Sonic and the Secret Rings

"This game is better than previous entries in the Sonic series, but that says little."

One has to wonder what exactly is going on at the Sonic Team headquarters when they are working on a new game. They stopped making good games after they released Sonic and Knuckles and even that was debatable. Since then, they have been pouring out Sonic games for years, but all of them feel like bargain bin games at best. Sonic and the Secret Rings is nowhere near as bad as these other entries but it falls flat in far too many areas to be anything other than a mediocre game.

Let me just get one thing out of the way right now. The storyline in this game is as bland and boring as they come. Sonic is dragged into the story Arabian Nights by a genie to stop the Erazor Djinn from erasing the book. Get it Erazor… eraser… its meant to be clever. This story may keep children interested, but anyone over the age of fourteen is going to be put off by the static cutscenes, lame story and annoying voice acting. But being honest, when Sonic was at his best the storyline to his games was always threadbare at best. Skipping cutscenes as much as I can, the storyline was merely a means to keep Sonic going through the levels.

What this game tries to do is to let you experience what Sonic does best and that is extreme speed. This is incredibly well done and it works to draw you into the game. You will gunshot across a level, dodging pillars that are erupting from the sand, leaping through the air and dashing into an enemy to destroy them before completing the level in record time. The sense of going at a rapid speed is insane in this game, outpacing many of the racers on the market now.

Controls for this game are nice and simple. You hold the Wii controller sideways, with the directional pad at your left hand and the buttons at your right hand. He moves forward at all times and you move him side to side by tilting the controller left or right. When you want to jump, you will press the jump button and hold it as you must charge your jumps before letting go and actually leaping through the air. The longer you charge, the farther you go. This requires a lot of timing as Sonic will kind of skid as you charge a jump, so while he slows down a bit he doesn't stop moving. Thus you must charge your jumps well before you must actually make the jump. The second button stops your forward movement when you hold it down. Sonic will skid to a halt and eventually stop moving entirely. Once he has stopped, you can tilt the Wii controller back towards you if you want him to run backwards.

Even the combat in this game isn't really too complicated. When you want to take out an enemy you must leap into the air and wait for the cursor that appears on them to turn from green to red. Once it does so, you can flick the Wii controller forward to make your blue wonderball fly forward and bash into the enemy. This will more often than not kill the enemy, letting you do it again and bounce into the next one in your path. Should you not kill the enemy, you can dash into the enemy as many times as it takes to kill them.

While this sounds nice and simple, and it is to a degree, it is also the biggest flaw in the game. When Sonic builds up a head of steam he can move so fast that controlling his side-to-side is actually problematic. So it is usually safer to find a comfort zone where he is moving fast enough to get through the stage, but not so fast that you can't control him. But even this becomes a problem in some levels as the controls really do not feel that responsive. They tried to rectify some of this by adding in an upgrade system though.

When you complete levels, you gain experience depending on several factors including how fast you do it and how many enemies you take out, amongst a few others. When you gain a set number of experience Sonic levels up, allowing him to pick up more rings and to learn abilities. These “abilities” are usually nothing more than making the game more responsive. So while there are a few interesting ones, such as a backwards dashing attack that defeats enemies, it really stinks to need to unlock better control for your character. Sonic is not a car, we shouldn't need to unlock better “tires” for him, as it were. The controls should have been tighter to begin with and it almost feels like a slap in the face to unlock this.

Admittedly some of these upgrades are kind of nice: getting to go even faster than before is kind of nice. But this ends up with a really stupid effect on the game. As you progress through the game it starts to go faster, you begin to be able to brake easier and you can start to control Sonic a heck of a lot better. So basically you are forced to struggle through the beginning steps of this game and only later on does the game get more playable. For a game on tracks, control of your character is just about all you have but that isn't the case in this game.

There is one thing that Sonic most certainly cannot do in this game… stop. Even though the basic premise of this game is extreme speed with the blue wonder, the developers realized that this needed to be broken up to avoid it getting too repetitive. So they put in moments where you have to either stop to time a jump or you will need to move slower to avoid dangerous traps. However, Sonic does not stop very well at all. He slowly grinds to a halt and depending on how fast he was going, he might not stop in time. This gets very frustrating and can force you to memorize certain portions of levels before you can get past them.

Speaking of repetitive, you will have to play through each level at least five times to unlock the boss fight and move on to the next level. This gets really redundant, especially considering the fact that each level can sometimes be as short as a minute and a half if you move quickly through it. Even in the older games each area had a few different levels in it to provide some variety. Of course as you go through the game you unlock more worlds and as you get further in each stage you will see new areas of the stage but its still the same basic stage over and over. You might get to move around a bit more, try out some new platforming and just generally get to explore a bit more but thats about it. At least in the old games you went through new portions of the stages.

One short note about this game though: the multiplayer mode is really bad. Its like a bad imitation of Mario Party where you get to play a bunch of cheesy little games, but none of them are any fun. Even something as simple as catching butterflies is a chore in this game when they try to make you use the d-pad on the remote to move your guy and then wave the remote slowly from side to side to make the bubble. I've never had so much difficulty blowing a freaking bubble in my life. I guess that this might entertain kids for a short while but I would imagine that it would be a bit much for even their attention spans.

It's clear that the developers mostly focused on a game about extreme speed and they did this well. However, all the other aspects of the game have suffered for this. What could have been a good game is reduced to a mere shadow of even the older Sonic games. Remember something, when someone says this is the best Sonic game released in years, that's not saying much. Rent this one and see if you like it, its worth that much at least.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/07