Ridiculous and goofy premise aside, this game is a humongous chore to play. The controls are worse than they were in Sonic Heroes. Handling and turning are awful and unlike Heroes you're stuck like this the entire game as you don't have a flight or power formation to slow down and get your bearings, but even compared to speed formation it's still considerably worse on every level. Returning moves like the homing attack, triangle jump and spindash feel bad to use and are super sluggish (spindash in particular seeing as you have to stop dead in your tracks to use it), the levels themselves absolutely were not designed with Shadow's slippery controls in mind. You can see this as early as the first stage: Westopolis. It's filled with tons of areas littered with enemies and obstacles toppled with random frame 1 explosions that are almost impossible to weave between at a high speed.
Speaking of level design, there isn't any. Usually Sonic games have tons of interesting structure with levels offering high speed, branching paths and rewarding satisfying platforming challenges. Shadow has none of that whatsoever. They're either empty areas littered with stuff you're supposed to kill, or they're giant confusing mazes where your only guide is a compressed map jpeg splattered on a random wall. The only stage I would even REMOTELY consider to be fun (and that's being extremely generous) is the hero mission in Lava Shelter. It's a straight point A to point B mission, and the stage at least somewhat feels like it was designed to be a Sonic level (albeit an awkward Sonic level with platforming challenges made for infants and infested with "mash X" grind rails, but I'm really trying to be nice here lol), the rest of the stages are complete toss. Some are worse than others, but pretty much all of them fall into the same trappings I'm about to bring up and are all a chore to navigate and aren't fun in the slightest.
The main gimmick with Shadow is the branching storyline system. You usually have 3 different objectives in each stage: hero, dark, or neutral. Each path will have you doing a different sort of objective than the other, with the neutral path always being "get to the goal", and on top of this what path you take will also affect what stage order you go in and changes what happens in the story. Sounds great on paper, but the issue lies with what the game wants you to do in the hero and dark missions. Quite frequently the game will want you to kill an X required number of enemies, forcing you to comb over every nook and cranny searching for enemies you need to add to the checkbox. Alternatively, it could be needing to disable X amount of bombs, or collect X amount of objects, or activate X amount of things, you always are given a list of the same exact crap every single time. This absolutely KILLS the game, turning Shadow the Hedgehog into one of the most mind numbingly boring and tedious scavenger hunts I have ever played. Finding all enemies to kill or finding objects to destroy isn't fun nor engaging, it's not challenging, it's absolutely monotonous. This makes every single already awful stage you play just sort of blend together in a pile of mush, and it by proxy drags stages on to an absurd amount of time. There's no flow to the gameplay since you basically always have to stop to kill something or get an object, turning the pace of the game into a constant stop and go affair. And I should also mention that in order to reach the last story segment with the final boss, you essentially need to play the game 10 times, once for each of the 10 different endings you can get, that in and of itself should keep you away from ever touching this sad excuse for a game but I digress.
And mind you I haven't even gone over the combat in Shadow. Heroes' combat wasn't exactly ideal for most people, I get that, but it at least had substance to it. There was nuance and flow, multiple risk and reward options, and leveling up rewarded not only playing through the game well, but it also sped up the combat considerably leading to a super rewarding system. Shadow took everything Heroes' combat managed to do and break it. His standard combat options (homing attack and the absolutely pathetic 3 hit combo he has) does jack all to enemies health. It's clear the game really REEEEALLY wants you to use the firearm weapons scattered throughout the stage, which takes Heroes' combat and turns it into "hold B and win: the game". Sure one could argue the gunplay "works" well enough, but this turns enemy encounters into incredibly mindless affairs in an already mindless game. There's no risk and reward system, no flow, no incentive to improve, no NOTHING. There's different weapon varieties to use but aside from the melee weapons (which are awful to use), they all are pretty much the same effectiveness wise against enemies. This also highlights another problem with the game's pacing and highlights the "stop and go" issue I showcased earlier: considering you need to hunt every corner of a stage for these objectives you can't just run and gun as you would think you were able to. You need to constantly be stopping and starting over and over again to make sure you didn't miss enemies. Would've been nice to have some sort of map or radar system, but nope. If you're a couple short you just need to use the checkpoint system and comb over the stage all over again and hope you're able to find them. On top of the gunplay, Shadow also offers vehicles to control. All of them are not only pointless since he moves faster than pretty much all of them, but they all control horrifically. Most are optional but there are some that the game forces on you like the mech suit in sky troops with somehow even WORSE handling than the one in SA2 and a hover that kills your speed completely. Great
When you kill enough enemies of a certain alliance, you fill up a dark or hero gauge. When the hero gauge is maxed out, Shadow can use Chaos Control where he just skips a huge chunk of the stage and heads for the goal ring which is literally pointless if you're wanting to finish a hero or dark mission. When the dark gauge is maxed out, Shadow can perform Chaos Blast which is just...a worse version of Team Blast from Sonic Heroes. Shadow also gets infinite ammo and is invulnerable to damage when the gauge is maxed out anyway so that alone renders either ability worthless if you ask me.
In terms of visuals and aesthetics this game just looks flat out ugly. Colors are super dull with constant black, dark grey, brown all over the place and it just looks super unappealing. Stage themes range from passable at best to incredibly repetitious and lame (some stage themes are even recycled from SA2 altogether). Even the more thematically creative stages like Mad Matrix or Digital Circuit just makes my eyes bleed with the horrid bright neon and constant bloom everywhere. The dialogue and voice acting are embarrassing and the story is so bad that it actually is pretty entertaining with how serious it wants you to take it and how it often unintentionally shifts in tone constantly with terrible cutscene presentation and character animations. The soundtrack is genuinely really really good though, very underrated. Dare I say it's by far the best thing about this game? I've heard so many people just brush it off as forgettable and generic rock but...no? It's super varied and even the stuff that is rock goes absolutely hard.
That's all I have to say though. Don't even play this game as a joke or for laughs, it's not worth it.
Speaking of level design, there isn't any. Usually Sonic games have tons of interesting structure with levels offering high speed, branching paths and rewarding satisfying platforming challenges. Shadow has none of that whatsoever. They're either empty areas littered with stuff you're supposed to kill, or they're giant confusing mazes where your only guide is a compressed map jpeg splattered on a random wall. The only stage I would even REMOTELY consider to be fun (and that's being extremely generous) is the hero mission in Lava Shelter. It's a straight point A to point B mission, and the stage at least somewhat feels like it was designed to be a Sonic level (albeit an awkward Sonic level with platforming challenges made for infants and infested with "mash X" grind rails, but I'm really trying to be nice here lol), the rest of the stages are complete toss. Some are worse than others, but pretty much all of them fall into the same trappings I'm about to bring up and are all a chore to navigate and aren't fun in the slightest.
The main gimmick with Shadow is the branching storyline system. You usually have 3 different objectives in each stage: hero, dark, or neutral. Each path will have you doing a different sort of objective than the other, with the neutral path always being "get to the goal", and on top of this what path you take will also affect what stage order you go in and changes what happens in the story. Sounds great on paper, but the issue lies with what the game wants you to do in the hero and dark missions. Quite frequently the game will want you to kill an X required number of enemies, forcing you to comb over every nook and cranny searching for enemies you need to add to the checkbox. Alternatively, it could be needing to disable X amount of bombs, or collect X amount of objects, or activate X amount of things, you always are given a list of the same exact crap every single time. This absolutely KILLS the game, turning Shadow the Hedgehog into one of the most mind numbingly boring and tedious scavenger hunts I have ever played. Finding all enemies to kill or finding objects to destroy isn't fun nor engaging, it's not challenging, it's absolutely monotonous. This makes every single already awful stage you play just sort of blend together in a pile of mush, and it by proxy drags stages on to an absurd amount of time. There's no flow to the gameplay since you basically always have to stop to kill something or get an object, turning the pace of the game into a constant stop and go affair. And I should also mention that in order to reach the last story segment with the final boss, you essentially need to play the game 10 times, once for each of the 10 different endings you can get, that in and of itself should keep you away from ever touching this sad excuse for a game but I digress.
And mind you I haven't even gone over the combat in Shadow. Heroes' combat wasn't exactly ideal for most people, I get that, but it at least had substance to it. There was nuance and flow, multiple risk and reward options, and leveling up rewarded not only playing through the game well, but it also sped up the combat considerably leading to a super rewarding system. Shadow took everything Heroes' combat managed to do and break it. His standard combat options (homing attack and the absolutely pathetic 3 hit combo he has) does jack all to enemies health. It's clear the game really REEEEALLY wants you to use the firearm weapons scattered throughout the stage, which takes Heroes' combat and turns it into "hold B and win: the game". Sure one could argue the gunplay "works" well enough, but this turns enemy encounters into incredibly mindless affairs in an already mindless game. There's no risk and reward system, no flow, no incentive to improve, no NOTHING. There's different weapon varieties to use but aside from the melee weapons (which are awful to use), they all are pretty much the same effectiveness wise against enemies. This also highlights another problem with the game's pacing and highlights the "stop and go" issue I showcased earlier: considering you need to hunt every corner of a stage for these objectives you can't just run and gun as you would think you were able to. You need to constantly be stopping and starting over and over again to make sure you didn't miss enemies. Would've been nice to have some sort of map or radar system, but nope. If you're a couple short you just need to use the checkpoint system and comb over the stage all over again and hope you're able to find them. On top of the gunplay, Shadow also offers vehicles to control. All of them are not only pointless since he moves faster than pretty much all of them, but they all control horrifically. Most are optional but there are some that the game forces on you like the mech suit in sky troops with somehow even WORSE handling than the one in SA2 and a hover that kills your speed completely. Great
When you kill enough enemies of a certain alliance, you fill up a dark or hero gauge. When the hero gauge is maxed out, Shadow can use Chaos Control where he just skips a huge chunk of the stage and heads for the goal ring which is literally pointless if you're wanting to finish a hero or dark mission. When the dark gauge is maxed out, Shadow can perform Chaos Blast which is just...a worse version of Team Blast from Sonic Heroes. Shadow also gets infinite ammo and is invulnerable to damage when the gauge is maxed out anyway so that alone renders either ability worthless if you ask me.
In terms of visuals and aesthetics this game just looks flat out ugly. Colors are super dull with constant black, dark grey, brown all over the place and it just looks super unappealing. Stage themes range from passable at best to incredibly repetitious and lame (some stage themes are even recycled from SA2 altogether). Even the more thematically creative stages like Mad Matrix or Digital Circuit just makes my eyes bleed with the horrid bright neon and constant bloom everywhere. The dialogue and voice acting are embarrassing and the story is so bad that it actually is pretty entertaining with how serious it wants you to take it and how it often unintentionally shifts in tone constantly with terrible cutscene presentation and character animations. The soundtrack is genuinely really really good though, very underrated. Dare I say it's by far the best thing about this game? I've heard so many people just brush it off as forgettable and generic rock but...no? It's super varied and even the stuff that is rock goes absolutely hard.
That's all I have to say though. Don't even play this game as a joke or for laughs, it's not worth it.