Sonic Rush Review

Forget the fact that it's using both screens. While you'll have to switch your focus from one to the other occasionally when the game moves you up or down, there's very little distinct benefit. From time to time, you'll find yourself on a rising platform and the top-screen will show you the switch you'll need to hop off and press before hopping back on, but it's rarely more complicated than that.

Giant golden snakes: why not?

Forget newcomer Blaze the Cat too. She doesn't really do anything hugely different to Sonic, despite taking things on in a different order.

And forget the allusions to the DS's greater graphical might. The 3d elements are superficial, and when they actually affect gameplay only really introduce a Final Fight level of world depth.

Nope - what makes Sonic Rush so good is that the devs, the chaps who did the Sonic Advance games on GBA, seem to have a lot of good ideas for things Sonic could be doing above and beyond what he did on the Megadrive. (Unlike SEGA itself, judging by the last few 3d efforts.)

There's a Super Boost button ("Rush", surely?), which propels Sonic forward at super speed, enveloped in blue flame, and with enough force to clobber any enemy and bash through obstacles. Super Boost is built up in a meter on the left of the screen, which is fuelled by the slaying of your robot foes, and the performing of tricks whilst in mid-air. Tricks? Yes - arguably a bit silly, but a good thing to remember. And learning when to use Super Boost, whipping it out just in time to clobber an enemy instead of dropping most of your accumulated rings (the only other barrier to one-hit-kills, lest anyone forget), is a rewarding feeling.

Really though, even that... For all the new stuff you can do in Sonic Rush, it's the way the old stuff's done that satisfies most. The levels that mix precise, timed platforming and rudimentary puzzle-solving. The use of common level elements in greater concert and with variation. Overcoming this stuff consumes you in the way that good platform games should.

Example: In one level, you hit a switch to activate a moving platform and then ride it to the other side of a pit. You also hit a switch to briefly activate greyed-out platforms to hop between and rails to grind. Later, you do all of this while dodging enemies. Later-later, you do these things in combination. And so on. All the while you are sprinting very fast between each bit, riding ramps, dodging stuff and generally doing what Sonic does in colourful, imaginatively drawn environments.

We'd throw ourselves off a ledge if Tails was our best friend, too.

If you list this stuff bit by bit it sounds tedious - moving platforms, switch-platforms, trapeze-swinging, bounce-pads, rooms of enemies. So too do the environments - grass level, water level, carnival level. But it's fast and energetic and the controls are simple and responsive, it makes good use of all your available skills in the right ways, and it presents layered levels that reveal their secrets in the face of intuition, KGB-level reactions and a decent memory. With the boost and tricks making an appreciable, if not exactly zeitgeist-redefining difference to the proceedings.

Oh, and despite a few insta-deaths, the bosses are actually very well designed, and actually capable of surprising you on second attempts by wheeling out new attack patterns to keep you on your toes.

It's a good Sonic game. Probably the best 2d one since the olden days.