Sonic Unleashed shows there's still some hope for the series, but its got a ways to go

I’ll get straight to the point: Sonic Unleashed is a tease. A horrible, horrible tease. Sonic’s name has always been synonymous with going really fast—a mechanic that’s never really gotten old in his nearly-20 year run, even if the games haven't always exactly delivered on it.

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?


WTF?

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.

Platforming bits save Sonic Unleashed's nighttime levels.

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.

Now that's more like it.

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.


Faster than a galloping werehog.

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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Banjo-Kazooie’s latest outing throws a wrench in the works

I don’t envy Banjo and Kazooie. After only defeating witchy villainess Gruntilda a handful of times in Banjo-Kazooie games over the past decade, the duo have fallen into lethargy, fattening up with a perpetual routine of video games and pizza—at least according to the conceit that begins their newest adventure, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Nuts & Bolts establishes the now retired duo living lazily at their home in Spiral Mountain, which makes sense since they haven’t had a proper console adventure since the heyday of the N64. And when I say lazy, I mean it—bear and bird have become so out of shape that Banjo now sports a hefty, blubbery gut, and Kazooie can’t even fly.

This may seem a slightly bizarre approach to begin a new long-overdue installment of a successful platforming series, but Nuts & Bolts isn’t your typical platformer. Rather than simply giving Banjo and Kazooie an HD facelift and a new world to play in, developer Rare opted to go for something else entirely with Nuts & Bolts: a self-aware platformer with vehicular gameplay.

So, whereas you’ll still be collecting tokens, notes (the game’s currency) and Jiggies—Banjo’s equivalent to Mario’s stars—in Nuts & Bolts, you’ll mostly be doing so in land, water and air-based crafts you build yourself. That being said, this isn’t strictly a racing game. There are plenty of races, sure, and most every challenge in the game is timed, but there’s the game’s vehicle building and platforming mechanics make it more of a hybrid.

Nuts & Bolts' whimsy even spills over into its aesthetic style.

Game self-awareness on the level of Nuts & Bolts' is something of a rarity in the industry. Although it may just look and feel like a kid’s game at first, the game’s sharp writing makes use of every opportunity to take jabs both at itself and the game industry in general, with plenty of sarcasm and self-reflexive humor.

This is clear from the very start, when the Lord of Games, or L.O.G., shows up and actually pauses the game, stopping a fight that’s about to break out between Banjo, Kazooie and old Grunty’s head, which has reappeared to hound the duo.

“Greetings, second-rate game characters!” L.O.G. greets the trio.

If Nuts & Bolts’ intro, which makes fun of platforming conventions and plot devices is anything to go by (and it is) the game is rife with parody. After L.O.G., the creator of all games, forces Banjo and Grunty to race collecting as many pointless game objects as possible, (a genre convention most gamers will recognize instantly) it magically makes Banjo and Kazooie fit again and gives Grunty back her body.

When Kazooie protests that she no longer has any of her old moves from previous games, L.O.G. dismisses them as ‘outdated’. Finally, bear, bird and witch are forced to follow L.O.G. on vehicles, of which will transport our heroes throughout the game’s world, Showdown Town.

Like previous Banjo adventures. (or most platformers since Super Mario 64) Showdown Town serves as a hub from which the game’s levels can be accessed, challenges taken on and jiggies obtained. To do so, you’re given a bucket of bolts that vaguely reminiscent of a shopping cart to get around in.

For a platformer, Showdown Town is massive, with various districts and distractions and townsfolk (including familiar faces like Mumbo Jumbo, the series shaman who now owns a garage) to talk to, and thanks to Nuts & Bolts’ uber-slick, cartoony aesthetic you feel like you’re driving through a living, breathing place, like something out of a Shrek­-type CG film.

Although you’ll want to stick to your vehicle most of the time, bear and bird can still perform a few basic functions.

This time around, Kazooie is restricted to simply using a helpful magical wrench, which can pick up objects, turn over vehicles, and perform automotive adjustments on the fly, thanks to Nuts & Bolts’ use of the item manipulation friendly Havok engine, and Banjo can still…uh, run around, jump and swim.

Once you leave the town and enter a level, however, you aren’t restricted to your metal-box-on-wheels when selecting a vehicle to traverse the game’s gorgeous environs.

Gameplay herein involves finding and accepting challenges, activated by talking to new and returning characters in the levels. Winning challenges in turn nets you more jiggies, which are used to unlock new levels.

Challenges come from in a variety of forms, ranging from something simple, like racing someone around a route made into the level, hard, like protecting a helpless character or location from hordes of Grunty’s new malevolent grunt-bot henchmen, or ridiculous, like hard-boiling a giant egg by transporting it into an active volcano.

Occasionally Nuts & Bolts forces you to use a vehicle designed for a particular task, but most of the time, you have free reign over what mode of transportation you pick. Collected notes can be used to buy new vehicle parts and blueprints, which brings us to the game’s most fun feature: its robust vehicle editor.

Nuts & Bolts’ open-ended design lets you change, modify, or completely scrap vehicles to build something new. And although creating a running vehicle could sound daunting to non-gearheads such as myself, the process has been streamlined for gamers of any age.

Whether you’re building from a blueprint or starting from scratch, the process is simple—lay down the basic components in your rotatable workspace and the editor will display each part in green, red or yellow if the vehicle’s components will or won't work together, or if something’s missing.

The game’s varying challenges make modifying and creating new vehicles necessary, but the trial and error process is also a lot of fun. Until you get a basic grasp of weight, physics and part stats, you’ll probably be laughing at yourself over some of your results.

Finally, when you think you’re all set for a level, you can test out your contraption using the game’s in-garage test course. The ability to access Mumbo’s garage in Showdown Town before starting any challenge is also a welcome feature, which makes performing vehicular tweaks a breeze, and saves you from the tedium of driving back to the garage or entering a level to test out your new creation.

As you progress in the game, you can work your way up from basic cars to anything from a series of connected cars that look like a centipede to jumping, four-wheels cube covered in weapons—simply put, the only limit to how ridiculous you can make something is your imagination, so long as you have the necessary parts.

And much like the game’s whimsical aesthetic, the aforementioned humor is everywhere. Much like the mission structure in open world games like No More Heroes and Grand Theft Auto, Nuts & Bolts eschews a deep narrative for a script that mostly involves conversations with characters presenting challenges, but its still often pretty funny.

Although in previous games Kazooie has been the cynical one, in Nuts & Bolts, both she and Banjo have become pretty jaded, and are well aware when they’re being asked to participate in a useless fetch quests or menial tasks to the point where the two often chastise or make fun of characters who seem less aware of their own game-based existence.

Constant in-jokes and references also pop up frequently, in levels like Banjo-Land, an amusement park-like area themed after locations from previous Banjo adventures, (now presented as a museum), and LOGBOX 70, which is basically the inside of a giant Xbox 360, complete with spinning game discs of old Rare titles.

Familiar themes and the series’ trademark unintelligible-animal-noise “voice acting” are present as well, and Nuts & Bolts even breaks the fourth wall by having elements the game admits were cut from the final release appear in cameos (read: inflatable sheep), making this one a much smarter game than you might assume from the constant presence of a dopey-looking bear.

Aside from the game’s great sense of humor and creativity, though, Nuts & Bolts does have a few loose screws. For one, the game’s challenges range greatly in difficulty, and, much like any game with racing elements in it, computer controlled characters cheat from time to time.

On top of that, some vehicles’ controls are way too sensitive—to the point where one turn taken slightly the wrong way will result in a series of unwieldy turns or circular spins, which, in a timed-based event against perfect CPU opponents is often the kiss of death.

But the most disappointing thing about Nuts & Bolts is that its creative mechanical design and clever sensibilities don’t always follow-through in the game’s challenges, which are usually little more than races, escort services, attack or defend scenarios, or item fetch quests. Given the sheer amount imagination in the rest of the game, it seems an almost criminal misstep that more inventive tasks weren’t used, and can make the game feel more frustrating than it should.

While this isn't a make or break deal, it is worth noting—the game certainly wouldn’t be any worse with more platforming elements and more varied tasks for vehicle use. Surprisingly, it doesn’t ruin the experience, and for what it does, the game does pretty well.

Nuts & Bolts may not be for everyone—the vehicular mechanic is far more than a gimmick, but it’s the kind of thing you’ll either love or hate. Regardless, Rare took a big chance with the game’s mechanics, and its innovation and reflexive nature is exactly the kind of forward thinking the industry needs, even if Nuts & Bolts’ level design could have used a little more time under the hood. Whether you’re a gearhead or are just looking for something different, this one puts the screws to the competition (sorry, I couldn’t resist). Check it out.

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