level designs, you’ll hear a lot of Radical Highway. But as a whole, they did a really good job translating these songs and if anything, I think that they did a really good job with the remixes as well!

This was especially interesting in the Shadow section, since they had to rework two songs for each level, one for Act One and Act Two.

• New Hub World

Unlike Sonic Generations which has a simple 2D hub to access the levels, Shadow Generations actually gives you a 3D exploration hub, which feels like a more contained version of the open environments that we got in Sonic Frontiers. However, I think it’s more contained nature isn’t as visually interesting, but it does make exploring and trying out new powers more interesting than I was expecting, especially since I didn’t think it was a good idea originally. 

I did really grow to like the hub world and I think it’s a really good idea. 

MIXED

• Story

This is mainly because the Sonic Generations segment isn’t as great of a story as it was before, which is weird because I feel like it’s one of the more simplistic stories in the series. So that kind of drags the whole thing down.

The Shadow Generations segment is where I think things improved. It does a very interesting exploration of Shadow’s past and where he’s going. It doesn’t need to recontextualise what Shadow’s done since then, because he’s only really been in one game since Generations which is weird to think about… But it does a very good job in getting a sort of closure to a lot of the threads that have been dangling over the character for a long time. Let’s face it, his game on Playstation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube, wasn’t a great conclusion to his story arc, and if anything, this game’s story is what that one’s should have been.

However, there’s one character in the story which still doesn’t sit well with me. It’s when we dive more into Joe Robotnik. Fortunately, they don’t go down the root I was expecting to go down, but I do find it interesting that it seems to gloss over a lot of his worse qualities, especially considering what we know about him by the end of Sonic Adventure 2. 

CONS

• The Time Eater Boss Fight

The boss fights in Sonic Generations are still great, and there aren’t really any flaws in the Shadow segments either, in fact the second boss fight that you encounter might be one of my favourites.

There’s only one boss fight that sucks and even though they had a chance to improve it, they didn’t. It’s still awful! In some ways, I actually think that it’s worse this time around…

They actually tried to respond to the criticism that you don’t do as much as classic Sonic in that boss fight, so they tried to put more emphasis on his grabbing rings. But if anything, that means he’s now more prone to getting hit. It’s not as if this boss fight is particularly hard, it’s just annoying!

The Time Eater is always constantly too far away and by the time you speed up, you’ll do a move that forces you back. I’m so glad I got an S rank at my first attempt on the Xbox, because I don’t want to be fighting this boss multiple times. This boss fight always drags down the game, and it’s not different here. I really think that considering everything, they should have reworked or fixed this boss.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Sonic X Shadow Generations is an excellent remaster, and with the content it’s adding, I think it’s worth a repurchase. The Shadow segments add a lot of extra content, and to be honest I think that the Sonic stuff is fine even by itself. 

I do have some issues with the story, but I don’t want to be drawn in with several right-wing grifters who are making bad faith criticisms about it on Twitter, so I’m very cautious to distance myself from that. My position is that the rewritten lines take away from some of the humour that was good in the original.

I loved the gameplay, I love the soundtrack, it’s visually excellent, and there’s a reason that people still say that this is the best 3D Sonic, and I think that this is the best version of the best 3D Sonic.

Do yourself a favour and pick up this version. Just be prepared for how bad the Time Eater is.

FINAL SCORE: 9/10