Shadow Generations Review

Shadow Generations was quite the surprise, it was already weird to see game journalists make glowingly positive reviews on a modern Sonic game but as a whole it turned out to be solid. I would myself to be a casual fan or indifferent regarding the series but Shadow Generations won me over. I won't be talking about the base covering Sonic Generations, I'll replay that some other time. I mainly wanted to play this for Shadows parts since that was the selling point of this version of Generations. I don't know much about Shadow himself other than he is Sonic's on again off again rival and often gets compared to Dragon Ball's Vegeta.

Anyways, Shadow Generations is much like the game it's based on, it's a collection of Shadows levels throughout his run over the years. It does seem like the game is trying to be the best of both worlds in that it wants to appeal to speedrunning fans of the older games and the story fans of the Adventure games and it sort of works even if feels like I need to have played his games over the years to understand him better.

You have the overworld of the game inspired by Sonic Frontiers and much like the base Generations game, you do the one level both in 2D and 3D, then you do the challenges to unlock keys for the boss fights to continue. One massive point to over the base game is that challenges are much easier and are over much quicker. I would not even remotely consider myself an expert Sonic or high speed platformer player but most of the challenges I did in my first try, some needing to replay. What is good is that they are over so quickly so with enough brute force it can be done. You also have no lives and there is infinite continues, thankfully.

What's great about Shadow Generations is that throughout the campaign you will get new abilties like being able to dash into an enemy, knock them into the air and dash out of it with Doom Blast, riding on water with Doom Surf, launching Choas Spheres with Doom Spheres, and Doom Wing that lets you fly. All these abilties get their fair use in the campaign even if I would've liked all of the levels to use them all at once but what's here is good. Choas Control freeze time ability I thought would've been a gimmick but I used a good number of times throughout the campaign. There is also the homing attack that is a staple of 3D Sonic games.

The 3D levels especially are more polished by comparison to the pure platforming levels of Frontiers. However towards the end of the game, the awkward buggy platforming that 3D Sonic can be known for did start to rear in. Sometimes the homing attack wouldn't work, there were platformers that moved upside down which like a game of luck to not fall off from, the pole swing felt like I got the timing right then it turned out I got it wrong. It really felt like much of the challenge from the last few levels can from unrefined controls, level design and gameplay mechanics.

Boss fights are okay, they seem to lean towards the specticle since however a big issue I did have was during the bosses that required you to launch projectiles to do damage is that you had to press the bumpers while Shadow is moving and there either is a 50-50 chance he will either take damage or it will hit the boss. They do have mid boss checkpoints thanfully so this cancels out. I did like the ridiculous nature of some of them coming from a "casual" fan, where you had to fight a giant biolizzard, the whole concept I couldn't help but find funny and it was played with a straight face which adds to it but in a charming way. The final boss having All Hail Shadow play in the background was also great since I enjoy Sonic music and All Hail Shadow is one of my favorite songs in the series.

The game also moves at a brisk pace, apart of me wanted it to be a little longer so the various abilties and level gimmicks got to shine more but even the length as isn't enough to detract, also with how unpolished the last level was, this might've been okay in the long run

Overall, for someone who teeters between being a casual fan or indifference regarding the Sonic franchise, Shadow Generations might be one of my favorite if not my favorite game in the series. Came in with low expectations and it was enjoyable despite not even knowing much about the character of Shadow himself.