Regardless of your opinion of his games, there’s no denying that Sonic the Hedgehog is an appealing character; you don’t get staring roles in five different Saturday morning cartoon series on looks alone. Yuji Naka and the developers at Sonic Team have once again hit character gold with the titular hero of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, but sadly, his debut game is average at best. The spunky kid in a rooster suit deserves better.

When evil crows attack Morning Land and imprison the six rooster elders in giant golden eggs, preventing them from coaxing the sun out of its nightly slumber and therefore plunging the world into eternal night, it’s up to Billy Hatcher to save the day. With the power of eggs, obviously. Despite his flashy rooster costume, Billy isn’t much good on his own. Sure, he can jump and hang from ledges like the best of them, but any jumping puzzle more complex than a few floating platforms or an enemy crowbeast of any size or variety are no match for the well-meaning kid. Thankfully, his magic rooster suit allows him to push and move giant eggs he would be unable to manipulate otherwise.

Huge eggs of a multitude of sizes and colors litter the environment. By simply walking up to one and pushing, Billy can roll the eggs around the landscape, smashing through enemies and barriers with equal ease. Defeating the monsters of Morning Land – that resemble giant lizards and purple gorillas more than “evil crows” – yields fruit, obviously. By rolling up this fruit into your (completely non-Katamari-like) eggs, they’ll grow in size, eventually becoming large enough to hatch, providing Billy with consumable items, powerups, or Pokemon-inspired sidekicks. With over 50 eggs to roll and hatch, Billy has a genuine plethora of powerups at his disposal, but only a handful are ever actually required to overcome an obstacle. In fact, most of the available hatchlings are borderline useless, and with many of the eggs sharing similar colors or patterns, it’s often difficult to discern the useful eggs from the rotten ones.

Besides smashing and hatching, these giant eggs also provide Billy with additional platforming powers. Sharing common heritage with Sonic the Hedgehog, Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg also shares the same sort of breakneck speed. Billy rolls eggs around the world with unmatched quickness and spends a great deal of time blasting through freefloating, giant-egg-sized rings. This is fun. However, it quickly shifts from fun to frustrating once instant death pits enter the mix, which is often. As you might expect, performing precision platforming with a giant egg in tow is clunky and inexact. It’s often difficult to gauge where Billy ends and the egg begins, leading to many missed jumps. Additionally, because the eggs have their own weight and momentum, it’s not uncommon to land a jump onto a tiny midair platform only to have the still-rolling egg drag Billy off the edge with it. Rolling around and hanging on to eggs for dear life as you rocket yourself across the landscape is entertaining enough, but it’s not a mechanic suited to high flying live-or-die antics, as the sort of precision needed for a 3D platformer is sorely missing.

All flaws aside, tooling around behind a humungous egg is fresh and original, but the rest of the game just doesn’t complement this new concept. Billy and his giant eggs seem to have found themselves in a generically standard platforming game; it’s hard to believe Sonic Team built this unoriginal gameworld from scratch to host monstrous rolling eggs. Structurally, the game is identical to Super Mario 64, with Billy collecting Courage Emblems in place of stars as rewards for accomplishing various missions. Billy visits a snow level, some sand-soaked ruins, and a fiery volcano – all locals we’ve seen countless times before in this sort of game. Unfortunately, the simple truth here is once you’ve haphazardly rolled a giant egg through a chicken village in the first level of the game, you’ve already seen the most interesting the game ever gets.

At least the game looks and sounds great. The graphics are bright and colorful with a pervasive cuteness. It might not be the most technically impressive title in the GameCube’s library, but the texture work is clean and the art style is consistent. The soundtrack matches the sunny disposition of the visuals, with catchy, upbeat songs accompanying every moment of the game. Stop rolling eggs for a few moments and Billy will start singing along. Heck, do anything at all – jump, collect an item, run into an enemy’s behind – and Billy has something to say about it and, surprisingly enough, Billy’s constant commentary never grows old, remaining charmingly cute until the end.

Billy Hatcher and the Giant egg has seven worlds in total, a throwaway multiplayer component, and the same GBA-downloadable minigames as Phantasy Star Online. All told, you’re looking at about five hours to beat the game and double that to exhaust the content on the disc completely. There’s little incentive to play beyond the ending cinematic, however, as the game is just too frustrating and unoriginal to bother with for long. Still, there are a few terrific boss battles, some memorable music, and a delightful hero that deserves better than this, but then again, the same can be said of Sonic these days. Do yourself a favor, skip the game and just buy the soundtrack – it’s the same experience without the clunky platforming.