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Sonic the Hedgehog Game Review

Sonic the Hedgehog is a 1991 platform game published by Sega for Sega Genesis. It’s a classic, hugely influential game that started an entire long-lasting franchise.

It is about an anthropomorphic hedgehog named Sonic in a quest to defeat Dr. Robotnik, a scientist who has imprisoned animals in robots and stolen the powerful Chaos Emeralds. The plot is typically simplistic for the genre, but the personalities inhabiting this game are great and highly memorable, though the series here still had to wait for the arrival of Tails and Knuckles etc.

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Sonic is an instantly iconic character. It is absolutely fascinating reading the behind the scenes of creating this guy. Apparently, he was a mish-mash of many different ideas – the shoes were modeled after Michael Jackson’s shoes, the head is a mixture between Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat while the overall resemblance is to that of a hedgehog. The snarky facial expressions made him edgier than Mario and others, thus making him hugely popular among kids in the nineties.

Dr. Robotnik is also very memorable as this Egg Man type creature and all the other cute animals that are imprisoned are just adorable. The ‘Flicky’ reference was amazing for me as a fan of that eighties game. The animation and design of the characters are truly outstanding here while the graphics overall are terrific. The franchise would get better of course, but even in this first outing the colors are smooth, the background work is stellar and the game overall is very polished, not to mention groundbreaking for managing to execute Sonic’s immense speed so flawlessly.

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The score is also fantastic. That opening theme is clearly iconic as most gamers know it so well, but most of the stages themselves are beautifully composed and quite atmospheric. The game also runs smoothly, there are no bugs to speak of and the controls are intuitive and just perfect. The choice to have just one button for both jumping and hitting enemies was perfect as it made the game very easy to get into.

The game consists of six zones. All six have their standout elements, but clearly some are superior than others. The level design is widely uneven in this game, but mostly above average and often even excellent. Green Hill Zone is iconic in its music and it was present in so many games in their own variations afterward. I liked the greenery in these levels, but overall they were too easy to beat. The obstacles were better than the boss himself.

Marble Zone is very problematic. I loved those buildings in the background and the overall Ancient Greek-resembling architecture was lovely here. However, this level doesn’t really fit well within Sonic’s super speed gameplay mechanic as it did grind the gameplay to a halt with all those waiting for platforms etc. The lava was also overused. Again, visually it’s great and it is interesting, but too difficult and distracting to play.

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Spring Yard Zone is colorful and fun. It plays out very well in terms of difficulty as it isn’t too hard nor is it too easy and it benefits from a good use of jumping boards. Labyrinth Zone is very cool. The mechanic of sliding through watery platforms for so long led to a lot of innovative sections here and visually these levels are terrific.

Star Light Zone is amazing. It just might be the best zone of this game as it is the fastest and most entertaining of the bunch. The cosmic look to it was also very cool. The same goes for Scrap Brain Zone, but as was the case with parts of Labyrinth Zone, the underwater parts were too difficult. Basically, you have to catch these bubbles in order not to drown and the game demands that way too often, resulting in an overly stressful experience.

The Final Zone was weak and I found the final boss not all that difficult, which brings me to my main issue with this original Sonic the Hedgehog – the bosses are too easy. Dr. Robotnik surely is memorable, but he is too easy to beat and it doesn’t require that many replays to finish him off as I mostly ended up beating him in the first go. The bosses should be the hardest parts of platformers and not the easiest.

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The world building is fine, the levels are varied and their designs are mostly good. The ring system is not great as you lose rings when enemies hit you, but they serve as protection against most enemies and that was a very interesting, original mechanic that worked for me. I also loved the stages’ seemingly open structures as you have to go up, down, left, right instead of just right like in most side-scrolling platformers of the time. And simply the iconic speed of Sonic led to a unique, groundbreaking gameplay mechanic that is still cool to this day and age.