Sonic Adventure DX Director's Cut (GameCube)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.7 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Giancarlo Varanini
• Reviewed on: 06/23/2003
• Released on: 06/18/2003
• Originally published on GameSpot: Sonic Adventure DX Director's Cut (GameCube) Review

Sonic Adventure DX is essentially a port of the original Sonic Adventure, which launched alongside the Dreamcast in September 1999, but Sonic Team has thrown in a few extras to entice those who played the Dreamcast version and to extend the replay value of the game as a whole. Unfortunately, if you've already played the Dreamcast version, these extras definitely aren't worth your money. For everyone else, Sonic Adventure definitely has its moments, and some aspects of the game have held up reasonably well over the years, but it still has its fair share of problems, ranging from an unstable frame rate to some inconsistent collision detection.

Sonic Adventure DX is structured a little differently than its sequel, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, in that there's a hub area that Sonic and the other characters in the game have to find their way through to access the actual levels. The portions of the game that focus on this hub area seem a little pointless at times, particularly when all you have to do is take a key from one location to another, but most of the time it simply functions as a tool for advancing the plot.

In the beginning of the game, you can play only as Sonic, but whenever you meet a new character--such as Tails, Knuckles, Amy, E-102, or Big--you can start playing as that character in a series of separate missions. It's worth pointing out that some of these missions overlap, and some are nearly identical to the ones found in Sonic's portion of the game. However, some of them are vastly different, such as Big's missions, which have the enormous purple-and-blue-striped cat attempting to capture his pet frog. E-102 offers a slightly different pace as well, since he's a relatively slow-moving robot equipped with a cannon for destroying various types of targets. Tails' missions will have him racing against Sonic, while Knuckles will have to retrieve pieces of the chaos emeralds. In any case, the missions featuring the secondary characters aren't as entertaining as the ones that feature Sonic, but you'll have to play through them if you want to unlock the last level and the game's real ending.

While that was pretty much the only incentive for playing through all the levels in the Dreamcast version, Sonic Adventure DX attempts to add more motivation by throwing in some Game Gear Sonic games that can be unlocked by acquiring Sonic emblems. You can get these emblems by performing well in individual levels, or by simply searching for them in various parts of the game. It's a nice extra to have initially, but once you realize that most of the Sonic Game Gear games weren't all that great to begin with--and that some of them actually have some slowdown issues--your interest in collecting enough emblems to unlock all of them will diminish.

In addition to the main game and the Game Gear unlockables, Sonic Adventure DX offers a mission mode where you can venture around the city and temple areas in an attempt to complete a series of relatively minor missions. For example, in one of Sonic's missions, all you have to do is find a particular man standing in front of a hamburger shop in one part of the city and then bring him over to the train station. It probably wasn't the wisest decision to design an extra mode around the worst part of the original Sonic Adventure, but if you're absolutely intent on spending more time with Sonic Adventure after you've defeated the last boss and raised a chao (the Pokémon-like creatures in the game) or two, then this mode might be worthwhile.

It's strange that Sonic Adventure DX offers this additional content, considering that the developers really didn't put all that much effort into fixing the problems with the main game. Interestingly, the frame rate has been cranked up to 60 frames per second, and while that might sound like a good thing, it has only made the frame rate drops that much more noticeable than they were in the Dreamcast version of the game. The game slows down quite a bit--particularly when you're trying to move at higher speeds in Sonic's levels--which is totally unacceptable, considering that this game was released almost four years ago.

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