A tidy engine helps transform another flawed outing into something promising
It's a fairly pointless exercise by this point to list Sonic's many ailments, but I will anyway because I share Sonic Team's love of kicking a dying animal when he's down. Lower back pains have crippled his once sprightly acrobatics, cranial damage ensures his only social interaction is with other mental degenerates, and the radiation of all those gems he insists on hoarding like a rapid magpie have at last taken their toll and transformed him into Cousin It. It's a bewildering relief, therefore, to find that Unleashed shows a few signs of competence beneath the usual aggrevations.
Unleashed shows potential for Sonic's future, bearing in mind that 'potential' doesn't always have 'realised' glued in front of it. Sega appear to have listened to the baying public for once and the menagerie of squeaky Saturday-morning side characters has been through a brutal culling, with a grand total of four regulars making an appearance and the rest presumably toiling in the salt mines of Nightopia. But apparently Sega weren't listening hard enough, because what people have been crying for more than anything else is for that never-ending roster to stop growing, and Sonic Team are nothing if not set in their ways. Irritating twat-du-jour is Chip, a small, purple and entirely superfluous midget who dispenses barely-useful advice and spends most of the game distracting you with his antics (and I use that term loosely) during cutscenes. He's even more pea-brained than Big, a character who spent the entirety of Sonic Heroes picking his nose and asking his bogeys if they were his lost frog.
It's a curious situation where so many aspects of the game have been tightened up, and yet so many others continue to breed and fester. Needless gimmick this time around is Sonic's ability to transform into a werewolf when the sun goes down, a feature that meshes together with the standard run-and-jump mechanics like a pair of stickle-bricks being handled by a baby. The daytime sections are beautifully crafted epics, with sprawling cities and vast landscapes blurring past you at cheek-flapping speeds, while the night-time sections are slow, crammed solid with enemies and far, far too long. Annoyingly, this trade-off of good and bad pretty well sums up the entire game. Ultra-sonic speed has been balanced by unwieldy hubs and aggrevating item collection, and the loss of characters has been compensated for by some of the worst dialogue committed to paper. But despair not, devoted fans and slavering fan-fic writers, because this is the first Sonic game to step into 3D that actually feels whole and complete.
Unleashed marks the first time that everything has come together on a technical level for the series; the graphics are smooth, the animations superb and glitches rare enough to qualify for the endangered species list. Moreover, after numerous games that wavered drunkenly from the ultra-arcadey to the super-realistic, Sonic Team have finally found a tone that works for the series, nestling firmly at the Pixar end of the spectrum with enough pace and cool to satisfy everyone else. The charmingly cartoonish design makes for pleasing eye-candy amongst the broken glass of the gameplay's sweet jar, and embues the series with a much-needed vitality that sits comfortably alongside the slick presentation. There are moments such as the excellent Egg Beetle boss where you'll blur through the trees, deftly side-stepping rockets and kicking a robot three miles down the road in a somersaulting mess, where at last it all comes together. The speed, the movement, the music, the atmosphere... For the first time you get a genuine feel for being Sonic, even if you're struggling to keep pace at times. And while some of the old tat you wish they'd given up on somehow continues to amble through life with a clean bill of health, so much has taken a turn for the better that if Sonic Team could just learn to drop the moments of instant death and irritating side characters then they could have a pretty competent game on their hands. The chance for a Super Mario 64 moment is dead and buried, but Sonic's 3D epiphany may yet have its moment. Unleashed shows, if nothing else, that Sonic Team finally have the technical competence and the correct grasp of tone to carry their flagship series in the direction it needs. If only they could hire an actual script writer, I might even be tempted to care about the story as well; probably best not to get too hopeful.
Verdict
Aggrevating as always but finally starting to find its feet, Unleashed requires as much patience as ever to slog through, with the rewards for doing so greater than before. Much better than their last effort, which admittedly isn't saying much.
It's a fairly pointless exercise by this point to list Sonic's many ailments, but I will anyway because I share Sonic Team's love of kicking a dying animal when he's down. Lower back pains have crippled his once sprightly acrobatics, cranial damage ensures his only social interaction is with other mental degenerates, and the radiation of all those gems he insists on hoarding like a rapid magpie have at last taken their toll and transformed him into Cousin It. It's a bewildering relief, therefore, to find that Unleashed shows a few signs of competence beneath the usual aggrevations.
Unleashed shows potential for Sonic's future, bearing in mind that 'potential' doesn't always have 'realised' glued in front of it. Sega appear to have listened to the baying public for once and the menagerie of squeaky Saturday-morning side characters has been through a brutal culling, with a grand total of four regulars making an appearance and the rest presumably toiling in the salt mines of Nightopia. But apparently Sega weren't listening hard enough, because what people have been crying for more than anything else is for that never-ending roster to stop growing, and Sonic Team are nothing if not set in their ways. Irritating twat-du-jour is Chip, a small, purple and entirely superfluous midget who dispenses barely-useful advice and spends most of the game distracting you with his antics (and I use that term loosely) during cutscenes. He's even more pea-brained than Big, a character who spent the entirety of Sonic Heroes picking his nose and asking his bogeys if they were his lost frog.It's a curious situation where so many aspects of the game have been tightened up, and yet so many others continue to breed and fester. Needless gimmick this time around is Sonic's ability to transform into a werewolf when the sun goes down, a feature that meshes together with the standard run-and-jump mechanics like a pair of stickle-bricks being handled by a baby. The daytime sections are beautifully crafted epics, with sprawling cities and vast landscapes blurring past you at cheek-flapping speeds, while the night-time sections are slow, crammed solid with enemies and far, far too long. Annoyingly, this trade-off of good and bad pretty well sums up the entire game. Ultra-sonic speed has been balanced by unwieldy hubs and aggrevating item collection, and the loss of characters has been compensated for by some of the worst dialogue committed to paper. But despair not, devoted fans and slavering fan-fic writers, because this is the first Sonic game to step into 3D that actually feels whole and complete.
Unleashed marks the first time that everything has come together on a technical level for the series; the graphics are smooth, the animations superb and glitches rare enough to qualify for the endangered species list. Moreover, after numerous games that wavered drunkenly from the ultra-arcadey to the super-realistic, Sonic Team have finally found a tone that works for the series, nestling firmly at the Pixar end of the spectrum with enough pace and cool to satisfy everyone else. The charmingly cartoonish design makes for pleasing eye-candy amongst the broken glass of the gameplay's sweet jar, and embues the series with a much-needed vitality that sits comfortably alongside the slick presentation. There are moments such as the excellent Egg Beetle boss where you'll blur through the trees, deftly side-stepping rockets and kicking a robot three miles down the road in a somersaulting mess, where at last it all comes together. The speed, the movement, the music, the atmosphere... For the first time you get a genuine feel for being Sonic, even if you're struggling to keep pace at times. And while some of the old tat you wish they'd given up on somehow continues to amble through life with a clean bill of health, so much has taken a turn for the better that if Sonic Team could just learn to drop the moments of instant death and irritating side characters then they could have a pretty competent game on their hands. The chance for a Super Mario 64 moment is dead and buried, but Sonic's 3D epiphany may yet have its moment. Unleashed shows, if nothing else, that Sonic Team finally have the technical competence and the correct grasp of tone to carry their flagship series in the direction it needs. If only they could hire an actual script writer, I might even be tempted to care about the story as well; probably best not to get too hopeful.
Verdict
Aggrevating as always but finally starting to find its feet, Unleashed requires as much patience as ever to slog through, with the rewards for doing so greater than before. Much better than their last effort, which admittedly isn't saying much.
