There’s not much to say about this game that hasn’t been said already, so I’ll give more of a personal look into my experience with Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), arguably for most the worst game in the franchise.

First off, Sonic ’06 is legitimately the slowest loading game I have ever played. In one of the town missions, it takes non-playable characters multiple screens of usually poorly written dialogue and on average two loading screens to even get the chance to play the mission.

And of course, if you fail (usually to the fault of the game being finicky and slow rather than the player’s abilities), you have to sit through a total of three more loading screens to restart, the first one being the one that takes you out of the failed mission and back into the soulless hub world of Soleanna. Each loading screen feels like it takes at least 20 seconds too.

And that takes me to how ugly and lifeless Soleanna (the main area of the game) really is. Instead of starting off with the generic first level in this Sonic game (you know, like how most of them begin), and in this game’s case being Wave Ocean, you start off playing as a weirdly slippery Sonic in those terrible town missions and by talking to the ugliest non-playable characters I have ever seen.

For a PlayStation 3 game, there are aspects that look like they were created with early PlayStation 2 graphical capabilities.

Back to the beginning of Sonic’s episode after those town missions, the first level being Wave Ocean truly shows how glitchy the game can really be. Already on my PS3 version of the title, I was experiencing all sorts of errors like extreme (and ironic) slowdown, the blue blur’s feet melting into the ground he ran on and even more loading screens mid-level.

Sonic ‘06 has tag and battle multiplayer features, but after all I just told you, do you really think that I could sucker someone into playing it with me? It’s probably a safe bet that it’s equally if not more so as broken and terrible as the single player experience, which feels incredibly long with three main campaigns and a special last episode that become only more aggravating with time.

To conclude, Sonic ’06, as strictly a playable game (or not so much), is a very bad experience, even if you’re a fan of the series like me that enjoys the characters and world. Even if the game was not rushed initially, which probably resulted in the plethora of glitches and loading, it still would have had questionable design choices plaguing the hub worlds, bosses and levels that make this game an overall headache-inducing experience at times.

It can be guilty pleasure fun at its most sadistic sometimes, but most of the time Sonic ’06 is just dumb and not fun.