That might sound too simple a formula to really work in longevity, but to most veteran gamers worth their salt, it’s the truth. All we really want out of our Sonic experiences is to have the rush of speeding breakneck through everything in sight.
Sonic Team doesn’t seem to want to get this through their heads.
Instead of just giving us what we want, Sonic’s creators have spent the past decade soiling his adventures with hackneyed gimmicks since the debut of his first legitimate 3D game, 1999's Sonic Adventure.
To wit: Sonic vs. his darker, more-extreme-twin, Shadow (who eventually turns out to be a gun-wielding hedgehog), Sonic tethered to two other teammates at all times, and an on-rails Sonic saving pages from Arabian Nights are just a few examples.
Critical reception has ranged from mediocre to abysmal, mostly due to numerous technical glitches, poor design, shoddy gameplay and a recurring god-awful camera. Unleashed doesn’t suffer from all of these problems, but the game does prove that there’s still has a long way to go in Sonic’s slow re-ascent towards legitimacy.
Basically, Unleashed’s gimmick takes Sonic and transforms him into a werehog with inexplicable stretchy arms when the sun goes down. Yes, you read that right. Sonic the werehog. Who can stretch like Mr. Fantastic. Um…what?
So, with this new conceit, you’re basically given A Tale of Two Hedgehogs.
In daytime stages, you play as the Sonic we all know and love—the fast one. And when you’re controlling everyone’s favorite speedy blue ‘hog, Unleashed just about sings.
Daytime Sonic’s levels are silky smooth, (mostly) hyper-fast levels that change from 2D to 3D and back. If Sonic Team had stopped right there, the game would have been damn good from beginning to end.
When the moon (always full for some reason) is out, however, things get a bit wonky. Taking control Sonic the werehog—a slower, tougher, brawling-prone beast—results in a play style that’s completely different, turning the game into a brawler/platformer that’s something akin to a more-cuddly God of War rip-off.
I know what you're thinking—“I don't need brawling in my Sonic games.” Believe me, I agree. But as far as some of Sonic Team’s past design efforts go, Unleashed isn’t as bad you might think.
Past the first few werehog levels, which are little more than derivative slogfests through hordes of cookie-cutter enemies, the level design opens up a little, offering up levels of genuine platforming rarely seen in the series.
Sonic’s werehog also has a pretty decent selection (although not initially) of tap-combos, again mostly straight out of God of War. The move list increases with collected experience, which enemies drop, which can then in turn be saved and distributed amonst various attributes such as your strength or life meter (ripped straight from Kingdom Hearts and Onimusha, respectively). Experience also works for regular Sonic, giving upgrades to speed and speed-boosting ring energy, which is a nice touch.
Once you upgrade your werehog moveset, what enemies you do encounter can be dispatched in short order—sometimes combat’s even fun, if only for a little while. But it’s the platforming that’s still the best part of Nighttime Sonic’s levels.
As much as you might not like Sonic as a werehog, his slower style lends itself really well to this kind of gameplay shift, and once they start focusing more on jumping-obstacle-courses, Sonic Team’s level designs are actually pretty good.
Tying night and day together are some light RPG elements, held-over from the days of Sonic Adventure. As such, Sonic travels all over the world to various cities, helping citizens fend off the advances of “Dark Gaia”, which the nefarious Dr. Eggman not only used to transform Sonic into a werehog in the first place, but unleashed monsters from the planet’s inner core as well. The story makes little sense, but it also doesn’t really matter.
These various world-themed cities, towns and hamlets serve as hub levels to both night and day stages. I personally have never much cared for RPG elements in Sonic games—if I wanted those, I’d play Bioware’s Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.
And although I don’t see holding inane conversations and solving gee-whiz problems for people as part of the hedgehog’s job description, other than adding a layer of tedium to gameplay, they’ve never been too much of a problem. I had a different experience with Unleashed, for two reasons.
First, Sonic Team elected to place collectable sun and moon medals in each level. Ok, just another platforming “thing to collect", right?.
Wrong.
See, it turns out that its mandatory to pick up a certain number of these medals to access new night and day stages. That would all right, if all the medals per level could be snatched up relatively easily. Most of them can, but some are hidden and require some searching.
So if you haven’t picked up enough medals, sooner or later you’ll effectively hit a break wall and be forced to play through levels you’ve already beaten. This isn’t so bad when you’re replaying Sonic’s daytime levels, but looking for medals in Unleashed’s slower-paced nighttime levels can be a huge chore, and one that artificially extends the game’s overall length.
My point is, no game should punish you by forcing you to replay levels just to collect things you may have missed the first time around, especially when it doesn’t even make a big to-do about when said items are even for.
It would be one thing if there was emphasis on collecting the medals actually does—like how Mario games always make the point that stars open locked doors—but that isn’t the case here. Couldn't these medals have been used to unlock something less detrimental, like mini-games or secret passages or something?
My second point also has to do with cheap ways to extend a game’s length. Like RPGs that make you grind levels until your brain is mush just to beat a certain dungeon, Unleashed is sometimes incredibly vague about game progression, meaning you’ll waste a lot of time trying to figure it out where to go or what to do next.
On several occasions I had to wander around a town where I thought I should be, only to find that I was either a) in the wrong place entirely or b) lacking some gained skill only found elsewhere that I could use to get to wherever the game was telling me to go.
So, if I was told that I had to go beat the boss in the desert temple, what I actually had to do was go to a city halfway across the world, beat a level in that, and then come back. This is not good game design, and leads to an overall uneven presentation.
Outside if the RPG-lite realm, Unleashed has some other problems as well. Controlling the werehog can sometimes be a little sluggish, and things can only be grabbed on to after a green targeting reticle locks on, which feels unnatural and can sometimes hamper platforming segments.
The camera can sometimes be annoying during the nighttime levels, too. Although most of the time it’s fully 3D, occasionally Sonic Team snatches away control to present a more cinematic view of the action, but this can also present problems when trying to land a death-defying jumps.
In sunny levels, sometimes obstacles or turns come up way too fast, resulting in instant death until you get the hang of a course. The occasional light platforming elements in the day stages also feel like an afterthought, and often do little but frustrate and break up the level of speed.
I’m harping on Unleashed flaws for a reason, though. On the one hand, there’s some really great ideas at work here—yes, even in some of the nighttime stages. Finally, Sonic’s traditional levels are coming together after 2006’s truly awful reboot Sonic the Hedgehog, with a good balance between speed, dexterity and player control.
Futhermore, the nighttime levels help break up the pace of the game with some pretty good platforming. There are also some pretty cool boss fights, including one particularly badass encounter pitting Sonic against a G-Darius-type fish robot that actually plays like a horizontal arcade shooter.
But the point is, the aforementioned problems keep the game from being something truly special, and, let’s face it, the werehog conceit seems like something you would more likely find in a spin-off title rather than an actual Sonic game.
Unleashed remains a tease because in its moments of greatness, it shows us how good a 3D Sonic game can actually be. The daytime levels are dangled in front of us like bait, and really, that’s what keeps us playing through the rest of the game.
I completely understand and applaud Sonic Team for wanting to inject some innovation into the long-running series, and I don’t fault them for it. But you’ve got to know your source material—will this new idea work, given what this series is known for? With Unleashed, it doesn’t always.
I’ve got news for you, Sega. There’s plenty of old-school gamers that would love to see Sonic return to his former greatness, but this isn’t the best way to go about it. No one really cares about Sonic’s annoying, cuddly friends (that weren’t in the original games). No one wants to make Sonic run around fulfilling mundane tasks.
No one wants to play as a slow, lumbering hedgehog. Save those ideas for other games, or at least don’t make Sonic do them himself. Just because I actually enjoyed Unleashed more than I thought I would, but that doesn’t mean its developers shouldn’t be held accountable for its shortcomings.
You’ve showed us that its possible to make a great hedgehog game with the high speeds we’ve all been clamoring for for years—the blueprints are all right here. So next time, put your money where your mouth is and give us a long-overdue Sonic title that’s completely worthy of the series name.
Sonic Unleashed
3 of out 5 stars
Sega
PS3, Xbox 360
$59.99
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sonic games are waiting for new directions...
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