Second time’s the charm - Sonic Adventure 2: Battle Review

Developer: Sonic Team | Platform: PC | Playtime: 9:10 (4:45/4:10/0:20)

This is Review #3 of the ‘Summer to Summer Sonic’ special on the site where I play each of the mainline Sonic titles for the first time. Previous review was for Sonic Adventures DX, which can be read here:

Moderate to major gameplay SPOILERS follow. Reader discretion is advised.

Any good self respecting sequel primarily needs to improve upon the elements of the previous title before it can afford to do anything else. Sonic Adventures was fun but had a lot of bloat and jank. Sonic Adventure 2 manages to fix vast swathes of these problems though it isn’t perfect.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing the plot of the game because if your copy is like mine, I’m pretty sure it skipped the opening cutscene and dialogue crawl. In short, Dr Eggman has found his grandfathers old research with government agency G.U.N and the ultimate weapon - a black hedgehog called Shadow. Yep, this is the Shadow introduction game. G.U.N mistakes Sonic for Shadow so the plot revolves around Sonic stopping Eggman and Shadow while avoiding G.U.N. That’s probably a more charitable reading than most, it’s a Sonic game you go from A-B as fast as you can.

The main changes between the games is how the levels are sorted and goodness me is it welcome. Instead of having a two prong sandbox that connects levels, they’re now just accessed in a linear order. Instead of having six different campaigns, there’s now only two with multiple characters in each. In any other game or scenario this may be seen as a negative but here it’s quite the godsend.

Each of the campaigns - Team Hero and Team Dark have three gameplay styles - the regular Sonic A-B like levels, levels where you pilot a mech suit and the return of the Chaos Emerald shard hunting. These are Sonic, Tails and Knuckles for Team Hero and then Shadow, Eggman and other newcomer Rouge the Bat for Team Dark. Sonic stages are great, feel like they’re better than Adventures, the mech stages are fine - a bit mindless but passable. The hunting stages though, I don’t know what happened here I really don’t. In Adventures I found them okay enough, maybe even enjoying them. Here - I don’t know if the stages are too big or there’s too many options for spawns or what but these easily proved to be the most frustrating of all the stages.

The levels progress in a different order between campaigns much like Adventures but this time the stages within the same themes do feel different to one another, meaning you’re not seeing the same section of Twinkle Park 4 odd times as you would previously.

Twice doesn’t make a tradition but just like the first game, completion of both storyline unlocks the third campaign complete with true ending. I mentioned in my review for Adventure that while Perfect Chaos had a sick design, I didn’t actually beat the boss instead just watching the ending on YouTube. This time, I did the same thing - there was a level beforehand so I didn’t even get to the boss. Just kind of lost interest by the end.

As for the extra content, I once again didn’t really engage. My excuse for Adventure was that I played it over the course of three months which doesn’t really apply here as I managed to finish Adventure 2 over the course of a week or so on my Steam Deck. The nature of this series and catching up with the franchise means I’ve only really got time to do the basic stuff. That means once again no Chao Garden and specifically for this game, no Vs mode stuff (Not that I have a second person to do it anyways).

Better than the first, not that that’s saying much. Still incredibly janky with it’s dodgy physics, the series is trending positively. Next up is Heroes, the one I have played that is also janky. Summer to Summer of Sonic continues in January 2025 with Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog.