21-Mar-2006 The spiky one's latest high speed adventure proves a touch deflating Speed has always played a major part in the Sonic games, but Sonic Riders has to be the fastest ever. Sit your aunt Mabel in front of this and she'll have one of her 'heads' coming on within 20 seconds.
To be quite honest, - and at the risk of sounding horrifically old - we found it a bit hard to keep up with too. It's the whole concept of Sonic Riders that eludes us. On the one hand you have a super-fast racing game with shades of WipEout and a dash of SSX, while on the other you have the childish Story mode that must be endured to unlock later tracks and characters. Even by Sonic's juvenile standards it's pretty infantile stuff, with perhaps the most credibilitystretching yarn about Chaos Emeralds yet.
But most annoying of all is Sonic Rider's ludicrously steep learning curve. It's like trying to climb Mount Everest while wearing boxing gloves. Put it this way: two or three hours of solid battering and we still weren't even close to placing in Sonic Rider's easiest Grand Prix, let alone winning it.
Frustratingly, it can all be traced back to a single, fundamental, game-ruining flaw. To get anywhere in Sonic Riders you need to use air to boost the speed of your board, but you only have a finite amount of this air. When you run out of air you're forced to scurry along on foot until you can grab a power up or spend some time refuelling at an air-replenishing pit stop. That's fine if you're leading - you just need a dab of air here and there to stay in front - but if you fall behind you use up air so quickly just trying to catch up that you invariably end up with an empty air tank (which in turn puts you even further behind). So the worse you do, the more you're punished and the harder it is to get back into the race. Then you end up so far behind that the only real course of action is to quit and start over.
It's a shame, because we wanted to like Sonic Riders. It looks really pretty, but it's too hard for kids, too childish for 'da yoof' and too much like a bad acid trip for anyone over 25. Even the most diehard Sega fan will find Sonic's latest a bitter slap in the chops.
PSW Staff
// Overview
Verdict
Fast and pretty, but Sonic Riders lacks any kind of enjoyable, approachable gameplay. Frustrating
due to fundamental gameplay flaws.
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