Sonic Unleashed

Review - Unredeeming

Sonic Unleashed is easily the best recent entry into the Sonic series, but that's hardly saying much when getting smacked around the head with a brick wrapped in your own intestines is a more entertaining prospect than enduring Sonic's previous outing. It seems pretty common these days to see the gaming press making fun of Sega's blue mascot, simply because Sonic Team have repeatedly paraded an endless series of disappointing decisions and failed expectations to the point that they've reached a critical mass of turgidity. It's enough to make any discerning gamer's stomach tie itself into knots. Sega are having another go with Sonic Unleashed, the first real entry into the series in two years, and a game with just enough merit underneath its heaping stacks of offal that it's enough to make anyone over the age of twenty who grew up with a Mega Drive want to crawl into their bed and cry.

There are moments when it works, you see. That's what makes the whole thing such an excruciatingly painful experience to play. If only things could be different, and Sega could have the kind of disposable income that Nintendo flaunt around the gaming lands on a daily basis. The world would be a different place if Sega could afford to take risks and design a game without obvious, atrocious design shortcuts and ghastly, blatantly grotty padding sections. But they can't, so Sonic Unleashed is an occasional five-minute frolic of fun bogged down with an hour of boring collecting quests and uninspired attempts to shoehorn in God of War and provide merchandisers with enough avenues to create loads of shoddy stuff they can try and sell.

Particularly unintuitive level design is pretty much the name of the game here, with their poor construction inhibiting Sonic's speedy movement. The transition to 3D has never worked for the little guy, really, and Sonic Unleashed just doesn't do enough to break his meteoric fall from grace, resulting in the unfortunate hedgehog crashing into all my hopes and dreams. He's just too fast, which isn't a problem in itself but is a catalyst for seething rage when you're being forced into situations where precise movement is being demanded. It's hard, after all, to be accurate when a little tug on the analog stick results in Sonic breaking the sound barrier. Stages can only be completed by repetition, and certain areas are so frustrating they could have made Ghandi cuss like a trooper. It's all compounded by plenty of disagreeable and questionable concepts like having to run over water or putting a chasm at the end of an area where you're moving at 300mph. Surely the fact that Sonic Unleashed is often not even a smidge entertaining would have been picked up at QA? There are even a few levels that kill you if you don't move properly within the first couple of seconds.

As the sun sets, Sonic is transformed into his oft-lauded Werehog form, which makes everything a bit darker and lets him have a set of stretchy limbs so he can start his own Kratos appreciation society. The pace slows down a bit, and now instead of having to design visually appealing sections that speed by in a blur, the game can plonk you in various generic looking areas that you progress through very slowly. While the Sonic levels are generally visually resplendent, the Werehog levels are consistently drab. Other parts, too, are just as unforgivably confusing, filled with the kind of platforming that you'd expect to see in a Prince of Persia game only stripped bare of any potential charm and fluidity. The combat is even so unrefined there's no simple way to kill creatures that hover above the ground, and you fight either a horde of generic and repetitive neon foes that have been nicked from Kingdom Hearts or the robots from the daytime Sonic levels. It's usually rudimentarily basic, but there are also a few sections where the difficulty spikes up and you're left in a state of complete misery, contemplating whether or not you should impale your eyes on the prongs of the controller.

But the worst part, the most unapologetically terrible aspect of the game comes in the form of its hub towns, the home of even more terrible collecting quests and an assortment of NPCs. Each is more forgettable than the last, with the sole exception being some shady looking business dude who asks you take presents to a little girl without letting her mother know. Sinister. They're all humans, and none of them bat an eyelid at the fact that you're either a werewolf or a giant talking hedgehog accompanied by a flying blob called Chip that couldn't be more of a generic Japanese sidekick if he tried. No, nobody seems to take a blind bit of notice that there's four creatures in the game (Tails and Amy make brief cameos) that don't fit in with the human theme that everybody else is working. All of the hub towns are particularly jarring, too, and the entire game would have been significantly better were they to have simply been removed completely. I can't help but think Sonic Team are desperate to make a Final Fantasy clone, but shoehorning RPG elements into a Sonic game just simply isn't going to work. Then there's another misguided attempt to emulate Square Enix in an experience system, where you can level up Sonic in both of his forms. I can't understand why Sega let Bioware design the Sonic RPG for the DS when Sonic Team are clearly so desperate to make one themselves.

Sonic Unleashed also refuses to allow you to progress if you haven't collected enough medals that are scattered throughout levels, which means you've got to go back and scour everything just to complete the game. This is a design decision so upsetting it could only have been put in to annoy. It's a travesty of game development that deserves a paragraph for itself.

The blatant attempts at misdirection by Sega are plain to see, as the whizzy heights of the rollercoaster demos shown to the public account for about four percent of the game. And they're good. They clearly want everyone to think that the entire game is composed of these little nuggets of joy. It's not. The rest of the game is shockingly bad, with certain level design segments putting an extra life right next to checkpoints: a sombre, muted admission of design travesty by Sonic Team, as they quietly admit that you'll have to replay this particular segment at least twenty times because the camera will undoubtedly be getting in the way.

As I played the game my own personal notes for Sonic Unleashed became an increasingly angry scrawl of complaints and misery, the further into it all I progressed. For instance, one of the last bosses in Sonic Unleashed is fought with the player controlling a giant colossus - Team ICO's influence, I presume - that's about as easy to manoeuvre as trying to parallel park blindfolded. With no hands. I fought the boss completely gobsmacked that a decision so trite was ever conceived in the first place.

Sega's marketing departments gave British retailers the opportunity to have this game up for sale half price a week after it was released. This particularly desperate grab for customers shows how Sonic Unleashed is clearly devoid of great merit. It's too fiddly and obtuse to appeal to children, and too generic and tacky to cater towards the discerning taste of a gaming adult. The only possible reason you'd have for wanting this game is because it's cheap. The Sonic series presently feels something like a sinking ship, and the only possible thing Sega could do to redeem the series is design an HD version of Sonic 3.

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