Mediocre Game X Key Cards Commiserations
Sonic X Shadow Generations Review and Why Nobody Is Buying Third-Party Games
It’s come out in the news and in the numbers recently that third party games aren’t selling that well on the Switch 2; in fact, it’s so bad that sales have been described as ‘below lowest estimates’ but this is not a sign of the console’s failure since the Switch 2 has become the fastest-selling ever. Now, I’ve been an early adopter of the Switch 2: I was lucky enough to secure a pre-order a few hours after the big Switch 2 Direct in April and I’ve also bought a couple of 3rd party games myself, so this article will be something of a double feature: I’m going to be reviewing Sonic X Shadows Generations for the Switch 2 but also having a bit of a bitch and moan about 3rd party releases on the console so far.
I hope you enjoy this review and that you find my points to be salient.
Codes, Keys and Crap
Nintendo is the most physically-leaning player base of the 3 big console brands, the Big Red stated back in April that, in Europe alone, 80% of its sales of new Switch games were physical, a huge amount in comparison to the PlayStation and Xbox player bases. This alone is a huge problem for third-party Switch 2 game sales.
Why? Because almost none of the third-party games released thus far have gotten true physical versions.
Off the top of my head, only Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition comes on a full Switch 2 cartridge (feel free to list more in the comments if you know any) virtually every other third party title is a code in a box or the absolutely feeble Game Key Card: a piece of useless plastic that contains no game data but must be plugged into your console for you to download the game and to access it from then on.
Nobody is buying third party titles for the Switch 2 because nobody is willing to pay for a fake physical copy of a game that (and I say this both as a PC gamer and a big Nintendo fan) in all likelihood won’t run as well as every other platform on the market; if I wanted to download all my games, I’d stick to Steam… which unless something changes is what I’ll be doing from now on for all 3rd party titles, which is a real shame because I like having my 2D games, indies and metroidvanias on the Switch.
Between Nintendo’s ‘our way or the highway’ approach to 3rd party publishers with the 64GB game cartridge being the only option for full-physical releases, the E-Shop’s discontinuation of 2 really neat money saving features: gold coins and game vouchers and recent updates to Mario Kart World’s online portion restricting player freedom, Nintendo’s dictatorial tendencies once again are proving to be a blight on the company this generation. Let’s hope that changes (it won’t.)
Now I’ve gotten this topic out of the way, let’s move on to the review portion of this article. I hope you enjoy and I sincerely apologise for the lack of game box pictures in my Switch 2 reviews so far, that will change with Donkey Kong Bananza but so far? Nintendo’s pack-in bundle and third party publishers have done everything in their power to make me buying physical games completely pointless.
A Long Awaited Return
It has been an extremely long time since I’ve played a new 3D Sonic game, or considered myself a fan of the franchise.
When I was a kid, I owned every Megadrive and Sonic compilation for the Gamecube and PS2 you could imagine, as well as most of the 3D games; I spent many a school night playing through the different endings of Shadow the Hedgehog, the separate campaigns on Sonic Heroes, the Adventure games as well as classic Sonic and a couple of the Saturn-era games too. To this day, I still have a great fondness for these games and despite its age, I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Sonic Adventure on the Dreamcast not too long ago.
Around the middle of the 2000’s, at the height of my Sonic fever a little game called Sonic the Hedgehog was announced, commonly known as Sonic ‘06. It was only launching for the, then next-generation Xbox 360 and PS3 but I was desperate to have it and begged for the console all year.
I think you know where this is going.
To put it very mildly, Sonic 06 is not a very good game and even as a kid… I could really feel it. It took ages to load, was full of glitches and was just plain unfun which led to me playing Viva Pinata far more than the game I’d actually wanted and then eventually the console getting sold because I returned to the previous generation for a few more years. At this point, I still considered myself a Sonic fan but my love for the blue blur and his cast of horrifyingly anthropomorphic friends had taken a bit of a hit.
Over time, my love for the franchise would fade. I got a copy of Sonic Unleashed for Christmas on my PS2 and I think I managed about 1 level before I turned it off and to this day, it sits un-played in my collection; Sonic and the Black Knight on our living room Wii didn’t fare much better either. So, by the time I hit 10 years old and started to properly form my own opinions on video games, I’d left Sonic behind as something I’d grown out of, that just wasn’t good anymore… or perhaps never was.
This all changed in late-2022.
My mum’s favourite game had always been Sonic the Hedgehog, for Christmas I invested in a Megadrive, an HDMI converter and a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and 2 for the living room. I don’t know if it was the alcohol, the Christmas cheer or the innate, pure fun of passing the controller between loved ones on the sofa but I realised how much I’d been missing Sonic all these years and decided to grab Sonic Mania too and what a game that was! A modern Sonic that was actually good? Unbelievable.
To cut a long story short, I’ve spent the past couple of years slowly re-introducing Sonic into my gaming diet, Sonic Superstars was disappointing but not long after, we got trailers for Sonic X Shadow Generations, a game seemingly engineered to tap into my own personal nostalgia; Shadow the Hedgehog is a game I unironically love and hold a load of nostalgia for, so to see everyone’s favourite ‘edgehog star in his own game again was awesome, it only took me this long to play it because I was waiting for a Switch 2 version, it seems only right to play Sonic games on Nintendo: their biggest frenemies.
But why tell you my life story? Well, I find that these days the Sonic fandom has a bit of a reputation, both for debauchery with Rouge the Bat and for being quite insular, so I wanted to detail some of my relationship with the franchise and explain that while I generally enjoy Sonic, I’m not really a fan of the franchise, more of an outsider at this point.
Ying-hog and Yang-hog
Sonic X Shadow Generations is 2 games in one: a remaster of 2011’s Sonic Generations, which I hadn’t played up until this point and the new Shadow Generations which is a smaller, more refined side-campaign. The package has been compared to Super Mario 3D World and Bowser’s Fury but those games look and feel a lot more different than these 2, so I’d say a more apt comparison is a supermarket sandwich: it’s essentially the same meal, except one of them has stale bread, no butter and a glob of spit within.
There we are.
For all of Sega’s posturing about these being two separate games, besides Shadow getting weird alien tentacle powers, a 3D level hub that plays better than the actual stages and a plot that runs alongside the original generations, Shadow Gens. essentially plays the same as the previous game… including all of its flaws.
A common complaint I see about Sonic Generations is that the 2.5D stages suck, well, Sega listened, they thought hard on the issue… and did nothing about it.
Sonic Generations’ plot (if it can even be called that) revolves around young, Megadrive-era Sonic and modern Sonic teaming up to defeat the villain… whose name I’ve forgotten; it looks like a big purply-black cloud and is messing with the timeline. In practice? It’s more like Sonic’s ADHD and Sonic’s Autism teaming up because Megadrive-era Sonic is non-verbal and unable to read social cues while modern Sonic is his nauseating, over-enthusiastic self. This 2 timelines theme justifies the 2.5D stages and the 3D stages existing together. Shadow Gens. also has these 2.5D stages and they’re better than in Sonic Generations.
I’m going to be a contrarian and say I actually don’t mind these 2D stages at all. The Sonic Team gameplay and level design hallmarks are all there: the shitty, stubby jump, the spin dash randomly not working sometimes and the enemy placements that are impossible to avoid without clairvoyance or fighter pilot reflexes but apart from the last couple of stages in Sonic Generations? I’ve found them all perfectly playable and didn’t mind running through again to S-rank them. Nothing special but perfectly playable.
What really grinds my gears though and makes the entire pair of games intolerable for more than 90 minute sessions for me is the fact that they control like complete shit and are truly unpleasant on the hands; again, Shadow Gens. suffers from this less but it’s not a problem that gets completely fixed.
For a start, this game just loves dropping your inputs. Time and time again my S-rank runs of a stage were ruined because I tapped jump and Sonic just… didn’t. Fearing for my Joy-Con 2’s (which at this point have endured almost 40 hours of Mario Kart World) I looked up the issue and found that it wasn’t in my head, this is just something the game likes to do. Also not helping is the fact that the camera is both zoomed in too far in 2D stages and completely uncontrollable by the player; Sonic X Shadow Generations apart from in Shadow’s hub world, has less camera control than Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast, even in 3D stages. This lack of control and visibility makes avoiding obstacles a real issue sometimes and combined with the temperamental homing attack (which sometimes misses for no reason, or overshoots, sending you hurtling into the abyss) it can make hitting enemies that you’ve run past already, which is something you will need to do occasionally to unlock the path forward, a pain in the ass.
3D Stages play a little bit like Temple Run or Subway Surfers (I can’t believe I just made that comparison in a review.) Sonic/Shadow are driven forward and side to side by the player with the camera fixed behind you, as well as the usual high = fast and low = slow Sonic level design this also enables a 3 lane structure but generally? 2 of the paths will be identical and the 3rd will be more difficult to get on but objectively the fastest. Once again, I actually enjoy this level design but it’s ruined by how bad the game controls. By holding the right trigger, the player can use a boost that drastically increases Sonic/Shadow’s speed and if you want to S rank levels, you should be holding this down as much as possible. The trouble with this is that you boost in the direction Sonic or Shadow is facing not in the direction of the camera and in Sonic Generations specifically it’s gruellingly difficult to turn away from obstacles while boosting, so you quite often go face first into hazards or unintentionally fling yourself off of the stage and die; the need to hold down the right trigger with Shadow to boost, along with the frequent use of the left trigger to freeze time with Chaos Control and the use of the left and right bumpers to swap between grind rails in 3D stages means you spend entire levels crab-clawing your gamepad and it just is not comfortable.
I thought this fun wings power-up might have been a permanent addition to the arsenal but it was use din one stage and has vanished for the rest of the game since.
Aliased Hill Zone
I would describe the presentation of Sonic X Shadow as decent but never going above and beyond; like most Sonic games, it’s pleasant to look at but has a distinctly budget feel.
The Sonic portion of the game is quite clearly a polished version of a 2011 title but it runs at a flawless 60FPS in both handheld and docked; at 1440p on my monitor, the resolution boost, framerate, colourful art-style and just the fact that graphics from 2011 don’t look that dated anyway means that Sonic Generations is relatively pleasing to look at and doesn’t look out of place compared to the rest of my library.
The Shadow half of the game is where things get more interesting. As it was built from the ground up for current generation systems and with refined gameplay, the ceiling for graphics is a lot higher, so you get to choose between a crusty framerate at 1440p resolution or 60FPS and it looking slightly better than a Switch 1 game. I chose the latter and I have to say… I’m no programmer or game developer but I don’t see why the whole game couldn’t have been running at 60FPS. I don’t own the game for Switch 2 (I have it on PC and just couldn’t get into it) but Cyberpunk 2077 supposedly runs at 40FPS at 1440p on Switch 2 and that game is a hell lot more demanding than Shadow Generations is: its levels don’t look or feel that much more complex than the ones in Sonic Generations, not only that but the textures are quite muddy anyway, it looks pretty similar to Monster Hunter Rise on the original Switch to my eye, I’d imagine with some more time to optimise (or a company that made more than a handful of good games since the late 90’s) they could have gotten it to work.
A persistent issue with modern Nintendo graphics though is the lack of anti-aliasing. I know people don’t like a lot of technical jargon so I’ll explain quickly but I guarantee even if you’re not familiar with the term, you’ll know what I mean. Anti-aliasing is there to make lines and edges: especially those that are curved or diagonal where aliasing is more noticeable, look less ‘jagged’ or ‘stepped.’
Not my image.
Sonic X Shadow falls victim to this too, in fact, it has some of the worst aliasing I’ve seen on either Nintendo Switch console, so areas with a lot of shadow like the White Space Hub look particularly rough in this game.
On a more positive note, as usual, the music in Sonic X Shadow is top-notch, replete with remixes of classic tracks and some new ones too. It was an awesome surprise to hear the riff from I Am… All Of Me: the main theme of Shadow the Hedgehog on the title screen. Sound quality is great too with no audible compression, though I’m not a sound technician so maybe somebody with better headphones or a more keen ear could pick out some faults.
If you look closely, you’ll see some pretty nasty aliasing, particularly around Shadow’s spines, legs and the railings between the pillars, this is much more noticeable in the game itself and gives everything a rough, dated look.
Open Your Wallet
I’ve not been kind to Sonic X Shadow Generations in this review and a big part of that is because… I just don’t think it’s really worth the price I paid for it.
On top of it being a Game Key Card release, meaning I chose to download it instead and don’t even get the posterity of having it on a shelf or the justification of paying manufacturing costs, I’ve put just about 10 hours into the game and have finished Sonic Generations and am halfway through Shadow Generations; for £45 I really expect more. Sonic Generations’ dated controls meant I enjoyed maybe 4 of the 9 main stages in that game and while I find Shadow Generations much more enjoyable, with Kingdom Valley being a stage I thought was awesome, the fact that 80% of the runtime is bulked out by these really crap challenges (and that Shadow Generations is maybe 40% of this overall package) to earn collectibles and unlock the boss fights rather than by actual stages makes most of the game feel like filler; Sonic X Shadow Generations is the smash burger of gaming: the meaty, good stuff is flattened and obliterated until it’s a small portion of the overall dish with all the stuff you don’t care about layered on top. Why do these games have unlockable skills and powers? None of them feel that fun to use.
Sonic to me was about high-speed, momentum-based gameplay, layered level design with the occasional railroaded loop de loop, spring sequence and with some great boss fights sprinkled in, was that just not fun for some people?
The Gilded Age Cage
The persistent feeling I get with this franchise is that of midlife crisis.
Those classic 2D Sonic games: the first 3 plus Sonic and Knuckles along with Sonic CD were as good as it gets and during that era the Blue Hedgehog was every bit as good as the Red Plumber and even better in some ways, particularly if we’re talking about graphics and music. The difference between Sonic and his old rival is that Nintendo had the balls to risk it all in the name of innovation; Sonic Adventure was a faithful adaptation of 2D Sonic into 3D while Super Mario 64’s gameplay shares virtually nothing in common with Super Mario World but virtually everyone remembers Mario 64 better because they managed to reinvent the game in a way that felt authentic to the IP.
Sonic is stuck clinging to a legacy that has been undermined so badly, most non-retro gamers consider even classic Sonic to have been a flash in the pan. They tried to bring the Blue Blur to 3D, met with some resistance and then kept making drastic changes to the formula before appealing to nostalgia.
How many more games are we going to get where we replay Green Hill or Emerald Hill Zone? How many more games are we going to get like Sonic Mania, like Sonic Superstars, like Sonic X Shadow Generations where the whole thing is build to self-fellatiate Sonic Team and hearken back to better days? If playing this game has done one thing it’s convinced me to buy Sonic Frontiers because even if it was awarded 7’s by the entirety of the gaming press, I at least want to support the franchise turning away from doing the same damn thing over and over again.
I really don’t understand these game key cards, why would anyone buy one of these? Just download the game instead. Beyond their pointless existence, it seems very thoughtless (bordering on criminal) of Nintendo to be adding to the world’s plastic epidemic problem with this industrially produced plastic junk and not something that should be supported.
I read an interesting piece, I forget where unfortunately, positing that the Switch 2 will be the last great physical collectors platform. Purely from the standpoint of collecting the physical OG Switch games.
I'm still baffled for both this game's performance and the whole key card philosophy adopted by Nintendo. Everything is still gearing me towards not adopting the Switch 2 during this first year and stick with other platforms, unless DK Bananza proves to be a must buy and there's a major Mario and Zelda on the horizon... which proves your point that 3rd party games on Switch 2 are in trouble.
Anyway, great read! I really enjoyed how you connected your review with the key card subject. Keep up the good work!