Game Review – Sonic Unleashed (PS3/360 ver.)
I don’t do this a lot, but there’s a reason for that. I can’t ever make these things timely – I rarely finish anything, or at least not much I didn’t buy used three years after it came out. That said, I did finish this, and the Wii version too. Good times for all. Or… well, it’s give and take. The other reason I’m doing this? I have an incredible disagreement with what I’ve been seeing as this build’s comparative score to the Wii across the board.
Professional review groups range from the kind who make sure the reviewer is a member of a game’s target audience, or do what Game Informer does and every time a new Sonic game comes out have the reviewer state how much he hates the franchise and wants it to die. Let me save you some time wondering on my stand-point, then, in case you’re one of extreme bias, or just a jerk:
I am a Sonic fan. I have obsessively been playing the things since before I had a favorite color, and because of them my favorite color was declared blue. You might have noticed all the blue around here? I like blue. That said, I’ve palyed pretty much everything with Sonic’s face on it, and own all but a few borderline impossible games to get one’s hands on in the franchise – by impossible to own I mean the one arcade title that used a trackball, that stupid thing where you roll a coin down it to get tickets that’s (obviously) also from arcades, and probably some handheld things. Sonic Adventure DX pretty much got me every Game Gear Sonic title ever, and the Gamecube as a whole managed to get most of them on it somehow or other. I know the blue blur’s ups and downs, and have put up with some serious crap in the name of the fandom. I know how bad it can be, but also how good it can get.
That all said, Unleashed isn’t flawless, but compared to 2006′s abysmal “franchise reboot” that (thankfully) seems to have been discarded as the giant failure it was (Zone beat it and labels it, even by the standards of someone who plays games that make me infuriated for kicks, stupidly hard and notably for all the wrong reasons), it’s a definite step in the right direction. Naysayers beware, I am not in the “this franchise needs to die” camp.
As I’ve stated, I’ve played both major builds of the game – the PS2/Wii offering and now the much meatier 360/PS3 offering. The meaty bit is where you’ll have your will made or broken, though, and most reviewers have scorned it and most everything but the Wii version’s day stages as a waste. I beg to differ.
Between both versions, Sonic is his normal speedy self during the day and at night he turns into a beastly thing simply dubbed the werehog. During the day both builds are roughly the same in gameplay, but at night some rather radical differences show up. Sure, the fundamentals are the same, but some control issues mar the Wii, unsurprisingly, while the PS3 had some sadistic level designer that would crawl out from under his rock somewhere and just make random bits utterly evil. On the Wii version, the werehog is an aggravating affair wherein you are by the end of the game waggling like an idiot to put together inaccurate combos, trying to do platforming, and falling off of cliffs because the beast doesn’t interpret your flailing the way you’d like. The PS3 rips a control scheme straight out of God of War, or so LM claims having actually played both, and if you’re more accustomed to more involved brawlers like GoW, DMC, or whatever else is popular lately, you’ll probably find the two-button combo stringing as monotonous as most of the commercial reviewers have. On the other hand, if you’re like me, a DMC retard who needs Easy Auto just not to get frustrated trying to find the unmappable jump button in the first game before he dies, and have thus avoided the genre like the plague like myself, or simply have no experience in it, Sonic provides a relatively simple introductory experience, and if you can appreciate that and put up with the occasional design hiccup in the levels, it’s a completely acceptable way to go with things.
On the day stage front of things, there’s something I’ve frequently heard and simply don’t agree with: the Wii has a better balance of day and night. Simply not true at all.
On the Wii build you’ll get one VERY brief day stage per location, followed by two to FIVE night stages that take anywhere from five minutes to half an hour a piece. On the PS3/360, you get a 1:1 on both, both lasting longer, and then if you like optional stuff there’s extra acts in every world you unlock as the game progresses as opposed to the Wii version’s contextless missions which, I might add, the next-gen builds not only have in equal if not greater abundance and variety, but also give context through the town sections and the people who give the missions to you. Also, the next-gen build sports an entire continent you get possibly a fleeting glance of on the Wii, and notably Empire City’s day stage is possibly the most tingling for my “lets make people watch me play this and get scared of the game as I giggle and do it flawlessly” senses since Speed Highway.
That said, the towns also get a lot of flack, and I predictably also find this undue. If you don’t want to deal with townspeople, you really don’t have to all that often, but I got pretty OCD about it and found myself caring about the events happening in Spagonia more than I have any generic batch of NPCs in RPG history. Every person is identifiable, has their own personality, and was designed by a studio Sonic Team hired because, let’s face it, Sonic Team has never been all that good at making people look good. It paid off.
Never mind the PS3 builds have a bit of an homage to the Tornado stages in Sonic Adventure, even if it is reduced to pushing buttons when you’re told. As an old-school Sonic fan, that made me smile. The fact Knuckles is nowhere to be seen is also a plus in my little world, but I’d forgive you for not agreeing. I know he has his fans, for some absurd reason.
So resounding praise for the next-gen build over the Wii one, right? Not quite.
The day stages on the Wii build were designed by Dimps, the guys behind the Sonic Advance and more recently Rush games. Resultingly, the stages on the Wii build are well-designed but, in honesty a bit boring until the borderline end of the game. To counter this, the next-gen builds feature much longer, more numerous, and interesting day levels, but at the cost of being at times an absolute pile of evil crap. In the game’s final stage, I giggled with glee as I rode a flaming rollercoaster. That said, about the 20th time I saw that thing it got old. The game just spiked in difficulty for a bit and decided to acknowledge it.
Confused? To clarify, bear in mind the night stages follow a similar pattern – Wii has better stage designs, but next-gen is usually more interesting (there are some notable moments in the Wii-build, particularly in Chun-nan, that just don’t happen in the PS3 unless it’s something I haven’t gone back to look for yet), at the cost of deciding to be randomly sinister. The designers seem to know their doing this, as if they’re making it as impossible as they can to achieve that elusive S rank, and your indicator you’re about to be boned is when an extra life is sitting right beyond the latest checkpoint. Unlike some older 3D Sonic games, these suckers respawn every tiem you die, too.
So, yeah, they expect you to die, so much so that they give you another extra life every time you fail. Does it defeat the point of a lives system? Largely. But you start to appreciate it towards the end when you, you know, see the same flaming roller coaster twenty times because the thing it spits you out on sends you flying around like a dang pinball while at some point you just have to grin and bear it because there isn’t much lest you can do. Skill will always prevail in these parts, but that skill also tends to go hand in hand with the near-psychic ability to know what’s going to happen just as it’s about to. Extra lives being handed out or not, with the number of optional missions in this thing that entail not dieing for an entire stage, sections like this are the next-gen build’s absolute greatest downfall.
Otherwise, the only major differences come at the finale – the elements are similar in both builds, but where the Wii has a neat giant robot battle go down and then the lamest Super Sonic segment in the history of the franchise, the next-gen builds reverse that with a giant robot battle that is slow, clunky, and stripepd down to lame even when you get to land blows on the final boss, all of which left me screaming at my TV, followed by a Super Sonic bit that ain’t gonna win any awards but was just hard enough to be satisfying (they are historically either stupid easy or stupid hard), though it really boiled down to “remember how to play NiGHTS?” in the end so maybe other people would find it more aggravating if they had my similar instinct to hold the boost button until the end of time while Sonic veered about like a tard. But no, seriously, stop boosting for a second and suddenly the fight clicks and you do a bit better every time. Kinda like how bosses should be.
On that note, bosses in whole. Both builds have roughly similar bosses, with the next-gen ones being the same designs but shinier and, when Eggman goes curtain fire on your spiny butt, a lot busier. Regardless o your build tho, they aren’t much diffrerent in difficulty on this front, but are probably the most satisfying boss fights in the series’ history across the board… in the day stages. The handful of night stage bosses tend to be discovering a weakness through some puzzle where if you’re stupid Chip will pull a Navi eventually and then Sonic will echo him in case you really don’t get it, and then you beat the crap out of something, have a brief quick-time event spat, and move on with life. It’s a lot less interesting, but still just involved enough to keep you going until it’s done.
So, to wrap things up: No, the games aren’t perfect. Both major versions have their merit, and I’m honestly glad I played both sides of things. The Wii build’s werehog stages will wear on you and it has one of the most disappointing finales in the series’ history (“poke out the big monster’s eyes” has been done plenty of times already, never mind better), while the next-gen version will probably have a couple parts where you want to pull your hair out and beat the game jsut to find the level designers in the credits and begin hunting them down until you find the one responsible for your new-found baldness. If you don’t mind the ocassional bizarre and unannounced challenge, however, I find the PS/360 build to be far superior in every way – there’s more to it, it looks better, the story is fleshed out a bit more by the world actually having everything it was designed to instead of stripped down town stages that may as well be completely absent on the Wii for how much value they add to the game on that version, and ultimately, it’s just more satisfying in the end.
If you’ve got a system that can run it and can find it in your heart give the blur a second chance, the game is presently scarred by the reputation of it’s predecessors and hiding just outside your local bargain bin. Wal-Mart had it for thirty bucks, and at that price I think it’s more than worth checking out if you’ve ever cared for Sonic at all. (An exception to this: If you can’t get online and patch the game with your system of choice, hold off. From what i understand, especially with the PS3 build, the game had some terrible framerate issues at release that have since largely been cleared out. If you can’t patch it, tho, it’s worth noting, as it was one of the biggest complaints initial reviews laid out.)
On the other hand, well, can’t do much about the haters, can we?
EDIT: Due to like five of the things hitting this post on a daily basis, comments disabled due to spambots. :C
