Sonic Unleashed Review:

Cartoony Crap Or Classy Act?

by dkpatriarch

© 2009 David Hilton

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Sonic is the immortal gaming icon who cannot die, it would seem.  His latest outings have been poor but he has been kept alive by both his fame and the party Olympic and tennis games that feature his blue spiky hide.

Now we have a new fully ‘Sonic’ game called Unleashed and the question is will it revive past glory, or will it sink the hedgehog closer toward inglorious termination.  The answer is…well, yes he’ll survive, but if he wants to be a star again, he’ll have to reinvent himself.  And I don’t mean with a new haircut.

Unleashed begins with a Star Wars-esque view of a planet followed by space ships moving into screen.  We see Dr. Eggman is up to no good again, capturing the speedy Sonic and somehow using him to break the planet apart in a typically demented plot to release Dark Gaia, a power that will threaten….well everything and make Dr. Eggman giggle with glee.

The continents on the planet and the inhabitants from the various towns have been affected, but so has poor Sonic.
• Sonic Unleashed – Day and Night 360 Launch Trailer

He has become a ‘werehog’ by night, forced to slow down and look like an ungroomed grey mess with big razor claws and pointy dagger teeth.  Mind you, those claws and strength he gains come in handy, as do his elastic arms, in his quest to use chaos emeralds to re-join the continents and stop the Dark Gaia from maturing.

He meets up with a bunch of furry colourful creatures (and I don’t mean colourful as in personality because they are typical annoying cartoony characters) and townsfolk from each of the real-world based locations.  He then runs, jumps, and fights his way to victory.  So a lot of fluff for story then.

The thing is, Sonic is a game that should be targeted at kids too, and the cartoony characters, cheesy dialogue, and silly story do appeal to them, based on the reactions of my kids who helped me with the review.

The big problem with this game, though, is that it is schizophrenic.

It seems to want to appeal to hardcore “I only like challenges” adult fans of the original Sega Sonic games and to the kiddies who only know him from the party games and who will be frustrated more often than they should be with the challenge.

It seems to want to introduce some new elements but stay firmly grounded in the past with some truly poor ‘old school’ ideas. It seems to want to be a fast game and a very slow game.

It seems to want to be like an exhilarating roller coaster ride but also like a traditional jump and fall to your death platformer too.

This game has a lot going for it, though, so I’ll start with the positive side of things.

It is beautiful.  Those who decided to create “global environments” based on real world locations like an African village, Santorini in the Greek Isles, Italy, an Inuit village and more get big pats on the back because their versions of these places are more appealing than fantastical locations and are truly artistically realised in the game.

They look like they were designed for a CG film. Even when day-time Sonic is at full speed the graphics are smooth, clear, varied and often stunning, especially when Sonic is launched into the air and you get an often spectacular overview.  This level of graphical detail for this sort of game is unusual.

If I was picky I would point out the collision detection of arms swinging through walls and that Sonic doesn’t cast any shadows. A slightly more advanced dynamic lighting system would have made the graphics even more amazing, but this is a cartoon environment, so that’s probably being greedy.

After you unlock a few areas you have towns with different alleys and passages and ‘hub’ areas where you can do a limited amount of exploring or move onto other day and night challenges if you have enough tokens.  Exploring and finding ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’ tokens and other goodies, talking to people, visiting shops, and performing mini-quests for some of the NPCs gives the game an interesting, if limited, roll playing game (RPG) element to it.

The ability to change night to day and vice versa also changes how each place looks and the different quests you can do.  The problem is that this inclusion doesn’t really seem consistent with the fast-pace focus of the daytime Sonic levels.

I can see Sega were aiming for diversity but the constant change of pace from racing levels to slow exploring in towns or the platforming and fighting levels with Sonic the ‘werehog’ at night, makes for a game that is a bit all over the place, not seeming to know what it wants to be.

To be honest this didn’t bother me a lot, except that you seem to spend more time as ‘werehog’ jumping from platforms than you do as day Sonic rushing through towns and along the Great Wall of China.  So not necessarily a bad point, but an example of the duality of the game.

Interestingly, though, my kids didn’t mind the changes of pace.  The youngest said: “I like speeding” complete with “whoosh” sound to emphasise this fact and then added “and the explosions and fighting!”.   My second child simply said: “It looks great and I love speeding but I don’t like jumping and falling in the water and dying”.

So day Sonic is a hit with his speedy levels that mix 3D and 2D perspectives, but night Sonic is good only for the fighting and smashing in doors and finding things.  They hate the platforming and antiquated system where they die.  I tend to agree.

This mixing things up is further demonstrated by the dog (or hog)-fighting in a biplane doing quick-time presses to kill enemy robot ships and the inevitable boss fights, which also tend to have quick-time events.  These are not overly done though, so even though I’m sick of quick-time events as a whole, I’ll let these slide.

The extra RPG-like side quests seem rather meaningless but add something to the game when you are stuck and sick of repeating a level over and over to try and advance the game.  You perform tasks like exorcising Dark Gaia with a special camera at night from townsfolk suspected of ‘acting strange’, to collecting and delivering souvenirs and foods from around the world, to helping a rather ’sus’ businessman give a bunch of gifts to a little girl (Hmmm…).

When you fight and destroy baddies you collect yellow diamonds that give you experience points to upgrade your day and night Sonics, which is also like an RPG.  You need to find special ‘boots’ which along with the ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’ tokens allow you to advance to future levels.

The idea of night and day changes to the towns and having the ‘world map’ so that you can choose where you go are great but there doesn’t seem to be a screen listing the side quests you have started.

So the game has several styles of game in one trying to make a cohesive whole….and may have done so if not for some very poor decisions, which brings me to the negatives.

First off, die-hard Sonic fans may disagree with me, but the idea to appeal to the hardcore with challenging levels where you die over and over and only have a limited number of lives is antiquated next to accessible games like Prince Of Persia which don’t make you die and feel the kind of frustration that only the old school ‘try and try again’ philosophy does.

To add to that, to have a limited number of lives so that if you die too often you have to return back to the start of the level instead of the last checkpoint (dying often due to camera problems in the night levels, or the sheer speed, or running out of boost in the day levels) is absolute lunacy.  Dumbest decision ever.

What this does is alienate those who are not the obsessive “must get it right” gamers, the casuals who are attracted to Sonic as an assumed accessible game, and kids who don’t have the patience or attention span to ‘perfect’ a level like hardcore gamers do.  Just dumb.

Then the levels themselves become way too frustrating: the speed levels which first made me and the kids scream ‘whooooaaaa’ with delight soon become the chore of trying to avoid the increasingly added ‘death traps’ where you plunge to your death or drown because you pressed the wrong button and haven’t yet memorised the track or have run out of boost to get past these areas.  Then they also throw in a few platforming areas in these formerly fast levels that just make the levels grind to standstill.

The slower-paced ‘werehog’ levels are great when you get to fight, smash things, and solve some puzzles, but the platforming is a killer, with a terrible camera wobbling and spinning all over the place and the number of trial and error jumps that lead to your death high.

On top of those ‘artificial game-extending techniques’, you will often have to replay previous levels (especially the speedy day-Sonic ones) to try and get these tokens you need to keep going.  On the other hand, the transition from 3D to 2D and back again and the different paths you can take in the day Sonic levels is well implemented, so not all ‘old school’ stuff needs to be dumped.

The controls for the most part are good, but Sonic can feel a bit loose and imprecise, which isn’t good in the rather ordinary platforming sections.  There also seems to be some slow response sometimes in the button presses, which is deadly in a game where timing can be everything.

The ‘werehog’ controls for the fighting are basic but fine and the quick-time events remain mostly your choice…you can beat the baddies up using the fighting combos you have upgraded to or sometimes go in for a quick kill with a quick-time event.  You also have a temporary power-up where you howl and really can cause havoc (the kids loved that!).

The sound is another example where my mixed feelings about this game reappear.  The tunes are different for day and night and are appropriate for the world locations.  The music actually starts off as rather catchy and pleasant but the tune is repeated over and over while you are in the area and gets to the point where it is embedded into your brain so that at night in bed you still hear it and wish it would stop.

The voice work is pretty awful.  If I go somewhere exotic like a Greek Isle I do not want to hear an American-accented obviously Greek-looking mustached man ask me if I’d like an ice cream.

Sega, in its press sheet, talks about ‘evolutionary gameplay’.  The problem is that the gameplay hasn’t evolved enough to leave behind the poorly implemented ‘lives’ system, the ordinary trial and error platforming, or the backtracking which more modern games have replaced with accessible rewarding fun gameplay that attracts gamers of all ages.

Sonic Unleashed has a lot to like about it.  The environments and graphics are top notch, the variety and RPG elements, though somewhat incongruous, could have been great without the poor platforming and a bit less of the ‘werehog’, and the speed sections could have been even better too without the constant deaths and need to collect tokens. The transition from 3D to 2D and back again is well implemented.

If Sonic can stop trying to be both ‘old school’ and ‘evolutionary’ and just stick to being a solid game with well-paced variety and exploration, without the punishing challenge which alienates kids and casuals, it really could own the ‘cute, cartoony and fun’ niche.  Instead it tries to straddle the past and present too literally and, like Sonic does so often in the game, falls a bit flat.

“7.2/10

© 2009 David Hilton

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