E3 2003: Sonic Battle Hands-On

With all the console Sonic goodness appearing at the show, the Gameboy Advance recieved not one but two Sonic titles. Impressions and new screens inside.

Sonic Battle, as the name implies pits some of the characters from the Sonic games against each other in an all out melee that's sort of reminiscent of the Smash Brothers games.

In Sonic Battle, players select from characters including Sonic, Miles, Knuckles, and Evil Sonic and battle it out in an almost isometric style playing field against three opponents at the same time. The object of the game being that the first 10 KOs in two minutes wins, so you'll have to focus on knocking down your opponents as much as possible in this all out brawl and avoid being knocked off your feet as much as possible.

The action is very fast, sometimes a bit too annoyingly fast that it makes it difficult to keep track of the tiny sized characters and the moves they perform. Even with the image blown up on a decent sized TV screen the characters were still quite small, making a need to play the Gameboy Advance with a microscope. The character move set seemed to be quite limited to just a few overly simplistic moves that could be easily triggered by repeatedly tapping a single button to victory. Hopefully that was just in the E3 build and the final version will make for a more challenging and intense game.

The graphics were average at best and the sounds were pretty simplistic and generic sounding for the most part.

But despite the minor complaints about the game, it was still was fun enough to warrant a complete play through several rounds. The balance of the characters also needs to be addressed as I found myself playing as MILES throughout the game and winning all of the battles without much effort at all while using the same move over and over again.

I can only hope the final version will contain plenty more characters than what was available at the show. I'd love to see Amy and E-102 get in on the action as well as Dr. Eggman.

Look for Sonic Battle to grace your Gameboy Advances sometime this year. We'll have more coverage on this, er, when we have it.

Joseph Jackson
Staff writer, Kikizo Games