The best way I could describe Knuckles Chaotix would be a slow motion violent car crash with buckets of bright neon paint flying everywhere. The main mechanic (the ring tether) is pointless and detrimental to the game design in a number of ways. For one, it ends up screwing over your control most of the time. Even the most rudimentary jumps you want to make will be ruined because the partner you’re tethered to didn’t make the distance and yanks you back, and often times when you travel at a high speed you can end up bouncing back and forth in mid air constantly changing direction. You end up fighting against the controls more often than not, and the things you can pull off with the tether (a speed boost for example) takes too long to wind up making it an inferior option to the spindash in the older games. A spindash is still here, but it’s nowhere near as good, forcing you to use the tether to get a proper speed boost. This entire mechanic is a pointless handicap and nothing more.
Making things even worse is the levels themselves. The layout and level design of these stages is quite frankly baffling, often being giant empty hallways with loops slopes and...slow moving elevators but with barely any enemies at all and little to no actual platforming, which to be fair is kind of a saving grace with this game’s awful tether mechanic but it makes these stages feel all the more lifeless and exhausting to traverse through. There aren’t really any interesting stage gimmicks either aside from Amazing Arena, so a lot of these stages just sort of blend together, and my god they drag on for so looooong. And if that weren’t enough, these stages each have 5 acts you need to play to beat them. People complain about Sonic Colors forcing you to play 6 acts to beat a stage but at least the extra acts Colors has are bite sized, have satisfying platforming challenges with actual stuff to do that doesn’t boil down to holding forward a bunch, and doesn’t waste your time with an awful tether mechanic, but I digress. You pick these stages at random which kinda makes the game feel all the more disjointed than it already is, and it doesn’t help the tedium these stages all offer. There are special rings you can find but they don’t give out the Chaos Rings (this game’s version of the emeralds). Instead they warp you to a bonus stage and offer you the chance to get more rings, but the longer you stay in there the more rings you waste. Couple that with the fact that it controls horribly and doesn’t give out much rings to begin with means you end up losing more than you gain, making these bonus stages entirely pointless and making the one secret you can find in these stages not worth doing. Gee, thanks guys.
The one positive I’ll give is the special stages. These are admittedly pretty creative and kind of fun to play, aside from the large difficulty spike that comes around 5-6 stages in. The fact that you can extend your time in the special stages by collecting rings in the main stage beforehand gives more of an incentive to grab rings despite this game not having a lives system, which I think is very interesting. But if I need to point out the special stages as a single positive, I think that’s a major problem.
The cherry on top of the cake are the visuals, which are an absolute eye sore. Just this assortment of bright colors and super busy background elements kill my eyes after looking at it too long, Amazing Arena in particular looks like pure visual vomit. And the soundtrack isn’t very good either. It’s nothing bad, just nothing really memorable. It’s relaxing at the very least.
All in all, stay far away from Chaotix. There’s a reason SEGA hasn’t rereleased this game yet
Making things even worse is the levels themselves. The layout and level design of these stages is quite frankly baffling, often being giant empty hallways with loops slopes and...slow moving elevators but with barely any enemies at all and little to no actual platforming, which to be fair is kind of a saving grace with this game’s awful tether mechanic but it makes these stages feel all the more lifeless and exhausting to traverse through. There aren’t really any interesting stage gimmicks either aside from Amazing Arena, so a lot of these stages just sort of blend together, and my god they drag on for so looooong. And if that weren’t enough, these stages each have 5 acts you need to play to beat them. People complain about Sonic Colors forcing you to play 6 acts to beat a stage but at least the extra acts Colors has are bite sized, have satisfying platforming challenges with actual stuff to do that doesn’t boil down to holding forward a bunch, and doesn’t waste your time with an awful tether mechanic, but I digress. You pick these stages at random which kinda makes the game feel all the more disjointed than it already is, and it doesn’t help the tedium these stages all offer. There are special rings you can find but they don’t give out the Chaos Rings (this game’s version of the emeralds). Instead they warp you to a bonus stage and offer you the chance to get more rings, but the longer you stay in there the more rings you waste. Couple that with the fact that it controls horribly and doesn’t give out much rings to begin with means you end up losing more than you gain, making these bonus stages entirely pointless and making the one secret you can find in these stages not worth doing. Gee, thanks guys.
The one positive I’ll give is the special stages. These are admittedly pretty creative and kind of fun to play, aside from the large difficulty spike that comes around 5-6 stages in. The fact that you can extend your time in the special stages by collecting rings in the main stage beforehand gives more of an incentive to grab rings despite this game not having a lives system, which I think is very interesting. But if I need to point out the special stages as a single positive, I think that’s a major problem.
The cherry on top of the cake are the visuals, which are an absolute eye sore. Just this assortment of bright colors and super busy background elements kill my eyes after looking at it too long, Amazing Arena in particular looks like pure visual vomit. And the soundtrack isn’t very good either. It’s nothing bad, just nothing really memorable. It’s relaxing at the very least.
All in all, stay far away from Chaotix. There’s a reason SEGA hasn’t rereleased this game yet