Sonic and the Secret Rings

"Dirty little Sonic"

For some reason or another, I had a lot of hope for this game. I mean, I absolutely love Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and Sonic Heroes isn't all that bad, but Sonic the Hedgehog on the Xbox 360 is honestly one of the worst games I've ever played. I don't know what it was about Sonic and the Secret Rings that made me initially interested, but I had some rekindled hope for the little blue hedgehog. While the Wii's controls and some pretty terrible design choices by Sega ultimately ruin what could have been a pretty solid damn game, Sonic and the Secret Rings does manage to do some things right, and maybe there is a little hope for Sonic after all.

What's weird about this game is that instead of doing the obvious thing of using the Wii remote's nunchuck in order to maneuver Sonic around in a classic sort of manner, you hold the Wii remote sideways and steer Sonic like he's a car. Tilt left and he goes left; tilt right and he goes right. How do they pull this off exactly? Well, Sonic is constantly moving. Think Sonic sort of kinda meets House of the Dead in a weird, twisted sort of way.

You are constantly moving, meaning that you have next to no time to think about what you're doing most of the game. Sure, you can back up by pulling the Wii remote towards yourself and you can also completely stop by tapping the 1 button, but I just can't wrap my head around why Sega would choose this kind of control scheme. It's pretty damn horrendous and totally ruins the gameplay.

Because of all this, it's nearly impossible to pull off jumps successfully and taking out enemies will also make you want to throw your remote through your TV. You tap the 2 button to jump, but Sonic seems to randomly just completely stop when you hit the 2 button and other times he'll perform the jump like instructed. If you hold the 2 button, you can charge the jump, and I think that's what the game was attempting to do a lot of the times, though I clearly tapped the 2 button. Will it ever really cost you any cheap deaths? No, but it's still a glaring design flaw that really gets in the way of enjoying the game.

Continuing on with this game's problems, you go through the game mission by mission, and the levels are separated out by chapter and paragraph, sticking to the theme that Sonic has traveled to the pages of a book. You are ranked on each stage based on how well you do, just like usual, but the ranking system is still broken and it still requires a sick amount of skill in some areas just to perform at the lowest grade and at other times it's ridiculously easy to get gold. This mission structure also limits the levels available to you, so instead of progressing through the story level-by-level like you usually do in Sonic games, you are forced to go back through bite-sized segments of the levels you have already done, with barely altered platforming segments and a little half-assed goal to accomplish like “Kill 20 Enemies” or “Collect 99 Rings.” So, instead of getting the bulk of the platforming goodness Sonic usually provides in his other games, you are forced to replay average platforming levels throughout the entire game. Fun? Not hardly.

As you collect rings, perform well in a level, and even collect little experience orbs, you start to level up. No, I'm not kidding, Sega attempted to add some sort of leveling system in Sonic and the Secret Rings, and while it's pretty barebones for the most part, it does add a little bit more flavor to the experience. As you level up, you earn little upgrades that you can assign to one of four rings, and then you can equip one of the rings to aid you in that level. Why they didn't just throw it all on one ring is beyond me, but at least Sega is getting kind of creative here.

We've deduced thus far that Sonic and the Secret Rings is a very shoddy version of Sonic that, while it's not nearly as terrible as Sonic the Hedgehog for the 360, it's still pretty damn bad compared to the average Sonic Heroes and the brilliantly made Sonic Adventure 2 Battle. The meat of the game, though, lies within its multiplayer component, which I'll get into next.

Sonic and the Secret Rings takes advantage of the Wii's unique capabilities here in a way that they should have been done from the start. You can play with up to four players, and you can even have coms (man, I miss saying that word) play with you, in the vein of classic Nintendo 64 games like Pokemon Stadium or Mario Party. You can set the coms on easy, normal, or difficulty settings, and you have a variety of characters from the Sonic universe to play as and unlock.

The multiplayer is, like Pokemon Stadium, set up in a mini-game sort of fashion, and a lot of the different categories rely on a sort of memory game backdrop so the player with the best memory generally can win the games. Regardless of what game you're playing, you are introduced to a set of mini-games, of which there are quite a bit, and you are told what position to hold the Wii remote in, just like in WarioWare: Smooth Moves. The mini-games are actually quite entertaining, with canoeing on the edge of a waterfall and balancing on a ball on a platform over a dangerous body of water as highlights. You are sure to have a blast here and the games can last quite a bit, with some matches ranging as long as two to three hours. Sure, some mini-games are just stupid, but the bulk of the mini-games here are entertaining, and the multiplayer is very easily the best part of Sonic and the Secret Rings, though it would have been nice to have more customizability and freedom over the mini-games you play.

Surprisingly, Sonic games usually have pretty damn interesting stories. Sonic and the Secret Rings does have some high moments strewn out through the disappointingly simple plot, but the bulk of the story is shown to you by little storyboard drawings with some minor animation thrown in there. It's not that the drawings are bad, but the story of a Sonic game should definitely be told the classic way, and that's with Sega's kick ass cut-scenes. Regardless, the story is about Sonic falling asleep while reading a book, and then he wakes up to find a person living in the realm of the story explaining that an evil Djinn (a genie) plans on erasing the stories within the book to then wreak havoc in Sonic's world, and a few plot holes later, you end up in Arabia.

Taking a more Prince of Persia/Aladdin-look to things, Sonic and the Secret Rings doesn't look all that terrible. The water effects are okay and the character models are pretty nice, but the environment is dreadfully repetitive and bland. Some animations are not very well done either, giving the game that unfinished feeling throughout the entire experience. Add on top of that that Sega didn't bother with their usually amazing cut-scenes, and you can tell that Sega honestly didn't try all that hard to make Sonic and the Secret Rings look as awesome as it easily could have done.

On the brighter side of things, the audio quality is actually quite nice. The soundtrack is that classic and corny rock music that you've come to expect from Sonic games, and it's good to see that Sonic and the Secret Rings continues that tradition. The voice acting is just as good as always, though the dialogue was notably worse than previous entries in the series in an attempt to dumb down the game I guess for younger players.

Sonic and the Secret Rings definitely has a lot of missions for you to complete, a slew of unlockable content, and a rather decent multiplayer component, but the only question is, will you want to play it long enough for any of this matter? Diehard Sonic fans will probably have a ball with all this as the challenge provided in the game will test their limits to see if they can get perfect rankings on all of the missions and I'll admit the multiplayer did keep me playing for quite a few hours, but if you aren't obsessed with Sega, chances are you're not going to have the ambition to even complete the game. The missions become tiresome as early as on as the second mission, and while Sonic and the Secret Rings could technically provide hours upon hours of gameplay, I guess you'll squeeze about five to six hours out of it.

Like I said at the beginning of this review, I had a lot of hope for this game. I had hope that it wouldn't be as dreadful as Sonic the Hedgehog and I had hope that it would at least be as good as Sonic Heroes. Thankfully, Sega managed to bring their beloved mascot back from the dead after his last hoorah into games crashed and burned, but they Sonic has yet to reclaim the greatness he achieved in the fourth, fifth, and sixth generations. Is Sonic dead? Well, maybe he's not as dead as I previously thought, but Sega really needs to do something for this classic video game series to stay alive.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/09

Game Release: Sonic and the Secret Rings (US, 02/20/07)