Shadow the Hedgehog

released on Nov 15, 2005

The world is in peril as forces, both good and evil, make a play for the powerful Chaos Emeralds. In Shadow the Hedgehog, you can control Shadow and choose which side to fight for. This 3D platformer lets you use weapons, vehicles, environmental objects, and time and space manipulation to combat your foes. Although it is a 3D platform game as with the more recent Sonic Adventure games, the game's levels each feature up to three different missions (Hero, Dark, Normal) that the player may choose to complete. The game's plot depends on which mission is completed as well as subsequent playable levels. The game stars Shadow the Hedgehog and his quest to recover his memory, a goal he has been pursuing since his debut in Sonic Adventure 2, while an evil alien race known as the Black Arms is invading the planet.


Reviews View More

I can't believe I did 100% of this thing

Shadow mola más que mi puta madre, tiene moto, novia, fuma y mata policías. De mientras satanás alien le dice nosequé de que él antes molaba

The concept of shadow with a gun killing people is cool enough on its own, too bad the game sucks ass but I really like how they continue the adventure story and it does have replay value and has more level variety than sonic heroes. It definitely could've been worse, but could've been better

Actually pretty fun!!! The only real downfall in my opinion is the amount of replaying levels and some mission objectives suck balls. But the levels themselves aren't too bad and it controls way better than Heroes.

At one point, I called this the worst game I had ever played in my entire life. I hated it's structure, I hated it's visuals, I hated it's story, and the list goes on and on being filled with the usual complains that every single Youtuber has made about this game applied to me. I specifically remember when I first finished the Gamecube version of this game in a voice chat with friends, I specifically stated that I would never want to play it ever again...but then something funny began to happen.

It started when I played the Reloaded mod last year, back then it didn't have it's own dedicated page on the site, and although I still gave the game a half star review here, and proclaimed those same words, I felt like I was lying to myself, because, for as much as I wanted to deny it back then, I was actually having...fun. After that, things slowly began to turn in the game's favor, from re-thinking my perspective on the story and looking at it from a deeper level, to realizing that a lot of the missions are not as bad as they initially seem, my opinion began shifting more and more.

But I was still in denial, saying things like "Ok, maybe I like everything else about this game, but surely, SURELY the gameplay must be the kiss of death for it"...and then, I replayed it. No mods, worst version that I could have possibly gone for, streched widescreen, I had intentionally set this up on the worst odds I possibly could have, to see if it could pull through it all...and to my complete and utter shock, my inconceivable amazement, and as a massive blow to my ego...it did.

Shadow the Hedgehog is fucking awesome, and I don't just mean that in the ironic sense of seeing a hedgehog with twin glickies, I genuinely think this game is fucking amazing.

It's story is a deep analysis on every facet of Shadow's character being taken to some really unexpected places thanks to him essentially serving as blank slate for him to be influenced by others, only for him to say "Fuck that" and decide what he wants to be, putting his past with Maria and the Professor behind and choosing to protect Earth not out of a promise made to someone long gone, but out of his own volition.

The presentation of this game aiming for a darker yet still light hearted mood is nailed spectacularly, never going to far in it's own edginess visuals wise, and yet still making itself feel darker from other Sonic games, it essentially takes what SA2 was doing and expands it, which while drastic coming off the heels of the more light-hearted Heroes, fits the style this game is aiming for perfectly.

The music is stellar (except for Almost Dead that song is stinky), and once again, feels like a natural evolution coming from the Adventure games' musical influence, with the vocal tracks being all so catchy and memorable that they stick out as some of the best in the entire Sonic series.

And, to my utter amusement, the gameplay here is fun. Like, really, really fun. To be fair, Team Chaotix is my favorite campaign in Sonic Heroes so that might play a part as to why I ended up liking this game as much as I did in this department, but the way that most stages are designed really doesn't make the objectives as cumbersome as people make them out to be, plus with the Chaos powers giving you infinite ammunition and two very useful abilities (Blast more so than Control), it becomes a much easier task.

Plus, since the ranking system is mostly dependent on your time, it encourages quick play and skill via the score not saving in checkpoints, creating what I'd honestly call the best ranking system in the series next to SA2. Of course, that doesn't mean that some of these missions don't suck balls, Lost Impact and Central City can both go eat a dick for all I care, but I still found myself enjoying most of the missions in this game, which is something I did not see myself saying in a million years when I first played it.

This game goes to show how replaying Sonic games can be so fundamentally important in forming a full opinion on them for me, because I will never forget my first experience with Shadow, but now, 30 something routes later across 3 different versions of the game, I can confidently and unironically say that this game is fucking great.