Sonic Unleashed

"Tell it to you straight: Sonic Unleashed (PS3)"

Ok, the media reviews for this game are bad,I know, but honestly can you really trust the media for rating games anymore? In particular I'm talking about gamespot's horrible review. Honestly, I don't understand how these people are gamers at all, they just sound like whiny little babies who don't know how to play videogames, they bash the game for it's controls and level design, but the point is that the game has a learning curve, you're not expected to be expert at a game the moment you start playing it. I don't even think they know what "unresponsive controls" means. If you press a button on the controller and the character onscreen doesn't do anything, then the controls are unresponsive, but I have the game and I have run across no such problems. Ok well, I'm gonna give my own review of the game and you can compare it to the crappy gamespot review, or should I call it a whiny complaint.

To put in simply, Sonic: Unleashed is a visually stunning game. The daytime level designs are breathtaking and the camera angles are manageable and allow you to take in all the scenery. The transitions between 3rd person view and sidescrolling are seamless, and Sega truly captured Sonic's sense of speed with this one. When you're boosting, the scenery whizzes by and stretches, the music even changes to sound like you're in some sort of air tunnel, all in all, I truly "feel" speed when I play this game. Some of the levels can be a little frustrating if you're going for S-rank, but overall they are really fun to play.

Now for the nighttime levels, the game is completely different...which is good and bad. While I believe the change in pace between night and day is too drastic to be good, I will merit the werehog levels for their difficulty though. The negatives about the werehog levels are that the platforming parts of the levels are very perilous, particularly since you can only grab onto certain ledges, and one death can completely ruin your chances of an S-rank, because you're score goes back to 0; also, there isn't enough variety in enemies, so fighting can get tedious at times, and downright frustrating. They should have added more enemy types and different kinds of finishing combos. However, I do like the new combos you can learn and the whole fighting system seems to have a God of War feel.

Overall, I would have preferred many more daytime levels, especially considering how much longer the nighttime take to complete, and sonic is slightly difficult to control when he's really moving, but it makes sense that his momentum shouldn't make him easy to move.

My rating: 8/10
Music:9/10
Graphics: 10/10
Gameplay(daytime): 8.5/10
Gameplay(nighttime):6/10
Storyline(same old sonic storyline, kinda cliche):6/10
Voice/Characters(kinda annoying, switch to japanese): 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/09

Game Release: Sonic Unleashed (US, 11/20/08)