An attempt at trying to create a classic style Sonic game - and a good one at that. Familure but fresh!
The game's story revolves around (I'll give you one guess) that's right! Eggman/Robotnik is turning all of the animals into robots again and it is up to Sonic and co to stop him in his tracks and prevent him from collecting the Chaos Emeralds.
You have a choice from four playable characters; Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy. They each have their own unique abilities. Tails can fly, Knuckles can glide and scale walls. Amy is unique because her gameplay is significantly harder. She doesn't have a spin jump or a spin dash. She can attack whilst swinging her hammer in the air, but she is significantly harder to play as.
There are six zones in total each uniquely themed. You have the standard Tropical Green Hill area, a Casino, Ice Mountain etc. Each zone has two acts and the second act has a boss at the end. The levels feature the standard sprint to the finish whilst grabbing rings, platforming and evading hazards. The levels really are fun to play. Some feature gimmicks to try and separate them such as the Angel Island featuring rotating wheel things on walls you need to use. Ice Mountain features underwater sections. Level specific gimmicks may only be a few small things, but they do help separate them.
Trying to get the Chaos Emeralds in this game is a pain. There are hidden springs hidden in a few levels which you need to find. They appear to be hidden in higher up places, so use Tails or Knuckles whilst attempting to get emeralds. Some springs are quite well hidden, I haven't found all of them. But when you find them, jump on them to be taken to the special staage, which has you free falling from space on a snowboard down a pipe. You will have to collect the specified number of rings whilst free falling. It's a really cool idea and the stages are fun, there's just one problem. It's hard ro judge where you are realitive to the rings sometimes; in other words you can position yourself so it looks like you will pick the rings up, but will end up missing them. Still, a fun gameplay mechanic non the less.
The graphics are quite nice and the characters do have cute little animations. The music is great too! There are some really beautiful tracks in this game.
Just as a heads up, fake GBA games are rife. Tell tale signs of a fake cart are poorly printed (or absent) logos, wonky sticker, a generic code of agb e01 41 stamped on the circuit board (or no code at all), no number imprints on the sticker, a disordered arrangement of pinholes on silver contacts (vs a neat straight line of pinholes just above gold contacts on real games) and notorious save malfunctions such as inablity to overwrite data so you can't restart your game, random data deletion or just not saving at all
But please note that all legit copies of this game have problems with the tiny chao garden ring data if you delete the first file
Sonic Advance was the start of a new generation of 2D Sonic side scrolling - and is the only one which does manage to capture the charm of the originals, Not because the rest of the Advance series and Rush are bad, because they feature totally different gameplay. The levels are really fun to play through and overall this game is hard not to reccommend. It's only real downfall is that despite having four characters, it's all over too quickly. A really great entry to the Sonic series!
Milesprower2K9 Original Reviews