Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg

Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is the most consistently frustrating game I have ever played. The amount of times I thought to myself how much fun it would be to rip the disc out of the system and toss it into the beyond, never to be seen again, is impossibly high. Everything about this game is designed to be as irritating and unforgiving as humanly possibly. And it’s all covered up by bright colors and an overly sweet vibe.

I don’t want to come off too strong so I’ll start by saying that I absolutely love the game’s presentation. It’s colorful, cheery and goofy as possible. The game is fully aware that a game about a boy and giant talking chickens is as preposterous and childish and it comes and it runs with it. The only way the game could get anymore childish is if the game’s graphics were done in crayon ala Super Mario World 2. The cuteness is actually hypnotizing like some kind of mind-numbing children’s TV show.

The graphics themselves are solid too but nothing standout. The game was built on the Sonic Adventure 2 engine and the game looks a touch above that game. Bright, solid pastel colors make up much of the game’s palette. It’s certainly pleasing to the eye but the art-style isn’t original enough to make any sort of impact. It’s certainly “cute” but it’s that generic kind of cute. Even the creature designs are lackluster. They all look like rejected Digimon which are already pretty dull as far as cute Japanese monsters go. The enemy designs are nothing to write home about either. Their big grinning faces and generally dark color schemes evoke a sort of “Nightmare Before Christmas” vibe but once again, it’s not enough to make any sort of lasting impression

The graphics, although good in a technical sense, totally drop the ball in the other categories. They’re nice looking but considering what they could have done with the game, they certainly aren’t impressive. Thankfully, the sound department picks up the slack and helps to make up for the underwhelming visuals. Mariko Nanba, the game’s composer, helps to make the levels feel alive and bombastic. The main theme, Chant This Charm, is absolutely adorable and totally infectious even if its 100% gibberish. The actual level themes aren’t exactly the cream of the crop or even Nanba’s best work but they get the job done and they complement and even improve on the level’s aesthetics.

            Billy Hatcher’s biggest gimmick is the eggs that Billy must use in order to defeat his avian foes. It’s an interesting idea if woefully under-utilized. For instance, certain eggs can hatch into little monsters that you can use as an alternate form of attack but these creatures are rarely helpful and generally only used to solve super-easy puzzles. On top of that, you cannot take them into boss fights which makes me question why they’re even around. There are only about eight monsters with most of the eggs (of which there are a lot of) containing little items and trinkets.

The eggs themselves are also very unwieldy which would make sense if the game didn’t randomly decide that momentum is not an issue at certain points. Inconsistencies like that are far, far too common in Billy Hatcher and drag the game down a considerable amount. Another thing about the egg is that the larger they get, the harder it is to gauge what’s in front of you or where you, you being Billy, is going to land. I had more than my fair share of deaths that were caused by the egg pushing me off of a narrow platform into a bottomless pit. The eggs are also very inconsistent about how fragile they are. Certain attacks will barely damage the egg but then the same attack will hit the egg and break it. It’s possible it has to do with the angle the egg is hit at but the game does a terrible job of telegraphing that if that’s the case.

The biggest problem this game has though is its teeth-gnashing, controller throwing, intentionally annoying level design. The best way to describe it is “The worst parts of 2D Sonics and Super Monkey Ball thrown into a blender”.  Much like a 2D Sonic game, everything works like it should until you hit a wall, physical or otherwise. Once you hit that wall, the game loses all momentum and instead becomes a tedious slog. And you never get that previous sense of fluidity back unless you restart the level. And heaven forbid you lose your egg. If you lose your egg, consider yourself dead. Billy is totally useless without the eggs; even his jumping ability is unreasonably terrible.

Billy Hatcher also suffers from one of the worst cameras in the post Playstation age. This comes as no surprise, seeing as how this game was made with the Sonic Adventure 2 engine, but you’d think Sonic Team would have at least attempted to make a few improvements. But no, it’s as bad as it always was. The camera will often get stuck behind a wall, an enemy, the egg itself, whatever. To sum it up, if the camera can get stuck on an object, it’ll get stuck on that object at least once.

Billy’s Hatcher combat is also incredibly clunky and not very entertaining. I’ll concede that it is fun to flatten your enemies in quick succession but that’s about the maximum enjoyment you’ll get out of its combat. If you miss your chance to quickly flatten the enemies on your first go-around, you’ll be forced to turn around, adjust the camera and go in for round two. It tries to be tricky and far more involving by giving some of the enemies’ health bars but that doesn’t really work for a game like this. Billy Hatcher, much like Sonic, is a game about time trials and speed and things like this only slow it down.

            And that’s not even mentioning the boss battles. Some games, 3D platformers especially, do not need boss battles and Billy Hatcher is no exception. The boss fights here serve no real purpose and are more often than not, pathetically easy. When the bosses aren’t super-easy, it’s because the camera is too busy having a seizure or it’s because the game is glitching out. Billy Hatcher might have one of absolute worst final bosses in any 3D platformer. It’s glitchy, the camera goes haywire and it’s incredibly tedious and repetitive. On top of all that, the boss fights don’t offer any experimentation. Like I mentioned before, you can’t bring your animal buddies to help you and you can only use the default egg.

            It’d be unfair to say that Billy Hatcher’s difficult is entirely the fault of poor game design because there are parts that are designed to be legitimately challenging and to the game’s credit, those parts are well thought out and intelligently designed. However, the parts of the game where the difficulty stems from control problems, camera issues and weird physics far outweigh the well-made portions of the game. The take-away message here is that every single death in Billy Hatcher feels unfair. And that makes for a very unpleasant experience.

            But, if you have the patience of a saint, you may find something to like in Billy Hatcher. There’s loads of replay value here with each world having eight missions (for a grand total of 56!) and an emphasis on speed running will keep the dedicated busy. At its core, Billy Hatcher is a Sonic game with some Katamari Damacy and Super Monkey Ball, pardon the pun, “rolled” in. 

            Make no mistake; Billy Hatcher is another mediocre 3D platformer that was made at a time when Sega, or more specifically Sonic Team, could do no right. It’s got a cutesy look that’ll draw in those easily won over by cute things (like me) but that cute exterior hides a dark, very frustrating underside. If it were hard and fair, like an old NES game, I’d be in love with the game but as it stands, Billy Hatcher is a poorly made game whose flaws greatly outnumber its strengths. All that being said, I still adore the game’s concept and I think the game would greatly benefit from a sequel because it’s not an inherently flawed game; in fact, Billy Hatcher is a game whose shortcomings are caused by rookie mistakes and a terrible engine. Billy Hatcher was an interesting experiment that played it too close for comfort and ended up paying the price for it.

FINAL SCORE: 4.0