The game gave me a negative initial impression on the first route I finished, but after finishing True Neutral, True Evil and the Final Episode, I really like the game. Certain levels are very lengthy, and there are other levels that were purposefully made incredibly harder. Although controlling Shadow was finicky at first, it was extremely easy to get used to. The boss fights in this game were among the greatest I've played in a Sonic game, and the level design and themes were great as well. The final battle and soundtrack were fantastic. Each run of the game is short, but it was handled well and was an enjoyable experience.

I appreciate the better controls and the fact that the kill 'em all missions now feel like they were designed by a sane human being, but eh, it's still largely the same game but more polished. My issues with Shadow the Hedgehog are mainly its bland level design where 90% of the time you'll be just holding forward and spamming the shoot button, and the utterly nonsensical story that gets even more confusing when you actually make use of the choice system instead of just following a linear route where you're always doing evil, dark or neutral missions all the way to the end, none of these things are really addressed in this version.

Credit where it's due, I do enjoy a few stages where this mission system is well used, like Lava Shelter, where doing the hero or dark mission will lead you to wildly different paths in the actual stage, with your actions even altering the layout by making the stage more or less flooded by lava. Why isn't the rest of the game like that instead of the same "kill 50 enemies" missions plastered all over the place?

Playing bad Sonic games and wanting to see them improved is like wanting to be able to breathe oxygen. Out of all the games from the series' slump in the mid-to-late-2000s, Shadow The Hedgehog is one I have a weird fondness for, in spite of it being pretty terrible. I was the core audience who thought Shadow packing heat and riding a steel horse was the coolest shit in the universe, and I still kinda am.

But looking from the eyes of a jaded, more knowledgable 24 year old, rather than a dumb, easily impressionable 7 year old... yeah, the game's objectively pretty awful for a number of reasons you probably already know by now. Controls are like wet ass, the tone and story are trying way too hard, and the gameplay structure takes the worst parts of Sonic Heroes and amps them to 11. You know the whole shabang; some really fun shooting gameplay, a couple fun levels, and sone heavy rocking tracks ain't enough for me to go full apologist, not no more.

Enter, Shadow Reloaded. A fan mod that mostly aims to sand off some of the rougher edges (ha!) of the game, change some stuff around, and provide a lot of QOL to what's seen by many as one of the worst, most tedious Sonic entries. And it... works, kinda, a little bit!

For the record, I didn't even consider trying every stage from my fresh file at the time of writing. Ignoring I already avoid the unholy trinity of Mad Matrix, The Doom and Lost Impact like the plague on a vanilla playthrough, genuinely don't have it in me to 100% motherfucking Shadow The Hedgehog anymore, so barring a detour to Space Gadget in place of Lost Impact, take note I went pure neutral, hero and dark respectively, before jumping to the last story. Regardless, a few of the stages have enemy kill requirements toned down. Either that, or I think there's a few more enemies available? Stages like Glyphic Canyon still had 60 Black Arms soldiers, and I was going all in on the neutral route, so ya know. I swear there were a few more spring cages around on some routes, probably to minimise frustration of killing enemies you're siding with. Nice!

Oh yeah, and you read that right, I only did 3 playthroughs prior to the last story, because that's a major QOL change the game so desperately needed! Sure, 3 runthoughs of Shadow is a complete toss up depending on your chosen route, but compared to the 10 you need to do in vanilla? Bet your ass I'll take it, that's just how it should've been to start! Beyond all I've mentioned thus far, there's also a few bits of unused content that get restoredin here; with plenty of unused dialogue being reimplemented into stages that made me go, "Huh, that's real neat." More importantly, Powerman 5000's Almost Dead is totally abolished, replaced with the unused Who I Am and Broken on pure and semi dark route completion respectively, which made me very happy as someone who stands by the former as Shadow's true theme.

Shadow Reloaded is also a surprisingly stingy bastard with a revamped ranking system, and a few mission difficulty tweaks I wasn't that big a fan of, though. I mean, the ranking system from the original was kinda easy to break in half, but runs that would've easily earned a B at the lowest returned Cs and lower; I got an E Rank for beating the Death Ruins fight with Black Bull in 40 seconds, while doing the same to Lava Shelter's Egg Dealer got me the single A I landed thus far, what's up with that? But if you don't want that? Don't fret; it's a separate mod if you opt to patch the ISO yourself. I was just lazy and grabbed it pre patched, cause using the Steam Deck's desktop interface in handheld mode anymore than I have to is enough to make me drink.

Good god, the first thing I played on EmuDeck after not bothering to set it up for a year was motherfucking Shadow The Hedgehog...

Anyway, about that other point! A couple levels have more enemy spawns as established, there might be some laser grids in sections that never had them, the panels in Digital Circuit never completely block the entire path which actually does wonders for the pacing, small things like that. But Space Gadget and The Ark stuck out with their major changes to me. The former's Hero mission now requires you beat Sonic on a whopping 3 minute timer, down from the 5 in the original. I was a little tense getting to the end, after restarting from a random Black Arms grunt on a saucer ramming me from off screen in the middle of a jump, fuck that guy. I would've personally added an extra 30 second grace period, since I think 3 minutes flat is a bit tight, but ahh what do I know?

The ARK was much more of a bitch; in a level that's pretty mindless fun as Shadow takes flight on a Black Arms bird to destroy the level's defence systems, now becomes an exercise in annoyance as turrets are placed everywhere, backwards facing dash rings are liable to screw you further, and there's a plethora of forward dash rings designed to hurl you into the final defence system's turrets at fuck off MPH. Wasn't a highlight, which bites, cause it's one of the coolest stages in the original! At least my beloved G.U.N Fortress was left mostly intact from what I could tell.

Beyond all these QOL changes, though? Shadow Reloaded is still Shadow. Might not be the worst game in the franchise for my money, and I'll admit there's some guilty pleasure shit in there. I won't act like I didn't enjoy returning to Lethal Highway, Digital Circuit, G.U.N Fortress and Final Haunt for the first time in about a decade. But you really can only do so much with the game when it's still got that same mostly flat and linear level design (barring the reworked key system, that opens up new pathways? Neat for those curious!), that goddamn story and all its issues therein, those levels that are fundamentally bad to play, and still often annoying structure, regardless of attempts to remedy it. There's fun to be had, for sure; some a holdover from the vanilla game and some on its own merits as a QOL hack, but I think Shadow's an inherently flawed enough game to the point that it still can't rise into anything above plain mediocre in spite of it all.

But that's not to knock the attempt at all! On the contrary, I've got nothing but respect for the time, dedication and passion that the Sonic community put into these kinds of things! Whether fixing botched PC ports, creating badass original fan games, full blown reimaginings of existing titles, or just an attempt to make small tweaks to a game for an overall better experience, that's the kinda shit I love to see, and god knows there's plenty more coming down the pipeline! For something like Shadow Reloaded to exist at all, made, presumably anyway, by a person entirely on their own time, is commendable and then some, and I hope nothing but the best for anything they do going forward!