I had such high hopes for Sonic Unleashed when I first heard about it. The first videos and screenshots reminded me of Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast. Now THAT was a Sonic game. Fast paced action and platforming made it an excellent addition to the franchise. That’s the next gen Sonic game everyone’s been looking for. Something that takes all of the things that were great about the older games in the franchise, and brings them into this generation of gaming. Unfortunately, Sonic Unleashed isn’t it.

When you fire up Sonic Unleashed, the very first thing you do is sit through an extremely long cutscene, in which you see Sonic get transformed into a werehog by Eggman, and you meet Sonic’s new annoying pal, Chip. This could have been a great tutorial level—running through Eggman’s space station, and squaring off against him before falling into his trap could have been a great way to introduce the game and it’s controls, but instead they chose to bore the audience to tears with a drawn out cutscene. Fortunately, once that cutscene is over, you are thrown into a fast paced, highly enjoyable level where everyone’s favorite hedgehog is tasked with getting from point A to point B as fast as he can. The level is short, but highly enjoyable. It reminded me of everything I loved about classic Sonic games. After one more short but satisfying level, the game puts you in control of the werehog, and this is where things fall apart.

The werehog represents everything that’s wrong with gaming. Compared to the way Sonic moves normally, the werehog is extremely slow. It’s extremely jarring to go from a fast paced level as Sonic the hedgehog to a slow paced level as Sonic the werehog. The controls feel loose, which feels natural when you’re moving at high speeds as Sonic the hedgehog, but as the werehog, it just feels like you’re walking across ice at all times. The combat feels clunky, and awkward. Most of the time, I found myself just mashing the same two buttons and watching Sonic flail his arms around wildly. The real enemy you’re fighting at all times is the camera. It often chooses a far from perfect angle, and, most of the time, you’re only granted partial control of it with the right stick. Last, but not least, the werehog’s combat is highly reliant on quick time events. Just about every enemy can be slowly beaten to death, or finished off quickly with a QTE. I’m not a big fan of QTE’s, and these are some of the worst I’ve ever run into. The window of opportunity to press the required button is small, and if you fail, you’ll take damage from the enemy you failed to attack properly. This leaves you with two choices: kill everything slowly without the QTE’s, dragging the already too long werehog levels out even further, or attempt the QTE’s, and die frequently because you missed one of the multiple QTE button presses required to kill a generic robot. I might be able to look past these flaws if the werehog levels didn’t make up more than half of the game.

Visually speaking, this game doesn’t know what it wants to be. The hairs in Eggman’s mustache, and the fur on Sonic the werehog look pretty good, but everyone’s eyes look like they’re made of plastic. The style falls somewhere between cartoony and realistic, and it mostly just winds up looking wrong. Maybe if they had gone with a simpler graphical style, they could have eliminated some of the frame rate issues that plague the werehog portions of the game.

If this game contained only fast paced hedgehog levels, I probably would have loved it. Those levels feel well designed, and they’re a lot of fun to play. Unfortunately, you spend the bulk of your time as the werehog, and I just can’t bring myself to recommend that experience to anyone. It’s just sad to see one of my all time favorite gaming franchises fall so low.

-Mike Kurz

Tags: Microsoft, Nintendo, PS2, PS3, review, Sonic, Sony, Wii, Xbox 360

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