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Sonic Unleashed (Multiformat)
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RRP: £49.99 buy for £29.97
Release date: 28 November
The little blue hedgehog is back – but instead of fans of the speedy one waiting in excited anticipation, they’ll be dallying with a sense of dread and doom. In recent years Sonic games have been generally very poor. The spiky one has strayed from the loop-the-loop path into a variety of platforming disasters with annoying side-kick characters and clumsily handled spin-offs. The simple mechanic of speed and smoothness is the key to Sonic’s success, and it’s this heritage we hope will be restored. So have they done it this time? Well sort of.
Sonic Unleashed introduces you to a beautiful world full of blue skies, fabulous environments from around the splintered world, torn apart by the evil Dr Eggman. Sonic’s control is initially sublime, with levels that you scream through at an intense pace slipping smoothly from 3D to 2D viewpoints for different sections. If you’re playing on the Wii you’ll have to do a bit of an unwelcome Wiimote waggle to boost you forward but you can always substitute a traditional controller. The Hedgehog engine has been in development for three years and you can see the time that’s gone into bringing Sonic back to his speedy roots, where the controls are so intuitive the game almost plays itself.
Unfortunately, we can’t end the review there and go out and celebrate like it’s 1991 and we’re all back playing our Mega Drives. Sadly the perfect formula has been messed with yet again. You’ll actually spend most of the game playing a “werehog”. Once the sun goes down, Sonic becomes a lumbering, hard-to-control furry monster who’ll play through the night-time levels, fighting enemies and pushing blocks around in slow boring levels. The game is almost a symbolic representation of everything that’s happened in the series’ history – a few fleeting moments of fast, furious fun under a blue sky, now overwhelmed by dingy levels – and clumsy gameplay made by developers out of touch with their audience.
7/10
Review by Kirsten Kearney
