Sonic Unleashed is SEGA’s latest attempt to make us care about the arrogant blue hedgehog that has been plastered over many sub-par games in his lifetime. They got our attention with new Werehog levels which take us away from the speedy gameplay that we’re used to. Instead offering some button mashing platforming.

Sonic Unleashed puts you in control of Sonic and his newly acquired Werehog alter ego (cheers, Eggman) that comes out to play at night. The game sets this up with a gorgeous pre-rendered starting cinematic. This is where we meet “Chip” the annoying as hell brand new character who will be making us cringe with his cliché dialogue and Scooby Doo “air running” sound effects the entire journey. The less said about him the better. He only shows up in cut scenes so he is easy enough to ignore.

The game is broken up into two very polarising types of levels. The first are the extremely fast paced dashing levels that take place during the day while Sonic is in his normal form. The second is a new platforming, button mashing, “kill all the enemies and move on” mechanic which takes place during the night while Sonic is in his big hairy transformed state. Our mission is to explore the world putting Chaos Emeralds in some temples for some reason. Which gets me onto my first disappointment.

Sonic goes fast. He doesn’t tell stories.

Sonic games have never been know for their storytelling prowess. Back in the day most if not all of the story was told in the manual that came in the box, destined to be ignored by most. Even then it was a simple tale of Dr. Robotnik, once again, playing about with Chaos Emeralds and putting small animals in robots. Sonic story lines should be an excuse to play a game. Not just an excuse. Sonic Unleashed’s story is plain stupid. Long (and absurd) story short: Dr. Eggman used the Chaos Emeralds to shoot a giant laser at the world for some reason which for some other reason causes a giant purple dragon fish thing to appear from underneath the now broken pieces of the planet. The Dr. says that he wants to use this fish-monster’s power to make Eggman-land happen somehow. He boots Sonic out off his space station (who for some reason turned into a Werehog when the laser was fired with the power of the Chaos Emeralds) where he lands on the aforementioned “Chip”.

The ending to the game is dramatic. I’ll give it that. It is a mix of Godzilla, Shadow of the Colossus and rock’em sock’em robots. But the reasons given for this over the top series of events is awful. It’s something I would expect from some 13 year old girl’s fanfic. Yah, it’s that bad.

I understand that the characters and story are geared toward children. But I really can’t see a child caring about the lost memories and destiny of a purple flying dog-rat. Another “bad man uses robots to cause trouble” would have sufficed.

Speaking of bad. This game is bad. Actually that’s unfair. If I were to be analytical I would say it’s 80% bad, 15% awesome and 5% what the fuck? The speed levels are BRILLIANT for the most part. But they are sprinkled with excruciating swinging poles and cheap pitfalls that are thoroughly broken and destroy the flow of the level, causing me to lose any hope of a half decent run. Luckily they don’t show up too often in the speed levels and putting those flaws aside, it is everything I have ever wanted from a Sonic game.

It has epic speed, multiple routes, catchy music and vibrant scenery. In my opinion it is the first time Sonic has worked in proper 3D. But this is the problem. A half decent player will be able to bomb through a speed level in four or five minutes. The average Werehog level takes about 20 minutes at least. And that’s not including cheap deaths or poorly placed checkpoints. On many occasions I found myself dying due to poor camera placement near a ledge only to be pulled back to a point I had passed a good five minutes earlier. And there are very few speed levels to make up for this.

Each zone is based on a culture or part of the world. Each has night and day stages. The day stages use the fast mechanic in and the night use the Werehog mechanic. But there is only one proper full level of each per zone. After the main speed section you can find yourself screaming at the screen as you find that you have to do a lap of an area surrounded by rails or jump up and down on crumbling platforms with day-time fast Sonic. Fast Sonic needs to be moving through a speed level for him to be fun. The speed mechanic only works well on the proper speed stage. Same goes for night stages. I found myself enduring the night stages to unlock more day stages only to find that I now have to do a stage in which I am required to kill a tonne of bad guys to finish. That is not fun. Which segues nicely onto my next beef.

The game is made much longer than it needs to be.

The Werehog levels are thoroughly frustrating. I found them fatiguing and stressful. They seem to serve only one purpose: to irritate the player. I can think of only a single level from which I derived marginal levels of enjoyment. It was a decidedly short one and it gets this mantle due to the fact there was not one cheap death or shitty checkpoint. It’s a shame as the Werehog mechanic is a good idea but has been implemented very poorly. The controls are usable, but little more. The camera is fine when under your command but when it is taken away from you it positions itself in the most awkward places often leading to the unwieldy Sonic jumping head first into a pit as the distance was impossible to judge.

The combat has been made overly complicated and has had an RPG-esque levelling element tacked onto it. There are countless numbers of attack combos to pull off yet I stuck with the same two for the entire game (Y,Y,Y,Y and X,X,Y,Y if you must know) as they don’t really differ that much. Most of the bosses need to be taken down with quick time events (QTEs) and I have no issue with this. They are easy enough to pull off and their difficulty curve across the game is reasonable. Every regular enemy also has a potential QTE that you can use to kill them faster. But these are terribly flawed in that they are too difficult to pull off. The punishment for failing to do so is a massive chuck of your health. After having failed one or two I ceased using them at all.

Sun and Moon medals. A plague on the house of whoever thought that collecting medals to unlock stages was a good idea. The player navigates to levels (acts) via hub worlds. In these hubs there are platforms that the player stands on to begin the act. But these platforms only work if you have collected an appropriate number of Sun and Moon medals. A normal play though of a level will not give even nearly enough medals to unlock the next stage. At some point the player will have to go back through levels checking every nook and cranny in search of these medals. At one point I had to find a whopping 15 Sun medals to activate a platform. After being unable to find enough in the previous stages I had to spend the rings I had amassed during the course of the game at each hub worlds shop (another pointless addition to the game) to purchase souvenirs. I then took them to another hub world to give to another character in the hope that he would give me some Sun medals. I struggle to imagine a boardroom of SEGA employees discussing the matter with Team Sonic, nodding their heads in agreement of its suitability to the game. It is embarrassingly obvious that the purpose of the medals is to stretch out the game. They do a great job of this. But it forces me to replay the irritating night stages and die another thousand times trying to jump after little medallions that unlock more levels that make me want to pull my own skin off and eat it.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• Hub worlds for level selecting seems a bit over the top and unnecessary.

• Humans in Sonic games have always been rubbish due to cringeworthy dialogue and Sonic Unleashed is no exception.

• Old Sonic friend “Amy” shows up for no reason.

• Some attributes, such as Sonic’s speed attribute, yield no noticeable difference when improved.

• There are often unavoidable cheap deaths that can only be overcome with hindsight.

• Talking to the humans in the hub worlds reminds me of skipping walls of text in Mass Effect.

Overall this game was a chore to play, feeling like hard work trying to progress through the stages. Each fun speed level that raises your hopes only sets you up for disappointment with another night stage riddled with endless and monotonous button mashing combat, cheap deaths and poorly placed check points. I had to force myself much too hard to power through the crap levels so that I could finish. No game should make a player have to do that. When I did finally complete it I was not happy to have finished a great story or complete the task of foiling Eggman’s plans. Instead I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to pick it up again. .

I started playing this game as something of a Sonic apologist. I was so sure the game would at least be good despite what I had read and heard about. Sadly the truth is that I cannot justify ever telling someone that they should buy this game even if they are an avid Sonic fan. In fact if they were I would ward them away from it, so not to stain their good image of the poor hedgehog. The sad thing is that if the speed stages could have been crammed into an XBL arcade game, without the Werehog levels dragging them down, it would have been great.

You should play this game if…

… you feel that you can endure digging through the crap to find the shining diamond in the middle.

Final score:
The brilliant speed segments do not excuse the rest of a terrible game. Worth a rental if you love fast-paced Sonic and the demo got you excited.

(What does this score mean?)