Sonic Heroes (2003): The Review

Overview

Sonic Heroes is a beautiful, chaotic, nostalgia-powered rush weighed down by a cursed camera and a few technical hiccups known from the old days. If you love Sonic, it's a blast from start to finish. If you don’t, this might be able to convert you.

Score: 7.5 out of 10

The Positives ✅

Sonic Heroes is the closest the 3D series had come (at the time) to remembering what made Sonic Sonic. Speed isn’t just present, it’s the star. Loop-de-loops, corkscrews, casino pinball chaos, and rail-grinding sections that feel like your controller might achieve lift-off, this is the Sonic rollercoaster fans had been begging for since the Dreamcast era. Casino Park alone is worth a ticket: a full-on neon torture chamber of bumpers, flippers, and physics that barely follow the Geneva Convention.

Even better, levels are shockingly replayable thanks to the four team campaigns, each with different difficulty spreads. Team Rose is basically “Sonic with training wheels,” Team Dark is for players who want a bit more of a challenge, Team Sonic is the default middle lane, and Team Chaotix is… side quests from tax hell, but credit where it's due: it’s variety. The campaign structure gives players a legitimate reason to come back afterward, not just stretch a short runtime.

And yes, let’s talk visuals: Sonic Team absolutely nailed the aesthetic. The saturated colors, the shimmering water, Green Hill’s familiar checkerboard DNA, it all looks fantastic running at a silky 60 FPS in single-player. Character models are clean, animations are buttery smooth, and the entire vibe screams Dreamcast-but-better in the most affectionate way possible. It’s pure, unapologetic Sega energy: loud, bright, and proud.

Finally, the Team mechanic deserves credit. Switching between Speed, Flight, and Power on the fly is intuitive and adds tactical depth. Sonic can tornado enemies, Tails can throw teammates like emotionally unstable Pokémon, and Knuckles does his best impression of a red bowling ball with fists. It’s goofy, but it works.

The Negatives ⚠️

Now, the part where we pretend to be surprised: the camera is once again a demon from the seventh circle of platforming hell. As long as you’re moving at 300 km/h, the camera behaves. But the moment you slow down, engage in combat, or breathe incorrectly, it starts framing the action like it’s filming a low-budget documentary about walls. It blocks your view, it misreads direction, it occasionally decides that you, the player, no longer deserve rights. Classic Sonic Team energy.

And while the team-switching mechanic is a great idea, Heroes holds your hand so much it may as well play the game for me. Every obstacle has a giant sign telling you exactly which teammate to use. Speed here. Strength there. Flight above. The fun evaporates when the game refuses to let players experiment.

Multiplayer? Performance dives harder than Shadow into existential crisis. Split-screen drops the fps from 60 to “PowerPoint Presentation.” Sure, it has races and battle modes, but if your game starts running like the world’s worst slideshow, it kills the hype pretty fast.

And we need to talk about the audio. The soundtrack channels 80s Saturday-morning-cartoon energy in the most gloriously cheesy way, which is fun, but the voice acting? No. Absolutely not. The cast sounds like they recorded their lines between bites of a ham sandwich. The advice is simple: cutscenes = volume down.

The Experience 🎮

Here’s the thing: Sonic Heroes is flawed, loud, occasionally broken, and often ridiculous, and yet, it’s fun. When the game is moving at full velocity, it is the closest the franchise had come (in its time) to capturing the original 2D thrill. Those moments where you’re rail-grinding at light speed, thrown into the air, smashing through a line of enemies, bouncing like a sentient pinball… that’s the good stuff. That’s the “I’m 10 years old again and life hasn’t crushed me yet” magic.

But you will also spend time wrestling the camera, redoing cheap falls, and yelling “WHY DID YOU NOT JUMP, SONIC?” at a fictional blue mammal. Heroes is a contradiction: immensely enjoyable when it works, infuriating when it doesn’t, and unforgettable either way.

It’s a perfect example of a game where the highs are insanely high, and the lows? Well, let’s just say Big the Cat is here and leave it at that.

At its best, Sonic Heroes is a bright, blazing theme-park ride that never slows down long enough to doubt itself. At its messiest, it's a reminder that 3D Sonic has always lived on the knife edge between “masterpiece” and “bug-induced migraine.” It is, in short, pure Sonic.