First Look: Sonic Battle
Sonic and pals engage in a little Smash Bros.-style roughhousing on the GBA... an old concept, admittedly, but you've never seen it quite like this before.
Sega isn't ending the Sonic onslaught with a new console game, a re-release of an old one, and a GBA pinball title. No, there's also Sonic Battle, an original title that takes the Smash Bros. formula and applies it to one of the most dysfunctional families in video games.
A sort of showdown between the characters of Sonic Adventure, Sonic Battle lets you choose one of eight characters, pick an arena, set the rules, then have at it with each other. Up to four humans can duke it out at once via the Game Link cable, and players willing to truce with each other can use tandem combos to clean up the competition in an instant, leaving them time to concentrate on more important matters like hitting each other. If you're all by your lonesome, then no worries?there's also a Story Mode, where you'll get an AI-controlled partner to fight for you in the arena.
Sound fairly standard for a Smash Bros. clone so far, right? (Indeed, a lot of these features are already in Digimon BattleSpirit, released for the GBA a few months ago.) What's new here is the graphics?one of the more ambitious attempts at 3D on a Game Boy Advance. The game uses a semi-overhead view, and all the arenas are rendered in full 3D (although the characters are still 2D sprites). The screenshots, as a result, look fantastic?it'll be interesting to see how it all moves at E3.
Coming to the Game Boy Advance later this year.
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