So I decided to trade in a few games today and get Shadow the Hedgehog for the Gamecube, hoping to God that this wasn't gonna be another unmitigated disaster like Sonic Heroes. And after playing it for an hour before I had to head to work, I must say I am pleasantly surprised.

Gameplay is your standard Sonic Adventure fare, with the large A button being both your jump and homing attack button. Only real difference here would be that they made the X button the roll/spin-dash button rather than B, which is now used to punch or use a weapon you have picked up. Y is to drop/pick up weapons. And one feature they put in that I'm really happy with is the use of second analog stick to move the camera around without it snapping back into position the second you let it go. And while camera issues are still a bit of a problem, they're nowhere near as appearant as in previous games.

Now the big sore point alot of people were bitching about when the game was first announced, was the fact that Shadow uses guns. And I must say, it's not as bad as people make it out to be. It seems to go along with his personality. That and the weapons interface is fairly intuitive, though I kinda wish there was some sorta targeting system rather than just "point at enemy and shoot". Another thing worthy of mention, you're not limited to capping baddies with firearms. You can also pick up alien swords, poles, eggman robot lances, ect. The real fun comes from the automatic weapons that the GUN soldiers drop, though.

And one other neat thing is the Chaos Control and Chaos Blast. Kill enough of a certain type of enemy and one of two meters on your screens fills up. Kill GUN troops and robots, and you can do a move called Chaos Blast which wipes out all the enemies on the screen. Kill Black Arms aliens and you get Chaos Control, which gives you a super burst of speed.

The real neat part of the game, though, is the non-linear path the game goes on. There's three different ways to clear a level:

1) Gather all the Chaos Emeralds in that level. (Screw what the heroes and the villians want. You're in this for yourself.)

2) Help out the hero character in the level. (tasks such as destroying all the aliens in the level, gathering a certain amount of rings, ect...)

3) Follow orders from the villians. (Either Black Arms or Dr. Robotnik. Usually this consists of destroying all the GUN troops in the level)

And depending on what you do, it decides which path you take and what level is next, ultimately giving you one of three different endings. Dunno the endings yet, as I only got to play it for an hour so far, but I'm itching to find out.

Anyways, so far, this game is beginning to kick ass.