Screenshots from Game Spot

Year released: 2004 (Game Boy Advance)

Number of Players: 1-2 simultaneously (main mode) 2-4 simultaneously (battle mode)

Eggman scatters both the Chaos Emeralds and Sonic's friends. Sonic and Tails move out to set everything right.

Graphics: Always pleasing. Even though our heroes find themselves in variations of the standard zones, this game still has refreshing and new graphics to show off. The sprites are the same as the previous Sonic Advances. These sprites are well animated, even if the skulls of Sonic and Knuckles are off. Most everything else about the sprites looks great.

Play control: Jump with A, ground attack with B, move left and right with left and right on the control pad. You are given a partner to accompany you, and you can utilize their abilities by holding down R (right shoulder button). Whether you're on the ground or in the air makes a difference in what move you'll pull off. Depending on the partner, any combination of A, B, and R controls might change (A will always be jump and B will always be ground attack, though).
Some things seem to stand out as a bit off... in this game, heroes walk a bit slowly out of complete stillness (but still get up to the speed we all know them for), making their reaction time slower than one is used to. Also, Tails loses all momentum when going into flying. Once you get used to these two (which doesn't take long), it's no big deal.

Sound: Voice clips from the same voice actors from Sonic Heroes. They aren't bad quality, either. After Sonic Advance's music, I wasn't expecting much. However, everything in this game is great! Really, everything here is compelling, up-beat music, similar to the better tracks of Sonic Adventure 2. The sound effects are standard for Sonic Advances; just a boing, a ping, a boop... nothing new. Not anything that will annoy.

Challenge: First off: a zone equals three acts, a boss, a special stage (unlocked), and one or more bonus rooms (destroy all enemies, get so many points, etc.). Also, you unlock the extra characters (Knuckles, Cream, Amy). To be frank, I'm not sure how. I suspect it's through clearing stages with multiple combinations of the characters you currently have or through getting Chao.
The focus is mainly on finding the right way through the course while navigating around what some might call cheap deaths. Basically, you have to figure out what gets done next, and this sometimes means thinking while standing on platforms crossing a big empty space at the bottom of the screen (if you hit the bottom of the screen, that's automatic death... if you didn't already know). One might think this clashes with the speed of the Sonic gang, and often it does. However, navigating speedy passages sometimes requires a little of that thinking-on-your-feet action. When the game really wants to throw a puzzler at you, it picks you right up out of that speed (sometimes tossing you right into the middle of the thought-required mess, much to your embarrassment).
There are 10 Chao per zone (you can check out multiple gardens to see how many you have for the current zone). You have to explore both the hub stage (I'll go over that later) and the acts to get each chao. Most chao will be in the acts. You have to search the places that are hardest to get to and the places where no one looks. Then, once you have all 10 chao, you can go into any act and pick up a key.
From there, you can find a spring in the hub stage to get to a special stage. You fly on a plane collecting rings. You can go up, down, left, and right, and the four main diagonals imbetween. You get pushed forward through a stage as rings and bombs come at you. You have to pick up so many rings to earn the chaos emerald at the end of the stage. These stages are hard, as in most Sonic games.
Basically put, the challenge arrives from being able to figure out how to get to the end of the stage (sometimes requires operating an unknown device which utilizes one of our hero's abilities) and being able to pull it off. Usually, the part where you actually perform the solution to the puzzle is harder than figuring out what to do.
Oh, yeah. There are three super-hard bosses in the game. And get this... in the final zone, you beat one super-hard boss to progress to the next super hard boss immediately--no saving occurs imbetween, so if you get game over, you have to work on the first of the two bosses again.

Gameplay: Sonic and company will zoom all around the screen, taking advantages of loops and such. These passages are somewhat long and ruin the essence they had in the original Sonic games. It gets better when, in later stages, those thinking challenges pop up more frequently.
You get to bend the rules (that is, instead of having to think about a certain problem, just skip it altogether) by using the special abilities of yourself, but more interestingly, your partner. For example, Sonic can do an extremely high jump if he charges up Tails and uses him on land. So instead of navigating a bunch of floating platforms, Sonic could just leap over the whole bunch. This brings in a great spin on the whole thing--think about which partner to use if you're having trouble at a certain spot. Also, you can't forget about your own abilities, nor how they are altered just by the presence of your partner.
Oh, yeah, you're required to go through a little hub stage to find acts. That is, to get to a stage with thinking and running and such, you have to find the entrance in a stage with no enemies. This allows for fun exploration, but gets annoying when one is stuck on a boss, and you have to find the entrance over and over again.

Bottom line: Those who have read my Sonic CD review may be puzzled by this review. While Sonic Advance 3 does use thoughtful gameplay a lot, it doesn't base the game soley around it. It takes Sonic CD and throws in the one thing it needed: speed.
A new take on the Sonic engine (Well, as far as I know--I haven't touched Sonic Advance 2). It combines speed and thinking (thinking would be along the lines of Ristar, except this time, you have a lot more ways to think around a problem) and comes out with a wonderful combination. Then, once you clear all the stages, you get to amble around stages, keeping an eye open for chao--if you like discovering different routes (think Super Mario World, if you can), then this will appeal to you. After that, unlocking different characters and getting to mess around with different combos of whatever two characters and seeing what affects their new powers have on acts is a bit Sonic-ish. I would reccomend it to Ristar fans and Mario fans... Sonic fans might be a bit hesitant.
For me, clearing all of the stages took a hearty afternoon. Finding all of the chao is the project of a week or more.

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