Review: Sonic Unleashed (PS3)

Mon, Dec 29, 2008

If anybody truly needed a Christmas miracle this year, it was poor old Sonic the Hedgehog. Five months ago, we spent some time with our old blue pal at E3, taking a sneak peek at Sega's latest attempt to revitalize the flagging franchise: Sonic Unleashed. Distancing themselves from the abysmal Sonic 2006, Sonic Team promised us an experience in the classic Sonic vein in some speedy, beautiful levels, along with some all-new brawling and platforming action through Sonic's new "werehog" form. Like good Sonic fans, we smiled, crossed our fingers, and held out hope, reassured that this time, this time, we'd finally get the Sonic game we'd been waiting for. And, like Sonic fans always do, we got hosed.

Sonic Unleashed is not going to rekindle gamers' love for the feisty hedgehog. Once again, those of us who remember the glory days of his 16-bit escapades will sigh and shake our heads, while those getting their first impression of him will question why the character is so popular, if this is how a typical Sonic game plays. By now, a Sonic review practically writes itself, conveying yet another series of disappointments, marred by the same flaws that Sega seems incapable of fixing: Annoying secondary characters, frustrating level design, infuriating camera, et cetera. What's most disappointing of all, however -- what's really and truly tragic about Sonic Unleashed -- is just how close Sega came to getting it right, for a change.

This may seem rather incongruous with the damning verdict I expressed moments ago, but running through a stage as Sonic the Hedgehog is exhilarating, visually pleasing, and enjoyable. The new "Hedgehog Engine" which powers Sonic Unleashed has not been a wasted effort, allowing our hero to sprint his way through highly detailed worlds at obscenely fast speeds, keeping the animation moving quick and smooth, and the controls nice and responsive. A player who propels Sonic through the levels at full tilt will get a wonderful sense of speed, feeling like they're barely hanging on for the ride as the blue blur flies into loops, across rails, and through enemies as the scenery swaps seamlessly from side-scrolling to forward-running, and back again. The levels feel gigantic in every way, allowing Sonic to soar hundreds of feet up in the air, and run for miles across sandy deserts, frozen wastes, and bleached rooftops.

Sonic's repertoire of moves is effective and satisfying, keeping him moving through the various obstacles and platforms without having to slow down too often. As in all of his 3D outings, the hedgehog is equipped with a homing attack, allowing him to fling himself through the air into nearby enemies, or into springboards and handholds, for flashy mid-air combos that will send him from foe to foe (with the right timing). Sonic has also picked up a few new tricks: During the levels' forward-running portions, Sonic can weave left and right around perils, but he can also make some quick lateral leaps with simple taps of the shoulder buttons, allowing players to test their reflexes against incoming pillars, barrels, spikes, and more. Sonic can even "drift" into his turns with the circle button, whipping quickly around corners and through hairpin turns without losing an ounce of speed.

Most impressively of all, Sonic can store energy from the rings he collects and, as in Sonic Rush, expend the energy in a massive burst of speed, allowing him to zoom through enemies, obstacles, and more as the stage blazes past in a blur. With a few other tricks like wall-jumping and mid-air tricks, players are in for some genuine, old-school Sonic gameplay, mixed fairly well between tricky timing and platforming, and mad dashes through a spectacular tableau of lovingly designed scenery that is moving too fast to be appreciated. Whether or not the PS3 is capable of Blast Processing, the sensation of speed is omnipresent, the controls are responsive, and the levels are a treat to look at. Sonic is as much fun to play with as he has ever been in 3D, rivaling or exceeding his exploits in Sonic Adventure 1 or 2.

It sounds like great fun, and truthfully, it is fun. It's by no means perfect; there are occasional bugs in the audio, it's tough to turn around if you need to, and there are times when the game will hiccup just a little. Still, while it may not be flawless, it is pretty damn good, proving that Sonic can still provide a fun time when he's doing what he does best. The problem, unfortunately, is that the exciting and fun experience I've just described accounts for roughly 5% of Sonic Unleashed. The rest of the game is a godawful mess, burying the well-executed fun beneath a crushing heap of infuriatingly bad gameplay and tedious filler.

The premise behind Sonic Unleashed is not a tremendous departure for the series; in fact, the game assumes you're already well-versed in Sonic lore. As the adventure begins, Sonic has already assembled the Chaos Emeralds, tracked down Dr. Eggman's terrible orbital weapon, and transformed into Super Sonic in order to annihiliate Eggman's robot armies. None of these familiar story elements are introduced or explained; it's taken for granted that you'll recognize this explosive, epic battle as just another day for Sonic and Eggman.

From there, the game introduces its new twist. Eggman, seemingly on the edge of defeat, uses the Chaos Emeralds to summon yet another world-consuming horror which immediately begins ripping the planet to pieces. Sonic is caught in the wake of the cataclysm, and as a side effect, he turns into a cross between Jon Talbain and Stretch Armstrong. This transformation, however, only occurs at night -- coincidentally, when the world-consuming horror is also most active. With the planet hanging in the balance once again, Sonic is joined by Tails, Amy, and an exceptionally annoying new sidekick, Chip, in a quest to recharge the Chaos Emeralds and save the day.

Sonic the "Werehog," as he is known in his altered state, loses his iconic speed, and instead gains a handful of agile platforming moves, as well as several combat combos to fight the hundreds of enemies he will face during the nighttime stages. In an effort to further balance Sonic Unleashed between insane speed and precise platforming, these stages are intended to challenge players in a different way, allowing Sonic to cling to ledges, double-jump, swing from bars and handholds, balance on beams, and manipulate levers and objects in a Prince of Persia-style puzzle-platform experience. The actual result is like taking the buggy and frustrating gameplay from Sonic 2006 and making it slow and boring.

As much as I had hoped to avoid saying the difference is "like night and day," it's truly an apt analogy -- everything that is good and enjoyable about the speedy daytime stages is completely the opposite in the nighttime stages. Where the stages are attractive, varied, and expansive during the day, at night they become largely formulaic and unremarkable. Sonic the Werehog can't fly down rails and run on water, so his stages are much more compact and predictable. Enter an open area to fight a bunch of enemies, walk along a ledge and climb a few handholds to another open area for another fight, jump over a long gap to another open area, and so on. There are a few visual treats on occasion, but they are few and far between, as opposed to the endless stream of epic moments found during the day.

Where the daytime stages are followed by an excellent, simple, and effective camera, swinging from side-scrolling to a chase view at just the right moments, the camera at night is uncooperative and obstructive, frequently getting pinned in corners, shifting at precisely the wrong moments for crucial jumps, staying immobile when you'd like to move it, and worse. The animation, too, begins to grind and stutter rather frequently, turning Sonic's massive fights into a strobing, jerky mess of unfollowable attacks, forcing players to simply hit the buttons and hope for the best.

Worse still, the controls are barely playable. Where Sonic's daytime controls are usually fairly quick, responsive, and easy to manage, playing as the Werehog is an exercise in wildly mashing the controller and praying for functionality. Sonic has quite a few flashy combos in his arsenal for combat, but as mentioned, the choppy animation prevents them from being timed and executed very effectively. The platforming controls, on the other hand, are nearly unforgivable, utilizing some staggeringly bad design for Sonic's new moves, leading to needless falls, missed moves, and a lot of irritating repetition.

Most of the Werehog platforming controls are based around the circle button as a context-sensitive "grab" move, allowing Sonic to reach out with his stretchy arms and snag a ledge, pull up onto a handhold, or swing from a bar. When Sonic approaches the obstacle du jour, a green targeting reticle will appear, at which point the button can be pressed to move upward and onward. For some reason, however, the window of opportunity for these moves is alarmingly small, allowing the grab to be made only when Sonic is at a precise distance from the object. A few inches too far, or even too close, and Sonic will refuse to grab it. Countless times, I found myself physically touching a ledge I wanted to climb, but Sonic had to actually fall a couple of feet underneath it before he was able to reach out and catch it, lending an unwelcome risk and difficulty to what should have been a perfectly simple maneuver. This also meant that, thanks to the jerky and inconsistent framerate, that Sonic would often fall right past his "grab window" without registering my frantic button presses, falling to his death with no possible recourse.

There is little or no joy to be found in the plodding pace, sluggish controls, and repetitive nature of Sonic Unleashed's nighttime stages. So, naturally, these stages last five times as long as their daytime counterparts. This is not an exaggeration: Even including a few deaths and learning experiences, the fast-paced hedgehog stages tend to last 3-7 minutes apiece. Completing a nighttime stage, on the other hand, takes roughly half an hour, thanks to countless identical combat events, forced repetition of the awkward platforming, and Sonic himself -- the fastest character in all of gaming, who now refuses to travel above a light jog. Once completed, stages can be revisited under specific "challenge" conditions, e.g. defeat a certain number of enemies, or complete the stage within a time limit. It is considered a challenge to beat the nighttime stages in under twenty minutes, which is far longer than one should really be made to play these dull excursions.

Amazingly (and bafflingly), as bad as the Werehog stages are, they are not the worst part of the game. Sonic Unleashed is a very good game, buried underneath a very bad game -- which is then locked behind a completely worthless game, which will, eventually, actually prevent you from playing the other two. Sonic Unleashed is tied together with an RPG-style series of hub worlds, hiding its stages behind pointless NPC interaction and a remarkably bad interface, topped off with utterly nonsensical level entry barriers.

As Sonic makes his way around the world to thwart Eggman's plot, he visits a number of regions which house the various in-game stages. These hub regions are home to a broad cast of instantly forgettable NPCs, each more concerned with their daily chores and relationships than with, say, the ripped-apart planet they now inhabit. At any given time, perhaps one of these characters will have anything relevant to say regarding your current objective, yet at times you are forced to stop and talk to every last one, in the hopes of finding that one necessary clue to advance the game.

Case in point: Early in the game, Sonic rescues a batty old professor from Eggman's clutches. This fellow happens to know how to keep the planet from exploding, so he quickly allies with Sonic, guiding the young hedgehog as to where he ought to visit next. Upon achieving an objective, Sonic has to go back and visit with the professor to learn where to go next, thus requiring him to load up the world map, load the hub world where the professor lives, load the professor's house, and finally meet with him, only to get a textual instruction of where to go next. The game could simply have said "Next stage: Here," but no, it forces you to push through five loading screens, two uninteresting hub worlds, and physically drag yourself to the stage entrance in an area that, somehow, controls worse than the rest of the game.

It really is a remarkable feat of poor interface design when you make players pine for a simple menu instead of what you've given them. It should also say something about your hub worlds if a player finds themselves dying six times en route to the actual stage and only once or twice during said stage. Sonic, who controls excellently when he is allowed to run very quickly along a largely linear stage, becomes nightmarishly awkward when placed in a free-roaming, 3D area with awful camera control. There is no good reason for these hub worlds to exist, apart from some barely notable side quests. However, let it never be said that Sega can't take a bad idea and make it even worse.

Much like collecting stars in Mario 64, or notes in Banjo-Kazooie, accessing new stages in Sonic Unleashed is contingent upon the collection of several shiny MacGuffins -- in this case, sun medallions for the daytime stages, and moon medallions for the night stages. Unfortunately, while other such games will sprinkle their collectibles all over the place, requiring only that a player take the time to reasonably explore his environment, these medallions are placed in difficult positions. They are hidden behind obstacles, placed on high platforms and hard-to-reach places, or stuck at the end of tricky one-chance-only jumps. A small handful of these medallions are left out in the small hub worlds, relatively easy to obtain at any time, but most of them have been hidden away within the game's stages, ensuring that players will be forced to repeat these old areas before they are allowed to advance the game.

It's honestly cruel, the way these medallions are placed: During the daytime stages, they are nearly always in places that whip past you before you can try to get to them, immediately before a long one-way jump or fall. Still, it's one thing to make a player repeat a five-minute playthrough of the game's daytime stages; it's quite another to tell a player "Sorry, you're six medallions short for the next level, have fun playing through a half-hour nighttime stage in hopes of finding a couple more." Plus, wouldn't you know it, the majority of the medallions are in the nighttime stages, meaning that you'll be forced to spend even more time in them just to get anywhere in the game. Sonic Unleashed won't even let you try to enjoy its well-executed daytime stages and just sleepwalk through the rest: Thanks to the needless medallion system, if you want to get anywhere in the game, you are required to thoroughly explore the nighttime stages and the hub worlds -- neither of which are enjoyable.

One can almost visualize the design meeting for Sonic Unleashed: A collection of designers and executives gather around a table, discussing how to bring about the perfect Sonic game. "Sonic needs to be fast, of course," they say, "So let's work on making stages that are fun to play at high speeds, and make sure the game looks good when it's moving fast. We'll need the kind of pretty levels and quick moves that really made Sonic stand out in his first games." Around the table, there are smiles and nods of agreement. Then, someone else pipes up, "And then what we should do, is..." It's at this point that someone should have reached over and smacked this person. Everything that came after the creation of the speed-based Sonic gameplay was a huge error.

Somewhere, buried deep within the many, many mistakes of Sonic Unleashed, there is a treasure. Running through lush and vibrant locales at a million miles per hour, turning backflips and grinding impossible rails while bouncing off of killer robots, grabbing shiny rings while dodging spikes and bottomless pits... it's there, and it's fun. It really is. In order to get to it, though, you're forced to put up with countless insults and irritations, making Sonic Unleashed a game that should only be attempted by the impossibly patient and forgiving. Given Sonic's own famously short patience, this seems ironic at best.