// View: Sonic Rush Adventure (NintendoDS)

Let’s start with the obvious here: since the brilliant original quintet (1, 2, 3, CD, & Knuckles), the spiky blue one has had a terrible time of it. A few decent efforts launched to 8-Bit (as the formats died off) never really garnered the attention they deserved, and after that…eurgh.

Awful game after awful game followed these glory years (as a depressing aside: it’s 17 years since the original. There are now adult gamers with no recollection of Sonics’ Mega Drive debut), with the actual business of being Sonic and running really frigging fast becoming a secondary concern next to bloating the character roster with horrible creations and truly horrific voice acting. Less time platforming and more time walking, slowly, between ear-bleedingly poor cut-scenes. Sonic, once a platforming brand in astronomical credit with gamers, found itself bankrupt.

And that was that. All seemed lost, until the excellent Sonic Rush was released in 2005. Received with genuinely warm acclaim from critics and gamers alike, it showed that keeping things simple, bringing the character back to his 2-Dimensional roots was A Very Good Thing Indeed – as it is here in the sequel, Sonic Rush Adventure.

Now don’t be frightened – as much as you may be put off by the ‘Adventure’ suffix, SRA doesn’t go the way of the Dreamcast title of similar name; a vast majority of your time in-game is spent a) being Sonic and b) running really frigging fast. Cut-scenes break up the action, and are certainly at points long-winded enough to make you nervous, particularly when they deal with such a typically asinine story about magic crystals and parallel dimensions and blahblahblah. (Featuring, unforgivably, Robot Pirates that are, somehow, dull.)

But aside from this perverse desire to wallow in it’s own rubbish, Sonic Rush Adventure is a good game, and almost a great one. The tweaks made to the dual-screen Rush formula are welcome; the reduction in the number of infinite death-drops and better thought out enemy placement being the most immediately welcome (no more springs propelling across 4 screens straight to unavoidable doom!), perfectly complimenting the speedy play encouraged by the once-again excellent level design.

Outside of the traditional levels, you’ll encounter the biggest, and best, addition to the series, the sea-faring mini-games. Similar to the Phantom Hourglass, you plot your journey from island to island with the stylus before heading out on one of a few vehicles (starting with a simple jet-ski, but further craft are unlocked as the game progresses), avoiding, attacking and racing enemies while dodging mines and stocking up on rings. It’s simple, fun stuff, and unlike the main game, bears up to repeat play reasonably well, even if the journeys themselves can feel a forced; travelling back to take on a level you’ve just completed happens a little too often. That said, these are a great throwback to Sonic 2’s tunnel-chasing Special Stages. Each craft has it’s own touch-controls, with boosts, stunts and firing all intuitively controlled through responsive gestures and taps.

Sonic himself controls excellently; the nicely-thought out stunt system being retained from the previous game allowing you to gain that extra few feet on spring-jumps, and thus facilitating exploration of the vast-but-tight environments. It’s a pleasure to move Sonic around the various levels – which is only too well when you’ve had to play the same stage 3 or 4 times as you collect various odds and ends to progress the plot. Advance warning: this does mean you’ll be playing a few maps as…*shudder*…Blaze. Yup, the single worst thing from the original Rush makes a reappearance here, upsetting the rhythm and generally making things less enjoyable in a way veterans of the series will be familiar with. While the time spent in control of the Cat is mercifully short these, and the time spent ‘adventuring’ will likely be the low points of your adventure.

So it’s not perfect; the series’ stubborn refusal to utterly shed the much-maligned conventions adopted by recent iterations is continued – albeit it to a lesser extent – here. This unwillingness, unfortunately, means I can’t recommend it as wholeheartedly as I would like to. Let’s face it though, recovery from the lengthy and disfiguring condition Sonic has was always going to be a lengthy process – and it’s always going to leave a few scars.