Sonic Unleashed review.

This was originally written in December 2008.

Now I wasn't going to buy Sonic Unleashed, nearly every review I read was crap and of course Yahtzee shot it down a storm. I've been a fan of Sonic a long while, but when Sonic Heroes came out I knew it was going down the crapper, and things just got worse. My faith being so low, I was completely ready to pass this one by, but then when I was in town, I saw the PS3 version on display in GAME for £20, and I thought "for £20 I think I'll make up my own mind".

The game starts with a cool CGI sequence, Sonic fighting Eggman on a ship, pretty standard. Eggman then zaps the world with a giant laser, and Sonic is caught up in it, turning him into the "werehog" (though I've never heard this terminology used in the actual game). What Eggman's done is split the world into pieces, oh you naughty boy.

When you land on earth, you meet this little purple floaty furry dickhead thing called Chip, he's basically the helper of the game, but god, he's SO ANNOYING. Always shouting at you like an attention-deprived toddler. Still, he's cute and somewhat bearable, but pointless and clearly included to keep this little ones happy. I hate the little ones.

The first level is a Sonic level, predictably, and you can tell instantly that this game is awesome. The Sonic levels are all really well designed, smoothly switch between a 2D and 3D view, look really nice and are just very fun to play. Some bits of the level require you to dart left and right to avoid obstacles, but using the L and R buttons, you do a quick slide in that direction. It's like you're on a 3 lane track, and it works very well because you crash much less but it also leaves a lot to reaction time. Speaking of reaction time, sometimes during a big jump or movie event in a level, you'll have to press a series of buttons in the order shown on screen within the time limit. These definitely add something to the gameplay, but what's really annoying si that some of them are mandatory and will decide whether you continue or plunge to your death. This is just a small pick, but a valid one nonetheless.

When you compare a 3D Sonic game to a 3D Mario game, the difference is clearly linearity. Whereas Mario can run around in any direction and take things at a slow pace, Sonic is always running and each level plays out more like a race. Get from start to finish as quickly as possible. This means that much like in other Sonic games, a lot of the time you'll just be watching while holding up or right on the joystick. These bits look good but aren't very fun, but luckily these bits are only occasional, and if anything they add to the experience in my opinion.

In contrast to these levels, you have a second type. The dreaded werehog levels. You've probably heard people go on forever about how crap these are. Well in all honesty, yes they are pretty crap, but not as crap as people are saying. The first thing I should point out is that while a sonic level may take 4-6 mins to complete, a werehog level will average about 20 mins. This is a pretty huge difference, and everything about it just shouts "FILLER".

You run, wait no, you walk through the level until you run into some monsters, then you button bash to defeat them, then walk some more, drop a crystal into place somewhere, walk a bit more. Some parts of the level have swinging poles and other such objects that you need to interact with. The problem is, they're all pretty buggy. There was this one bit where I got flinged across a lake, and had to time my grab of a pole perfectly with no prior warning that it was going to happen. The checkpoint was miles back so I had to defeat the same monsters again to get there. I had to try this bit 5 times to get past, defeating the same monsters every time, imagine the pain! Now imagine losing all your lives and having to redo the WHOLE LEVEL. Ugh.

Eventually you'll get to a huge monster. These monsters require you to reduce their health to half and then do some reaction button pressing. Werehog Sonic will do a cool looking move while you quickly press whatever buttons appear on screen. This is very hard to get used to, and what's more, if you fail, his health goes all the way back up! This can get really annoying when you're running out of lives - yes, the game uses lives! - you're right near the end of the level and you get Game Over. No experience points, no reward, nothing.

Oh yeah that reminds me, experience points, for some reason you gain experience from doing the levels, you can level up Sonic's Speed and Ring Power, and with Werehog Sonic you can level up lots of bits like Power and "Unleash" and Life. This seems slightly pointless, and is clearly included to pad out the gameplay a bit and add replay value. I'm a bit of a grindmonkey so I don't mind, but many people will. Luckily, I only found one occasion in the game where I actually had to try and level something up to continue, and it wasn't that high a level to get it to anyway. If you are interested in maxxing out the levels (there's a trophy in it for you!), prepare to play more Werehog, these levels offer SO much more experience, it's almost as if Sega want us to hate the game.

Linearity seems to work for Sonic, but in this game, Sonic Team have also tried to break it a little. If you've played Sonic Adventure orSonic Adventure DX, you'll be familiar with the "adventure maps", the hub world that you ran around to get to new levels. On there it was pointless but totally bearable because you were hinted on where to go and it tied the story together. This makes a return in SonicUnleashed, but it's the game's biggest downfall in my opinion.

At various points in the game, you'll be told to go to a specific country  but not how to get into a level there, or even which character you should be using. The load times are awful, so if you go to the wrong country, you'll have to load in and out of it again, which takes an age. Also consider that from the Level hub area, you can't go straight back to the world map, you have to load back into the village area and then out to the map, this means they've got a pointless load in there. Also, the game's got the most ugly loading screen I've seen in a while.

Anyway, when you DO get to the right country, you'll have to look around for ages to find the level you want to get in to. There'll only usually be one active one that's new, so in that way it's alright, but you'll run across so many locked off levels that you just know you'll have forgotten how to get to later. When you finally do find the level you're after, Chip will say you need more Sun or Moon tokens depending on the kind of level. You see, scattered throughout every level are these tokens, and if you don't have enough to unlock the next level, you have to replay old levels.

Now you might say "why not just get sun tokens and play only the daytime (Sonic) levels?". In response to that, I'd say it's because that they put way more sun tokens in the night time levels, and way more moon tokens in the day time levels. This means that in order to get to another good level, you'll probably have to play through a bad one again. Mercifully you can go to previously visited levels straight from the world map, and you can see how many tokens you've collected on that level and how many are left, but you shouldn't have to go back in the first place really.

Now the boss levels are very good, even when you're using the Werehog they're pretty fun. Like with most games they're all about repeating the same tactic three times with the last one getting slightly harder, but they are actually fun and well thought out. They also hid tokens on these levels so you might also end up replaying these, but it's not nearly as tedious as replaying a Werehog level, perish the thought.

All in all, I think this game is a must for Sonic fans, but a no-no for everyone else. You see, a Sonic fan will happily grind through the boring Werehog levels and the confusing hub world to get to those oh so sweet Sonic levels. To be honest I don't mind the storyline and the graphics are nice, they also included trophies so that's a bit of extra motivation. It's the best Sonic game in years, and that's a depressing thought.

What's equally depressing is that without the Werehog levels and with a more streamlined hub world, this game would have much wider appeal. Yes it would have less content, but it would all be good. If that were the case, I'd command everyone who liked platformers or the old Sonic games to give this one a serious look, but as it is, I'd recommend you get this only if you see it for £20 or less. Hell I reckon I might have paid a little too much.

We all know what will happen though, all the little kids and Sega sympathisers will flock to the shops to buy this game, SEGA will ignore reviews, count their money and think of the next way to  scam us. I heard originally that this game was just going to be a "world tour" kind of Sonic game, that sounded awesome. When you add the Werehog to this formula, it no longer works. Too much going on. Lots of good content, but it's buried miles deep in shit.