My opinions on this game and my preference in how I like my eggs share one similarity: they're both scrambled.

When it comes to the plot, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg doesn't offer much of note. Billy and his friends get whisked away to a realm called Morning Land, where the chicken inhabitants are being attacked by a group of evil crows. It's your basic "Go beat up the evil dark lord bad guy" storyline that's all too common in games like this. I'm not complaining about it, though. I think the plot is fine for what it is, and they do try to add some lore here and there to keep the world interesting. I have my complaints about this game, and let me tell you the plot isn't what I take issue with here.

Let's talk about how the game works. Throughout your adventure, you're constantly running into eggs. When you start pushing them around, you gain access to a whole wealth of traversal and combat abilities. You can do a ground pound with the egg and have it launch you in the air to gain some extra height. You can shoot it at enemies and have it roll back to you. You can also use it to dash. What's weird about the dash, though, is that Billy doesn't have the dash move when he isn't pushing an egg around. Why he suddenly loses the will to pick up the pace when he isn't shoving around an egg is beyond me, but we have other pressing matters to discuss.

Throughout my playthrough of this game, one constant thought ran through my head as I engaged with the mechanics: "Wow, this game would be great if the mechanics worked more reliably!"

The ideas they present with the gameplay are neat, but in execution prove to be rather frustrating. Take the ground pound that lets you jump higher I mentioned earlier. You're going to primarily be using this to reach higher platforms. In any other game, this would be as simple as using the move and then getting on the platform. However, things are not so simple in Billy Hatcher! When you use this move, the egg and, by extension, Billy begin to spin. Now, this has no effect on the controls, but it does have an effect on what happens when you land. If you're barely making it onto a platform and Billy is over the edge when you land, he's going to drop and the egg will just be hanging out on the platform you wanted to get on, mocking you as you try to find another egg to try this again. If there's no other eggs around then you need to wait for the egg to despawn and go back to its spawn point so you can try again.

Now, you may think at first that this is just a quirky weird thing that doesn't happen too often. Oh, you ignorant fool! This happens on almost every platform in the entire game. I started forming a habit of doing two ground pound jumps before even attempting to move myself to a platform because I managed to have less arduous results when I did it. I am thankful to say that this has never caused a death during my playthrough, but it is frustrating to deal with.

What did cause deaths during my playthrough was a special object in some stages. Sometimes in stages there will be railways that you need to put your egg on, and while it's rolling away you need to maneuver yourself to a location where you can catch it before it rolls off a ledge. When you first see one of these, it immediately works as advertised. However, in later stages it, for some reason or another, becomes the most finicky thing that you will ever interact with in this game.

Allow me to describe to you how these things almost made me quit the game. So, the first mission of every world requires you to find a gold egg and hatch it. For one world, you need to move this egg across one of these rails and catch it on the other end. The problems I had here weren't with catching the egg. The problems I had were that the egg just refused to get on the rail. If I moved too quickly towards the rail, it wouldn't connect with it and the egg and I would plummet down a pit. If I moved too slowly, the egg would just fall right through the rail, which also causes death since it's an important egg. I also can't use the move that launches the egg out to get it on there because then it makes the egg move too fast, making it impossible for me to catch it, resulting in death. I had to carefully manage my speed when approaching this rail, aiming my movements at just the right angle to get the egg on there. Whoever was in charge of playtesting levels that use these things must've had some level of spite towards the developers of this game because there's no way they didn't notice this! Either that or they reported it and it was, for one reason or another, never fixed by the devs, but we'll never know the true story.

I would probably be less mad about it if death was meaningless, but you have to remember that this is 6th Gen gaming, and we're still doing the lives thing in most platformers, as it was the style at the time. Personally, I think lives counters add nothing to games outside of making things more stressful for the player, and I rarely find their inclusion in games to be something worth celebrating. When developers add a lives system to their games, they either make lives super rare, making playing stages stressful and infuriating when getting a game over, or they shower you in them, raising the question of why they even bothered with including them in the first place. There's also other things to account for, such as what happens when you get a game over in terms of progress lost, when factoring how valuable lives are, but at the end of the day I think every game that has a lives mechanic would go up 2 points if they hadn't even bothered with a lives counter in the first place.

How does this relate to Billy Hatcher, you ask? Well, lives are rare in this game, for one. I didn't find a single extra life during my playthrough. I dunno if I needed to hatch a specific egg to find one but I didn't find any during my adventure. Next, we need to talk about what happens when you get a game over. A normal game would splash a "Game Over" screen with an option to continue or to quit, with continuing taking you back to the start of the stage you were attempting. Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, like other SEGA games during this time period, take you straight back to the title screen, requiring you to go through menus and loading times before you're allowed your next attempt. I think I game over'd around 5 times during that stage I mentioned earlier, so needless to say I was not a happy camper by the time I beat it.

As you go on your journey you'll get "Emblems of Courage", which act as your main collectable for this journey. For most of the game, they don't really matter. You only need to beat the first two missions of each world to advance to the next one. This is consistent for the first five worlds of the game. Once you get to the 6th world, they have you complete a third stage. At the end of that stage, though, you are greeted with a text box telling you that you need to go back to older worlds and collect more emblems before you can beat the game, and then you're kicked out of the level! You could spend over 7 minutes going through the stage, full of deaths and frustrating egg-related platforming all for the game to say "bro look at your wallet ☠️☠️ get back with some more green my man." and throw you out! Thankfully, there's an NPC near that spot where that happens that you need to just have 25 of the things before you can beat the game, but the way the game phrases things when you get to that room makes you think you need to get all of the emblems in the previous worlds, which would've scared me away easily.

At the very least, the other missions that you would need to do to get the remaining emblems at that point are absurdly easy. They went out of their way to make the first two missions of the worlds in the back half of this game worryingly difficult, but the missions outside the first two of each world are a breeze in comparison. There are some that'll end in just a few minutes without any need for a second attempt. It's crazy! Funnily enough it was during the time I was rounding up the extra emblems that I was having the most fun with the game. There weren't many rails to worry about, there was less egg platforming that could lead to ledge issues, it was like I was playing a normal game! All I could think during all this was "Why did they hide all the easy stuff and make me suffer like they have for the past few hours?"

Each world has a boss to fight, as well. For the most part, though, they're really easy. There are some where I wish the camera would lock onto them since they move all over the place and others where it took me a try or two to figure out what they wanted from me, but for the most part they're pretty comfortable to fight. You're not going to have any worries there with this game, for the most part.

Overall, I can't say I hate Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, but I can't say I like it either. A neat gimmick and an attractive world are marred by unreliable gimmicks, the trappings of the lives system, and the fact that the game waits as long as it does to tell you to go get more collectables. If this is a game that makes you curious, then I can say it's worth at least giving a shot, but I won't blame you if you want to drop it after a few worlds.

Also, ain't no way I'm going to try to 100% this game. There's no way you get something cool for finding all the emblems. Unless it makes my Wii spit out a $100 bill I ain't doing it, and I recommend you do the same. Just focus on getting enough collectables and move on. Save yourself some headache.

I really don't know why I decided to go out of my way to download an RVZ file for Dolphin to replay Billy Hatcher a few weeks ago. I think it was a combination of A) testing out a widescreen gecko code to see how it'd work (pretty dang well btw), and B) knowing that it was a platformer that I not only grew up with, but knew was pretty short (yet it took me this long to finally finish it... oops).

That aside though, it was kind of surreal to actually beat this for the first time. I always got close as a kid, but pretty much always stopped right around the third quarter, which is the Circus world. The reason, as anyone who's remotely familiar with this game knows, is evident even far back in the beginning: the wonky and inconsistent physics. Now, I wouldn't say it's like Shadow The Hedgehog level of subpar game feel, but it isn't exactly like Sonic Adventure 2 or even Sonic Heroes where you can be able to get used to it and figure out the more optimized ways to mitigate any potential issues. Instead of using standard platforming movekits, the titular Billy Hatcher controls eggs that can increase in size depending on how much fruit you roll up, as well as be the main thing in order to do the actual platforming bits with and it could've used some more fine-tuning. Sometimes you have the right gauge of momentum in order to bounce along and cross gaps, other times you'll feel like you're rolling around in a spot juuuuuuuuuuust to make absolutely sure you're gonna make that jump that looks a bit too out of the way. Most of the time doing anything with the rails is a crapshoot since eggs either stop right when they're about to go off on it, or just, fall and plummet to their demise, or even rarely exit and roll away from it entirely, until you realize you can just bypass (most) of the trouble by just jumping and then pressing the R button to do a forward push and land on it, thereby letting you and the egg roll along (this move can also be done to bypass the other infamous part of platforming where the ledge is just the right height to either make it entirely, or the egg making it and you falling off btw). The 'downhill' sections either has a consistent speed and control pushback, or ping-pongs between rigidness and looseness. Add on top of a rather janky and accidental-prone camera, and nothing really feels just right in Billy's game, and it gets worse with how little variety there is in the levels.

Levels are broken down by missions. First, you rescue an Elder Chicken from a golden egg. Then, you fight that world's boss. Next, you tackle miscellaneous tasks such as defeating an amount of enemy at a time, collect blue coins in a time limit, finding and rescuing chickens, one or two unique objectives that fit within that world's particular aesthetic and theming, or three different instances of rescuing Billy's friends from getting blown up by a bomb that then become playable for a total of there extra missions of said categories. It starts out decent enough, but by midpoint I felt exhausted having to do the same tasks with the design of each individual world having little to no alterations done to spruce the missions up. It also emphasizes combat way too much than I felt should've been possible - especially since it's so pitifully easy since you just roll up an egg to either near or full capacity, then squash them for big damage, or get an animal buddy and have them basically oneshot anything - but at the very least you can pretty much skip enemy encounters for a good chunk. Even outside of that, the actual platforming is too basic throughout, never really asking much and rarely utilizing the unique property of rolling an object.

Granted, some of the repeated missions can be short or fun enough to at least circumvent the repetitious nature, and like I said, there's some unique ones that do at least spruce it up, like having to roll up a ball of snow in order to make a snowman's head, traveling around and going up to where a windmill is and activating it by bouncing/slamming onto the sills, or lighting up fireworks for someone. And while again, I wish the platforming wasn't incredibly basic, the few times it at least changes it up - especially near the end where you actually do stuff with the egg differently - makes it a little more exciting.

Biggest thing that pushes the game into being just fine is that, again, it's pretty short and generally easy enough to at least sit through the more tedious sections with relative ease. I do think stopping the player and having them collect 25 emblems in order to get to the final world, which basically means fully completing two or three of the previous ones, is rather overkill, but again it's short and easy enough to at least make it a slightly bitter pill to swallow. It also has the right amount of graphical and musical charm to be rather comfy throughout, along with the fact that it isn't really narrative-heavy, which while I am definitely a fan of both approaches, is good for me cause after having to go through two different platforming franchises that lean towards that, having something super simple and put it at the backseat was pretty appreciative.

Overall, Billy Hatcher is one weird fucking game, and I guess that's why it has some level of memorabilia available in the general sphere of not only platformers, but the Sixth Gen as a whole. Not really polished or known enough to have widespread appeal, but also not engaging or bursting ideas to establish a cult following (or at least, a larger one than you'd expect). It just kinda... is.

Billy Hatcher is like if Mario 64, Glover, and Super Monkey Ball had a baby.

This is such a chaotic idea for a platformer and I'm shocked we never got more than this game despite Sega treating this like one of their mega franchises back in the day.

Coming from the team behind Sonic nonetheless, comes a platformer which is probably better than a lot of the 3D sonic games.

Billy Hatcher and the giant egg is structed like a 3D Mario game where you're given a couple of worlds with multiple missions where you need to collect a "Star". This time all platforming revolves around spherical oval that we tend to call an egg.

Billy relies entirely on the egg for platforming the same way Glover relies on a ball. When you have an egg, you roll it around kinda like a super monkey ball game, but you do many tricks such as bounce, dash, shoot, pound and throw (amongst other tricks). I'm sure if you spent a lot of time with the controls, movement would be found to be deep as hell.

The gameplay loop is pretty fun. You find an egg and you can roll over fruit or enemies with the egg. The more fruit your squash, the bigger your egg becomes, the more damage your egg does to enemies. If baddies manage to break your egg then you will have to find another one and increase it's size again.

While the game is mostly good platforming fun. There are a lot frustrating moments and the game can be a bit unfair with how punishing it is. Although if you play on an emulator I recommend using an infinite lives cheat so at least you start from a checkpoint rather than starting a level all over again.

I wish Sega someday revisits this franchise, because with some even more refined controls and more intuitive level design, I can see it being a great platformer series.

With a few changes this game would be like twice as good. The lives system is archaic and shitty, especially with how long some levels can be. The game is split into 7 worlds with like 8 missions each. The first two are required to unlock the next world, and the rest are sort of optional. Or, they seem that way. Then you get to the 6th world and they tell you that you actually need to have beaten 25 missions to unlock the final world. So then you have to go back and do all those. The first two missions of each world are downright obnoxious. By the time I found out I had to basically double the amount of levels I'd finished, I was really annoyed with this game. Then I did a bunch of the "optional" levels and actually had a great time. Going into the final level, my opinion on this game had completely turned around. I was having a blast. Then I played the final level and had to deal with all the boredom therein. The final boss is tedious and slow.

This game's weakest part is the combat, but holy hell does this game want to put you in combat. The platforming is actually pretty fun once you get used to the movement, although it could very clearly do with some improvements. The music (mostly) rules, with few duds in the soundtrack. Final opinion on this game is that it took away 8 hours of my life that could've been lowered to 5 or 6 if it didn't suck so much. There's a lot of potential here, but being made by Sonic Team and in 2003 really makes it hard to love. It'd be cool to see a spiritual successor by someone who sees what this game could be if it were made Not Shit.

This is maybe the biggest “this would be great if it was good!” game I’ve ever played. I absolutely loved Billy Hatcher but it is just a kind of middling platformer that makes the wild choice of pushing its worst levels at you first, therefore only reaching its height of “kinda fun!” halfway through, before ending with a stupidly bad final boss.

I think I’m just one of the few people who really would get as much joy from this game as I did, as frustrating as that is for me to say. Its graphics and character design and GBA link cable support add up to something that is so incredibly up my alley I became kind of obsessed! But if you just aren’t that interested in seeing kinda cute GameCube graphics animals pop out of colorful eggs then there is absolutely nothing else in the game to hook you. And its biggest flaws wouldn’t even be that hard to fix, either! I think polishing up the final boss and removing the lives system would instantly make the game leaps and bounds better.

I think if you do have some sort of interest in playing this game, whatever the reason is, it is worth trying. If you play it on emulator and don’t mind abusing save states then doubly so. I really, really hope a remake comes out someday that is more easily recommendable to more people but as is it’s still a game I enjoyed a lot.

I personally hate eggs, for a multitude of reasons. The bland gross taste combined with the lumpiness is just a pure recipe for gag reflex central. Everyone else in my family absolutely loves eggs, except for me. I’m always seen as an odd one out. There are a couple exceptions where I don’t mind eggs, when they’re mixed with other ingredients to create something new entirely (like a cake for instance), or in Japanese restaurants where they mix very tiny pieces of egg in with fried rice so you don’t really notice the taste much at all. Anywhere else, I despise eggs. Always have, likely always will.

On a completely unrelated note, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg sucks.

In all seriousness, I had been interested in trying out this title for a while. Been eyeing it ever since I was informally introduced to the series with the first 2 All Stars Racing games, and of course it being made by Sonic Team themselves was a key factor as well. I haven’t really heard any sort of overwhelming positive or negative feedback so I approached it with an open mind. I really didn’t know what quite to expect, but…man, this game really just goes from like, 100 to 0 in an instant. Actually, not even that, because 100 implies it was really good in the first place, it’s more like…50-45ish to 0.

If anything, the idea behind Billy Hatcher is very unique. It’s a standard 3D platformer with the catch that you need to use a separate object (in this case, an egg) in order to perform a lot of different actions. Without an egg, Billy has almost no mobility outside of a basic jump and ledge grab, and no means to attack either. With an egg, he can dash, dash jump, bounce jump for extra height, roll into enemies to flatten them and even ground pound. You collect fruit throughout the stage to strengthen the egg and make it bigger; when it’s maxed out you can even hatch it revealing an assortment of helpful items depending on the egg, ranging from 1ups, to temporary powerups, to small animal buddies with elemental abilities. To also give some credit, Billy himself with the egg controls pretty good! At least with general moving around, it’s surprisingly precise and I honestly didn’t think it would be.

This is where my gameplay praises end.

Billy Hatcher up until this point is simply mediocre at best. The egg mechanics, while they sound unique, never really amount to anything special. You just end up doing things you would normally do in a 3D platformer, basic jumping and combat, except with an egg this time. Nothing new or interesting is accomplished by this. Now I feel this could’ve been improved by, say, giving the egg even MORE mobility and utility and maybe even giving Billy himself some additional moves to provide different reasons and situations you would use egg-less Billy over egg-carrying Billy, but no. Aside from one or two one off instances of needing to grab onto tiny hooks or ledges, there’s basically no reason to not have an egg at all times. That leads into a multitude of issues with the egg itself; there’s almost no sense of satisfying flow with any of the egg’s actions. Dashing and jumping to enter a roll that’s entirely physics based feels decent enough, but jumping afterward brings you to a COMPLETE dead stop. This is effective when exiting a roll and trying not to fall off a tiny platform, but it KILLS the pacing when you just wanna blaze through a stage as fast as you can. You just end up mashing the dash button over and over again. Jumping feels sluggish, and because Billy spins horizontally around the egg, there’s a very high chance that, when you’re jumping with the egg to make it to a higher area, the egg makes it, but you don’t. Meaning now you either need to find another egg for another attempt at getting back up to that area, or you have to sit there and wait for the egg to respawn to try again. I can’t even begin to tell you how often this happened to me, it’s very frustrating but I was more so…baffled that this issue is even in the game in the first place. Like, they HAD to have known this was a problem during development, right? Right???

Any other action that requires an egg is either hitting switches to open doors (extremely riveting), riding on very tight rails which can be very finnicky to get working right, or jumping through hoops. The hoops in this game function either like jump pads or the dash rings from modern Sonic games, propelling you in a specific direction. The problem is that roughly 50% of Billy Hatcher’s level design consists of jumping onto higher areas (aka the most braindead BASIC platforming fundamentals to ever exist), and then afterwards watching as the myriad of repeated dash rings holds your hand and drags you through the level by themselves; in other words, a huge chunk of Billy Hatcher is absolutely plagued by a combination of boring lackluster level design and a ridiculous amount of automation. There are some areas where you need to guide a physics based rolling Billy through a downhill obstacle course to survive, but they aren’t that spectacular and they’re few and far between. The hatching mechanic I mentioned earlier snaps the pacing in half even further, because you need to come to a dead stop, press the R trigger, watch a cutscene play out (2 cutscenes if it’s an animal friend), and then continue on as normal. You will never have any idea of how the powerups even work until you go to the gallery and view them after beating the stage they’re in. The animal buddies are primarily used in combat and puzzle solving, which I guess leads not so nicely into the other topic.

I said previously that Billy Hatcher’s levels are 50% boring design and automation. Wanna know what the other 50% is? Combat. A LOT of it. The game, for some reason, has a really big fixation on combat. Much like Sonic Heroes, enemies come in many different varieties with different attacks and strategies and even rock health bars. The combat in this game, however, is woefully underdeveloped. You have like, 4 attacks. You can roll into enemies and squish them flat, shoot the egg as a boomerang projectile, ground pound a group of enemies while airborne, and even dunking the egg into them like Lebron James. That’s about it. Collecting fruit throughout the level strengthens your egg; the bigger it gets, the stronger it is. Though even with a small starting egg, nothing really stands a chance against Billy. Combat in turn ends up being insanely repetitive, just the same group of enemies repeated over and over and over again, and you needing to deal with them in the exact same fashion every single time. There are some enemies that have attacks that damage your egg and make them hard to hit, but all that really amounts to is waiting until they finish their stupid animation for them to become more vulnerable, the bee enemies getting the worst of it. Rolling into enemies is by far the quickest way to deal with them, and this was only somewhat satisfying the first 3 times I did this. Afterwards it’s just a chore, and oftentimes the game absolutely LOVES to gate progression in a level until all the enemies are taken care of, some even spawning in waves! I was so tired, so utterly SICK of this game’s overreliance on splattering enemies everywhere for the sake of “content” that I actively tried to avoid enemies whenever possible, which, again, isn’t really that feasible to do when the game gates progression because you didn’t move the left stick into all the bad guys enough!!! Do it some more!!! This game’s ranking system almost entirely is built upon hatching eggs for bonus points (not fun to do) and combat, except to get a good score you basically need to either use the boomerang attack and knock a ton of enemies into each other for a continuous combo, or you need to use the pile driving ground pound and flatten a ton of enemies at once, or both. Again, my main problem is that it’s too simple and not at all satisfying to do (especially with the case of the boomerang attack, it’s so awkward to hit multiple enemies with), which subsequently means that I didn’t care about the ranking system at all. I got like, one S rank, that was enough for me. The “””puzzles””” in this game, if you can even call them that, are nothing remarkable in the slightest. You either hit switches or hatch animal buddies to put out elemental hazards. Did you know that fire melts ice? Or that water puts out fire? Congratulations, you have successfully completed all puzzles in Billy Hatcher. The game also has bosses but to call them underwhelming would be the biggest understatement of the century. You just wait until they attack and expose their weak points, then awkwardly roll an egg around inside their hitbox, rinse and repeat. The camera makes these even worse, but we’ll burn that bridge when we get there, one thing at a time please.

Between the repetitive uninspired combat and platforming being both so unbelievably simple and entirely automated, there’s just…nothing Billy Hatcher’s levels have to offer. Nothing. You’ve seen all that the game has to offer within the first couple of worlds and everything else is just a repeat of the same content over and over again. The first mission is to help hatch elder chickens from golden eggs, and the second is to get to the boss to fight it, and it’s like this for every single world. The worlds themselves have their own unique gimmicks that at the very least ATTEMPT to try and alleviate the monotony and spice things up, such as the cannons in Pirates Island, or how the game attempts to somewhat help the automation issue by introducing hoops that are trapeze swings and rotating jump hoops you need to time to get the best angle in Circus Park, but it’s just not enough. Towards the final traditional world, Sand Ruins, I almost somewhat was ready to go easier on the game with how quickly it allowed you to finish it. It was still too long for its own good, but I was willing to cut it some slack…until the game decided to go “nah actually you need more emblems (this game’s equivalent to Power Stars) to get to the final world go back and get some more lol”. The game up to that point was only painfully mediocre, though it was slowly starting to test my patience the more I played, but now? All goodwill had been thrown out the window, like an omelet left in the fridge for far too long. The other missions the game has to offer are some of the most uninspired rehashing of the same exact level design with the most mundane of extra mission tasks. “KILL ALL DA ENEMIES! GET TO THIS POINT IN A SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF TIME! GET DA BLUE COINS!” There are some missions that are more unique, but I didn’t care anymore. This game never seemed to know when to finally stop, and the repetition of the boring level design and gameplay only deepened my disdain for this title. The final world, the Giant Palace, was just a massive hodgepodge of brand new gimmicks that, while they would be welcomed in any other world to try and add some interesting variety and make the egg gameplay at least SLIGHTLY more engaging, feel like a desperate attempt to shovel all the ideas the developers thought of to put in the main game at first, to instead later run out of time and put them in the final stage of the game. The final boss admittedly goes kinda hard in terms of spectacle, you straight up face this giant evil crow coated in darkness and get superpowered enough to catch his energy projectiles and throw them back at him, but at that point it was too little too late. I was just simply done. Exhausted. Drained. Slightly dumbfounded even. I thought it was fairly mediocre at first, but after fully playing it, NEVER would I have expected Billy Hatcher to be THIS horrendous, THIS drawn out, this AGONIZINGLY boring. I couldn’t even get anything out of the story, it’s so barebones and juvenile there’s nothing to it at all. There’s a surplus of extra missions to play, optional hidden gold coins to collect that unlock other SEGA characters such as Sonic to hatch as animal buddies in neat little cameos, and there’s even a full-blown party mode, but I don’t care anymore. Enough was simply enough. I haven’t even mentioned the large amount of other forms of irritation, the camera is genuinely atrocious. It moves so ridiculously slow, it’s inverted on all sides, and as the cherry on top of the cake, it moves constantly and NEVER ONCE focuses on what you want it to focus on. For boss fights especially, it’s a complete crapshoot trying to get the camera to not leave the boss off screen.

Not every aspect is terrible, but at this point it’s like trying to prop up a giant dumpster full of broken glass with a couple of tasty breadsticks. The visuals are colorful, the character models and environments look pretty good, and the soundtrack was really really catchy. Of course, that’s to be expected when you have legends like Tomoya Ohtani and Mariko Nanba on board, a lot of it was laid back, whimsical and fit the theme really well, but there’s a select few tracks that’s full of big band and jazz that wouldn’t be out of place in Sonic Lost World, the boss fight theme being my personal favorite. But again, these alongside the unique concept are all I can possibly salvage out of this abysmal slog. I wouldn’t personally be against another attempt at a new Billy Hatcher title mind you, but there needs to be some MAJOR overhauls for it to work well if you ask me. I’m genuinely stunned at how bad this game ended up being in the end. Chalk that one up to another typical Yuji Naka L I suppose. The Yuji Naka hater mindset never ceases.

Long story short, if you’re thinking about playing this, do yourself a favor and Cock-a-doodle-don’t.

Did that terrible pun make you groan out of disgust? Good. You have now officially had a taste of the Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg experience. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.