Sonic Unleashed (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3) Review

After the critical failure of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), Sonic Team decided to drastically change the Sonic the Hedgehog formula with Sonic Unleashed. In Sonic Unleashed Sonic now, controversially,  turns into a Werehog at nighttime. This review will judge Sonic Unleashed on its own merits.

The main gameplay of Sonic Unleashed is split up among daytime stages, nighttime stages, stages on Tails’ plane, and walking around towns. Daytime stages feature a brand new playstyle for the 3D Sonic the Hedgehog series. Sonic now controls much more loosely and his stages are much more linear, though there are some minor branching paths and collectables to find. Most of this gameplay style boils down to pressing the new Boost button, which uses Boost Gauge which is built up by collecting rings, in order to force Sonic through linear paths, destroying everything that comes into his path at an extremely high speed. Nighttime stages features Sonic’s new Werehog form and it plays very similarly to LEGO video games. Sonic’s Werehog form moves much more slowly than his normal form, instead using his greatly enlarged arms to fight enemies. There are a surprising amount of moves that Sonic can preform with different face buttons, but the game doesn’t provide enough of a challenge to make using those move purposefully necessary. Stages on Tail’s plane appear extremely rarely and involve pressing buttons shown on screen in both the correct order and before they disappear from the screen. Walking around towns mostly functions as padding, as the vast majority of possible conversations with the people in those towns are completely optional and are not particularly engaging or interesting. Throughout the game there are also collectable Sun Medals and Moon Medals that appear to be optional at first, but in reality a large amount of them are required for progression. This is mostly fine for the nighttime stages, as those are already slow in pace and Sonic’s Werehog form is suited for walking into small spinning medals. However, these required collectables don’t work nearly as well in daytime stages. Daytime stages are obviously meant to be completed as quickly as possible, given that Sonic’s daytime exclusive Boost move is used for this purpose only. The Sun Medals and Moon Medals require the player to either extremely quickly react to one of those medals appearing on screen and move Sonic to their position with incredibly sensitive controls, or bring Sonic to a full stop and use Sonic’s awkward base running speed and slippery movement to walk into the medals, ruining the flow and going against the intended design of daytime stages. There are also RPG style experience points that Sonic picks up that can be given to a variety of attributes that are not explained very well. A good use of this RPG style system is granting Sonic’s new moves in the nighttime stages, which could have easily been achieved in a different way, but it is otherwise completely unnecessary and feels shoehorned in. Overall Sonic Unleashed is far from a difficult game, even up until the very end. The abundance of lives and short stages with game overs that only send Sonic back to right outside of the entrance to the stage mean that there is hardly any punishment for death. The hardest thing the reviewer experienced was trying to pick up medals in a daytime stage that did not allow Sonic to come to a full stop, forcing the player to use the extremely sensitive controls to maneuver Sonic in front of the medal in a short timeframe. Even the final boss was hardly a challenge.

The controls in Sonic Unleashed are mostly fine, with the one exception being Sonic’s homing attack being mapped to the Boost button instead of the jump button despite the Boost button eventually getting a second use while in the air and the jump button having none.

Sonic Unleashed is the first game to use Sonic Team’s Hedgehog Engine, and it looks rather good. There are a large amount of graphical effects and detailed environments present in the game that impressively fly past Sonic as he runs in his daytime stages. Nighttime stages are much less impressive, but certainly don’t look bad. The only questionable graphical choice is the design of the humans which are not appealing and don’t exactly fit in with the rest of the game’s art style. Unfortunately, neither the Xbox 360 nor PlayStation 3 are capable of running these impressive graphics at a stable frame rate. The game frequently stalls and is often running below 30 FPS on both consoles. This is particularly annoying on daytime stages where the window of time to react is already small enough without additional frame rate lag. Strangely the frame rate seems to be the worst at the beginning and end, with the rest of the stages being much more stable. Overall Sonic Unleashed‘s visuals impress but its performance absolutely does not.

Sonic Unleashed‘s soundtrack is arguably the worst in the main series to that point, with Crush 40’s absence being a particularly disappointing, but it is still better than many other games’ soundtracks. One obvious exception is the nighttime battle theme, which is not only not very good on its own, but also incredibly irritating because it plays constantly in every nighttime stage, starting from the very beginning each time. Voice acting is also present and it is mostly well executed, but nothing amazing.

Sonic Unleashed‘s plot is nothing amazing either. It is not an engaging or particularly interesting story, but a large portion of it can be completely skipped and there are not too many intrusive walls of text boxes. The world that the game takes place in is not particularly interesting either, with the game taking place in mostly generic scenes that have obvious real-life inspirations.

Sonic Unleashed feels like a more substantial Sonic the Hedgehog game than most. Unfortunately a lot of the time spent playing the games feels like padding or is spent collecting those collectables that should have been optional. Beyond the main campaign the player can try to achieve better ranks on stages, collect additional collectables, and try some additional challenges. Overall it is hard to justify buying Sonic Unleashed at full price unless you are the type of Sonic the Hedgehog fan to already own the game by now, but it is much more worth its price at the heavily discounted prices it is often sold at years after its release.

Overall the reviewer would give the game a 6.5 out of 10.

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