This marks the 35th anniversary of the Blue Blur himself, Sonic the Hedgehog. At SuperPhillip Central we're going to look back at all facets of the fastest hedgehog alive, both good and bad. We partook in the good with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds earlier this month. Unexpectedly, and against memories from my youth, now we're going to be looking at the bad with Sonic Heroes.
What goes up, must come down. And wow, does it come down hard!
Sonic Heroes originally released on the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox back in 2003. I remember being incredibly hyped after coming off of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, greatly enjoying that GameCube release, and then feverishly pouring play after play of the first level of Sonic Heroes as part of a bonus demo disc released alongside some copies of Mario Kart: Double Dash!!. Then, the game came out, and I actually ended up enjoying it.
That said, my gaming habits and preferences have decidedly changed since 2003. For one, I was in high school then, and had so much more free time and patience in general. As an adult, I definitely have much less of both to dedicate to games that try said patience. Sonic Heroes is one of those games nowadays, and it's an unfortunate reminder that nostalgia can blind. What one might have considered a fantastic game back in the day, or one worth challenging themselves to overcome, nowadays is an effort of utter frustration.
Sonic Heroes is a unique game in the 3D line of Sonic the Hedgehog games, as it features teams of characters running, jumping, and otherwise moving through the game's 14 stages. There are four trios in all: Team Sonic (Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles), Team Dark (Shadow, Rouge, and Omega), Team Rose (Amy, Cream, and Big), and Team Chaotix (Vector, Espio, and Charmy), the latter of whom returned after last being seen all the way back in Knuckles Chaotix on the SEGA 32X.
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| While Team Sonic and Team Rose are like Seaside Hill Zone, great for beginners and getting their feet wet... |
Each team has their own story set of stages to play through, though the stages have similar designs with some changes here and there across all campaigns. Whereas Team Rose features shortened stages and even a tutorial level at the beginning of their story, Team Dark is more focused for veterans of the game, containing longer, more difficult stages with more tricks and traps to watch for and persevere against. Meanwhile, Team Sonic is your "standard" difficulty, while Team Chaotix is a mishmash between Team Sonic and Team Dark. Team Chaotix's story stages all tend to have a specific mission to complete: whether that's finding 10 hermit crabs in the opening Seaside Hill Zone, or defeating three specific gold-shelled turtles in the Power Plant Zone.
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| ...Team Dark and Team Chaotix's stories are better left for later playthroughs, as the levels can be long and unforgiving. |
It's recommended to start with Team Rose or Team Sonic to get your speed sneakers wet and obtain a taste of what you're in for with Sonic Heroes. Playing each team's story means 14 zones with seven boss battles interspersed after every two zones for a total of 21 per team. Multiply that by four, and you get a general idea of what awaits. Unfortunately, each level strikes a resemblance to other teams' levels, so it can feel like a lot of retreading and repetition. You can't play the final story featuring all four teams without playing through and completing each teams' story mode. This took me about 12 hours to do all in total.
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If the idea of three characters bantering back and forth for most of each level |
As for the overall story, each team has their own reasons and motivations for setting out for adventure. Whereas Team Sonic gets a letter from Eggman revealing a three-day plot to rule the world, Team Rose has each member wanting to track someone down: whether it's an amphibious friend suitably named Froggy for Big the Cat, a missing Chao for Cream the Rabbit, or simply Amy's fixation, Sonic and his love. Across each story campaign, the characters occasionally cross over, but seeing as boss battles are the same, just with different dialogue, it can be confusing to try to keep up with any kind of a cohesive, canon plot since some of the stories have conflicting, contradictory elements with others. Eh, it's a Sonic game, so I won't rack my brain over it.
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| "Froggy?" No, this one's unfortunately a little too large, Big... |
When getting to the game itself, Sonic Heroes takes the formula and foundation of Sonic Adventure and its sequel and attempts to expand upon it. Innovative is the team-based mechanic, having players press one of the top face buttons to switch between the two other characters on the fly. Speaking of which, each of the characters in each trio conveniently enough has their own ability type. For instance, Sonic is speed-based, Tails is flying-based, and Knuckles is power-based. Thankfully, most of the guesswork is eliminated in needing knowledge for what character to use at a specific moment in a level, as helpful floating monitors with words like "Speed", "Fly" and "Power" readily indicate the best character type to utilize.
Speed characters like Sonic, Shadow, Amy Rose, and Espio have the fastest running capabilities, can generally homing attack from enemy to enemy, and also sport the ability to create a tornado, used to remove shields and other defenses from foes, as well as spin up special poles. Meanwhile, Flight characters like Tails, Rouge, Cream, and Charmy understandably can fly, though for limited amounts of time before running out of stamina, dropping to the ground without any momentum left over whatsoever (which screwed me over plenty of times), and can also throw their teammates at other enemies from afar. Lastly, Power characters in the vein of Knuckles, Omega, Big, and Vector are great for busting through walls, blocks, and swarms of shielded enemies with relative ease. You can also hold the jump button to have the characters tag up with a Power character to ride up wind shafts and hover across gaps.
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| The bigger they are, the more throws it takes from Vector to beat 'em. |
Throughout stages are colorful orbs, either in blue, yellow, or red quantities (for Speed, Fly, and Power characters respectively) that not only add to the player's score at the end of levels, but also boost that given character type's abilities. Throwing your teammates as Tails against foes generally just stuns the enemy, but getting two yellow orbs will level up Tails' throw to deal damage. Each enemy has a health gauge, showing a number beside it (its HP). Some foes, like more powerful baddies and also the godawful bosses, possess high HP, requiring you to whittle away at them. Usually best saved for a Power character.
Finally, as rings--the livelihood of all teams, as if they get hit with at least one ring stored, they won't die--are collected and enemies are vanquished, a gauge for screen-clearing attack using all three teammates known as a Team Blast fills up and can eventually be used. For each team, this Team Blast shows a unique animation as well as a bonus. For Team Rose, an activated Team Blast will give the team invincibility for several seconds, while Team Dark's Team Blast will freeze everything on screen, including the timer, while Shadow, Rouge, and Omega can run around freely during all this.
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| After seeing Team Blast animations like this one ad nauseum, I decidedly won't be checking out your record, Team Chaotix. |
Levels in Sonic Heroes essentially follow the classic 2D Sonic games approach in design. And I don't just mean in the "two acts per themed locale then a boss battle" approach, either. No, these levels tend to feature plenty of alternate paths, with the higher paths being the most challenging to stay on, but also the fastest way to skip parts of stages entirely. Not every level is full of these, with Rail Canyon, for instance, having a more linear design with less in the way of detours--but something like the opening Seaside Hill and Ocean Palace possess a plethora of paths to take and uncover.
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| ...And here we go! |
I feel the level design in Sonic Heroes is pretty commendable, honestly. There's lots of secrets, lots of hidden-away elements and pathways, and well thought-out concepts. Unfortunately, it's the actual gameplay that sort of betrays the competent level design. So many set pieces that are meant to be cool in both spectacle and fun, in theory, occasionally just don't play well in execution. Seemingly automated sections of stages more often than I'd care to have happen, resulted in my team jerking out of the path, falling into the abyss. Oh, and how each team seemingly LOVES to fall off levels. It's the number one way I died without question in Sonic Heroes. Between homing attacks that wouldn't register properly on enemies, the slippery feel of characters sliding off stages, and camera issues, deaths by pit was the number one way hedgehogs perished in 2003. ...I believe I remember seeing that statistic in National Geographic back in the day...
At any rate, the camera is a constant problem throughout the adventure, oftentimes resulting in less than ideal viewpoints. I felt like maybe one of the Eggrobos might have been controlling the camera as a means to mess my teams over, like a corrupted version of Lakitu in Super Mario 64. More of a hindrance than a help!
This extends to the absolutely awful boss battles that infest the game. Here, the boss is public enemy number two, right behind the camera and other gameplay quirks of Sonic Heroes. The hit detection is off the charts in being bad, homing attacks, and just any attack that hones in on a foe usually goes after the wrong target, oftentimes ending in a premature and anger-inducing death. Plenty of times I got stun-locked where my characters were flat on their backs, given just enough invincibility frames to stand up, and then get attacked again. This occurs especially in the "Team Battles" where two teams from the story take on each other. These basically end up being battles of mashing the attack buttons to win. It's random, sure, but so is actually attempting to play them seriously and how they're how ever "meant" to be played.
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| I'm having flashbacks of an unsettling variety just by glancing at this screenshot! |
While it can be tempting at first to play Sonic Heroes as a score attack game, earning coveted "A" ranks from scoring high, beating levels with a fast timer completion, all without dying--it's simply not worth the aggravation. You're playing a Russian Roulette of "which glitch or gameplay quirk will potentially screw over your run" each time you play a level or boss battle in Sonic Heroes. Seeing as stages, especially with Team Dark, can take upwards of ten minutes just to beat, it's just not something I want to do nowadays. In 2003, I do remember getting all emblems from beating every level, clearing every post-game challenge (like clearing levels in a limited amount of time as Team Sonic, or collecting a set amount of rings as Team Rose), and obtaining every score-based "A" rank, and all I got for it to my incredibly diminished excitement was a super hard mode and some lame competitive multiplayer options.
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| Each character type has a different formation the other team members get into. |
Outside of glitches both technical and in gameplay, Sonic Heroes remains a relatively good looking game to this day. The zones definitely have that Sonic feel and look to them--colorful, vibrant, and it's something I definitely appreciate--something much more than Sonic Frontiers' drab and dreary approach to its art style (not to say Frontiers is objectively bad there or as a game). Meanwhile, the soundtrack is full of awesome rock tunes, and honestly, even with the cheese factor dialed up to 11 with some of the lyrical tracks, Sonic Heroes remains one of my favorite Sonic soundtracks even in 2026. The voice acting and cutscene direction are all over the place, offering lots of characters enjoying talking over each other or not giving each other enough pauses, and the audio balance is up and down as well. It was standard fare for Sonic games of that era, for sure.
My fondness for Sonic the Hedgehog as a character and series remains to this day, despite replaying games like Sonic Heroes. Ideally, I would have started this celebration of Sonic's 35th anniversary on a higher note. Well, technically, I did with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds earlier in the month! That said, the positives about Sonic Heroes--the level design, the colorful visuals, and superb soundtrack--greatly are betrayed by the game's poor controls, obnoxious mission design with Team Chaotix, abhorrent boss battles, awful camera, and glitches aplenty. Even despite all of these negatives, I did enjoy rolling around at the speed of sound, flying high, and throwing my weight around with this cast of 12 playable characters. Does that make Sonic Heroes an enjoyable game overall? Absolutely not.
[SPC Says: D+]
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