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Dom Robinson reviews
For
Distributed by
Sega 
Frustration comes in many forms: too muchtraffic on the motorway, that blonde in the nightclub who fancies your mateinstead and now, Sonic Shuffle.
The idea behind the game is that Illumina, the Guardian Angel, needs the helpof you and your fellow Sonic-related friends, Tails, Amy and Knuckles to namebut three, in recovering “Precioustones”,powerful crystals made from the hopes and dreams of people from every dimension.If you can do this, you’ll all help save the land of Maginary Whirl.
What this actually means is that you take it in turns to move around one of fiveplaying boards, choosing cards to select the number of moves to make instead of rollinga dice, then heading for the stones and fighting bad guys when you get therein a turn-based system. Kill the baddie and you get the stone. Don’t kill himand he’ll whack you into oblivion causing you to lose all your rings.
Mini Games appear from time to time, with 49 in total, such as “Great Escape”, in which you mustall proceed to an exit, in the dark, along a Chu Chu Rocket-styleboard, before Eggman’s bomb blows up the building.
The graphics do look damn good and colourful when the board’s in play, butthey’re not particularly stretching the Dreamcast’s capabilities. One thing thataides them is the black outlines drawn around each character a laJet Set Radio,but on the whole it feels like a futuristic Ludo board.
A plinky plonky soundtrack carries on along in the background, accompaniedby all manner of cartoon-like sound FX, plus mixed reactions from yourselfand your cohorts when they either succeed or fail.
It’s easy enough to move around the board, but was Sonic Shuffle thekind of game your Dreamcast was invented for? It’s not so much a ‘board game’as a ‘bored game’, as you’ll find out after playing it for any longer thanhalf-an-hour as your interest begins to wane because it’s too bizarreto make any sense and isn’t half as much fun to play as a regular Sonicthe Hedgehog game.
Overall, this is Sonic-lite. When the developers created this it must havebeen something that was more of an afterthought tied onto an existing franchiseas opposed to something that demanded a full-priced game release.
Try before you buy, is the phrase here. If you enjoy it, it’d be worth£20, but not twice that by anyone’s stretch of the imagination.
SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC
PLAYABILITY
ORIGINALITY
ENJOYMENT
OVERALL
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.