A more detailed review of the Shadow demo by Sonic Cult:
In Westopolis, Shadow is joined by Sonic, who kind of follows you around (though it seems pretty easy to lose him) and reminds you not to kill humans. In the second stage I tried, it was Eggman (well, a flying monitor broadcasting Eggman's face), who followed you around pretty much telling you to destroy everything. But going with the whole theme of choosing whether Shadow is good or evil, you can kill whatever the hell you want. I think the type of enemy you kill determines whether you fill up your blue meter or red meter, which gives you a nice super powered Chaos form (making Shadow glow red or blue for a limited time). I guess the enemies are made up of humans, aliens, and robots. Some of the robots seem to be taken directly from Sonic Heroes, though now they drop their weapons when they die.
The gameplay was all right, but it still suffered from some of the loose controls that Sonic Heroes did. Not quite as bad, but still not nearly as tight as Sonic Adventure 2. The weapon thing worked out pretty well, though I still think Shadow looks fucking ridiculous holding these huge guns, many which are more than twice his size. It just looks kind of silly when he's holding them and then does the rolling-into-a-ball-thing to jump and the weapon is spinning around everywhere. The functionality was pretty good, though, and there was a decent bit of variety. And it seems you don't really have to use a weapon at all for most parts of the game, if you don't want to. Weapons are taken from defeated enemies. Just about every one dropped something, so there was always plenty to choose from. My favorite was one of the big-ass alien swords. You could swing it around and take out whatever's in your way. Baically, the G.U.N. army dropped realistic type weapons, the aliens dropped weird futuristic weapons, and Eggman's robots dropped big-ass lances and bazookas and the like.
I think there was some sort of goal ring that ended the stage. Like in previous 3D Sonic games, you receive a "grade" at the end depending on your performance. Again, the control could use some polish, but overall, it's looking pretty good.
When I played the game at the Nintendo booth, one of the Nintendo guys asked if I liked it. He said that the Sega guys kept coming over and asking what people thought of it. I pretty much just told him that I liked it but thought the controls could use some tightening. Yay for indirect feedback.
Esrever? You mean THAT Esrever, the one that went insane and decided from that point that all new Sonic games rock. Heh heh, one for my side... AHEM, yeah, I saw it happen too. Everyone did. It was like an explosion, the kind that shook the Earth, crumbled the largest mountains, wiped out civilizations like a freak sandstorm, and spawned new vegetation among every land in the aftermath. It was like thousands of ninjas flying in the air, slashing iron and spewing lasers from their supernatural opticals. Llamas jumping off cliffs in self-sacrafice. Radioactive meteorites crashing into the Earth and thus rising the now undead and enslaving the human populace, using the young as meat to feed to their man-eating pets.
