- Joined
- Apr 7, 2008
- Messages
- 7,681
- NNID
- OctagonalWalnut
- 3DS FC
- 0619-4291-4974
Link to original post: [drupal=1913]Sonic Unleashed: Wii Version Review[/drupal]
I recall seeing the very first trailer for this game. It was on YouTube, an official trailer for a new Sonic game. Everyone on the video save for a few was talking about how it was certainly a return to Sonic’s old days – with 2D gameplay and speed. Having been burned by games like Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic and the Secret Rings, I was quick to be cynical and noted that it certainly looked like a return, but we should wait before passing judgment because Sonic doesn’t have a great track record, and they could still screw something up.
Well, they did.
Even after the game came out many claimed it was a really good in the thread, here on SmashBoards. There was lots of chatter about how, for once, the Wii version was actually the best version. I was still skeptical, so I wasn’t prepared to buy the game. I was going to rent it, but one day when I was talking to my friend who owned the game, he offered to let me borrow it. I gladly took the opportunity, and eventually managed to finish the game.
The game starts out confusing you. Apparently, the opening cut-scene is the intro video, before the title screen. Of course, this baffled me because I skipped through it assuming I wasn’t skipping a 5 minute-long video that you need to flow nicely into the next cut-scene. As a result, I didn’t see the intro video until I started it up at a later date. To sum up the cut-scene, Sonic is about to destroy Eggman’s latest plan as Super Sonic when he falls into a trap, and the power of the Chaos Emeralds is used to break open the Earth and unleash Dark Gaia, the game’s main nemesis (since Robotnik/Eggman apparently isn’t enough anymore). In the process he becomes a Werehog, but apparently only remains that way at night.
The most baffling part about this is that Sonic’s shoes apparently grow spikes, despite not being part of his body. Or maybe they are…
Once you’re done wondering why Sonic is an ugly-as-all-hell beast falling from the sky, you’re introduced to the typical, apparently necessary, “I’M GOING TO FOLLOW YOU AROUND AND BUG THE CRAP OUT OF YOU” character of this Sonic game; Chip. He is supposed to be a…chipmunk? Squirrel? Mini-bear/muskrat hybrid? I really have no clue. Of course, he has lost his memory, including the knowledge of his name, so he’s named Chip after his tastes in food.
If you thought it was annoying in Sonic ’06 when you had to wander around town talking to people, the Wii version of Unleashed has turned that dull task into something even more pointless. You have a point-and-click town interface in which you click on different parts of town to talk to people. Of course, 4/5 of the locations in town are generally useless, and a lot of times you have to talk to everyone, then talk to the last person you haven’t talked to, who will open up a new conversation with someone you’ve already talked to. By the end of the game, I used a guide to figure out which of the people gave me things/furthered the plot and talked to them and ignored everyone else.
The game is based around 7 temples, located on 7 different continents (obviously not related to the fact that there are 7 Chaos Emeralds…which you have to restore power to in the temples). Each continent has a Sun Tablet and a Moon Tablet. It never says it directly in-game but it’s pretty obvious that the Sun Tablet opens up a door in the temple to do the daytime stages and the Moon Tablet opens up a door in the temple to do the nighttime stages. By beating the required missions of the daytime stages and the nighttime stages, you get a half of a tablet. Once you beat the required missions of both types of stages, you will have both of them. But apparently you need to find some random person in town to put it together. I guess pushing two slabs of rock together isn’t one of Sonic’s strong suits. This tablet has a star on it and will lead you to the boss stage of the continent. Depending on the continent, you will either fight the boss during daytime or nighttime.
Let me give you an overview of each stage type.
The daytime stages are the type of stage everyone hypes up. I’ll be completely honest with you, while I found them to be pretty fun at first, by the end of the game I realized that, for all of their hype, they’re actually much less than perfect. The first thing is the speed. It’s a blast to be going really fast, grinding on rails, jumping, shooting out of cannons, etc. But much of the daytime levels feel too much on auto-pilot, like a racing game. Is it fun to an extent anyways? Yeah, but it is a little boring, and certainly not a return to Sonic’s roots…he’s “the fastest thing alive”, but none of the classic Sonic games were all that fast. In a few levels, namely the last one in the game, there is a rather large problem that, due to the speed, you have to do a lot of guess-and-check to get through. You might not see something coming, die, and have to restart and remember what to do at that point because you don’t see it coming early enough.
The second issue is the ridiculous missions. Not only are some of them pointless, but they’re just annoying. Go blasting at the speed of sound, but make sure not to hit any pots? That’s difficult AND obnoxious. The worst of them, though, by far, is that REQUIRED time-attack mission on the Eggmanland (final continent) daytime stage. It’s annoying enough if you want to go for all-S-Ranks or whatever, but it took me forever to get that level done and I couldn’t move any further until I beat it.
The final issue is the boosting system. You shake the Wiimote to boost. When in a level, you pretty much want to stay fast, as it’s the point, especially if you want a good ranking on the level. Sometimes you’ll end up hitting a wall, slowing you down considerably. The logical reaction would be, if you have boost power (F-Zero pun not intended), to turn away from the wall and boost away, right? Unfortunately, the game is stupid and by merely turning Sonic a lot of the times it doesn’t pick up on the change in direction, probably due to the camera angle being the same. So you boost. RIGHT BACK INTO THE SAME WALL. And hit it, slowing you down even more. The worst of it, though, is when you’re trying to homing attack – done also by shaking the Wiimote – but it decides to boost instead. I died countless times because of that.
The daytime stages are still fun, but they are hardly the perfect, flawless return-to-the-good-ol’-days many would have you believe.
Now, the nighttime stages. These are pretty awful, in just about every department. Controlling Werehog Sonic is like trying to stab an exact spot on your body with a very tiny needle. It’s painful and you have to keep trying again because it’s nearly impossible. The Werehog walks extremely slowly, but you can run by pushing the control stick in a direction forcefully. Running Werehog is even worse, though. It moves quickly, but if you want to turn, it’s like trying to turn a car driving at 80mph. I’m not kidding, it’s the sloppiest turn I’ve ever seen in a game. Jumping is just about as annoying while he’s running. It’s like he has so much inertia that it’s impossible to control him well, despite the fact that even his run isn’t THAT fast.
The Werehog levels are also Wiimote/Nunchuk-centric. Battles are EXTRAORDINARILY painful. Save for the occasional stronger-than-usual enemy that you have to use some dodging for, the best strategy for battles is basically to flail your arms. A lot. I’m not kidding. Of course, it irked me so when I realized that you can change the controls to either Classic Controller or Gamecube controller, I changed it to Gamecube immediately. However, you can’t customize the controls, and the attack buttons are L and R. Not only is that awkward and was it less effective than flailing (oddly enough), but you have to press them so rapidly I got worried I would end up wearing down my Gamecube controller for such an unworthy cause so I switched it back pretty quickly. Even worse than the battles is interaction with items like poles, ledges, and grabbable-enemies. All of these, you grab onto using B, and hold it to keep grabbing onto them. This isn’t a problem in earlier levels, but in later levels when they all tend to be above large abysses, you’ll find yourself jumping into the abyss and trying desperately to grab onto whatever it is that’s there, only to fall helplessly. With 2 lives, this is EXTREMELY annoying, because you have to start over frequently.
Of course, there is a system of adding more lives to your starting total by entering doors in each individual temple and finding an extra life computer, yet they never allude to this and you have to figure it out yourself. Once you have a certain amount of Moon and Sun medals (obtained by beating day/night levels, respectively – yes, it is reversed) you can enter the doors and participate in annoying puzzles involving switching between Werehog and regular Sonic to get various items.
Back to the Werehog levels, however; the battles are made even worse by the way the enemies look. It looks like a little kid got a hold of Paint, took a Pokemon, deformed it, inverted the colors, recolored it to be neon-colored, and slapped that onto a 3-D model. They’re awful. When was the last time you saw evil monsters have neon blue coloring, anyways?
Overall, by the end I was liking them slightly better, but the Werehog levels are EXTREMELY tedious, hard to control, and you’ll find yourself screaming as horribly as Werehog when you fall into the abyss. Battles are entirely unenjoyable, and “abilities” you unlock for said battles are relatively difficult to execute when you have 10 enemies surrounding you. You’re most likely to activate the different attacks by flailing at some point, I certainly did.
Viewing the game as a whole, there is one really stupid problem, not uncommon to 3D Sonic games, but especially bad this time: the camera. Not only do the angles get stupid and screw you up, but there is no way to control it. Great.
In the music department, some of the daytime levels are slightly interesting, but none of them are all that memorable. Most of the Werehog stages’ music was pretty much the same-sounding with a different theme depending on the culture of the continent, though Eggmanland’s was an exception, one I actually liked. However, the battle music for Werehog stages is AWFUL. It’s the SAME MUSIC for every stage. And EVERY TIME you get near enemies it starts out the exact same and plays the music. So you get to dread battles not only for awful controls, flailing arms, and ugly enemies, but also for their signature, obnoxious jazz music. I have no problem with jazz, I like jazz, but this is not GOOD jazz.
Graphics are a typical issue on the Wii, but seeing as the PS3/360 versions and Wii/PS2 versions appear to be mostly parallel, I would guess that the Wii version is a PS2 port graphics-wise, as a lot of 3rd-party Wii games are. For the most part, Sonic looks choppy and bad. When you start a level or enter a temple, it does a close-up of Sonic, and he looks…blurry. Especially the Werehog.
Cut-scenes look great, if only they could’ve ported that to the gameplay.
The plot is pretty typical and stupid, Eggman wants to get another monster under his control to destroy the world but in the end the monster doesn’t want to follow his commands anyways and you have to destroy it. But it has some REALLY stupid moments, like when Chip recovers his memory: SPOILER
/SPOILER. Basically, it's made of suck and the game would be better without it.
By far, the best part of the game was the final battle, but I had to push myself hard to get to the end of the game. A lack of free time certainly held me back from finishing it earlier than I did to an extent, but I’d be lying if I pretended I couldn’t have finished it earlier. Werehog stages do pretty much outweigh the daytime stages, but even at times when I felt they were even, it didn’t make the game any better for me.
If you see this game for $10, or to rent, it’s probably worth it, maybe $15 max, but any more than that and it’s not really worth it. The only real difficulty in the game is when the controls decide to fail you or when you have to complete a stupid task, and replay value is limited to how much you want to play beyond the final battle, which is probably very little. You can go for all of the Sun and Moon medals, but there’s not much point unless you want to get all of the secret songs and artwork pieces.
All in all, it’s not a bad game for picking up every once in a while and playing a random level or two. I am, however, glad that I did not pay a cent to play the game. I can’t say anything for the 360/PS3 versions, they could be better, but if the Wii version is the best one…that’s pretty pathetic.
I recall seeing the very first trailer for this game. It was on YouTube, an official trailer for a new Sonic game. Everyone on the video save for a few was talking about how it was certainly a return to Sonic’s old days – with 2D gameplay and speed. Having been burned by games like Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic and the Secret Rings, I was quick to be cynical and noted that it certainly looked like a return, but we should wait before passing judgment because Sonic doesn’t have a great track record, and they could still screw something up.
Well, they did.
Even after the game came out many claimed it was a really good in the thread, here on SmashBoards. There was lots of chatter about how, for once, the Wii version was actually the best version. I was still skeptical, so I wasn’t prepared to buy the game. I was going to rent it, but one day when I was talking to my friend who owned the game, he offered to let me borrow it. I gladly took the opportunity, and eventually managed to finish the game.
The game starts out confusing you. Apparently, the opening cut-scene is the intro video, before the title screen. Of course, this baffled me because I skipped through it assuming I wasn’t skipping a 5 minute-long video that you need to flow nicely into the next cut-scene. As a result, I didn’t see the intro video until I started it up at a later date. To sum up the cut-scene, Sonic is about to destroy Eggman’s latest plan as Super Sonic when he falls into a trap, and the power of the Chaos Emeralds is used to break open the Earth and unleash Dark Gaia, the game’s main nemesis (since Robotnik/Eggman apparently isn’t enough anymore). In the process he becomes a Werehog, but apparently only remains that way at night.
The most baffling part about this is that Sonic’s shoes apparently grow spikes, despite not being part of his body. Or maybe they are…
Once you’re done wondering why Sonic is an ugly-as-all-hell beast falling from the sky, you’re introduced to the typical, apparently necessary, “I’M GOING TO FOLLOW YOU AROUND AND BUG THE CRAP OUT OF YOU” character of this Sonic game; Chip. He is supposed to be a…chipmunk? Squirrel? Mini-bear/muskrat hybrid? I really have no clue. Of course, he has lost his memory, including the knowledge of his name, so he’s named Chip after his tastes in food.
If you thought it was annoying in Sonic ’06 when you had to wander around town talking to people, the Wii version of Unleashed has turned that dull task into something even more pointless. You have a point-and-click town interface in which you click on different parts of town to talk to people. Of course, 4/5 of the locations in town are generally useless, and a lot of times you have to talk to everyone, then talk to the last person you haven’t talked to, who will open up a new conversation with someone you’ve already talked to. By the end of the game, I used a guide to figure out which of the people gave me things/furthered the plot and talked to them and ignored everyone else.
The game is based around 7 temples, located on 7 different continents (obviously not related to the fact that there are 7 Chaos Emeralds…which you have to restore power to in the temples). Each continent has a Sun Tablet and a Moon Tablet. It never says it directly in-game but it’s pretty obvious that the Sun Tablet opens up a door in the temple to do the daytime stages and the Moon Tablet opens up a door in the temple to do the nighttime stages. By beating the required missions of the daytime stages and the nighttime stages, you get a half of a tablet. Once you beat the required missions of both types of stages, you will have both of them. But apparently you need to find some random person in town to put it together. I guess pushing two slabs of rock together isn’t one of Sonic’s strong suits. This tablet has a star on it and will lead you to the boss stage of the continent. Depending on the continent, you will either fight the boss during daytime or nighttime.
Let me give you an overview of each stage type.
The daytime stages are the type of stage everyone hypes up. I’ll be completely honest with you, while I found them to be pretty fun at first, by the end of the game I realized that, for all of their hype, they’re actually much less than perfect. The first thing is the speed. It’s a blast to be going really fast, grinding on rails, jumping, shooting out of cannons, etc. But much of the daytime levels feel too much on auto-pilot, like a racing game. Is it fun to an extent anyways? Yeah, but it is a little boring, and certainly not a return to Sonic’s roots…he’s “the fastest thing alive”, but none of the classic Sonic games were all that fast. In a few levels, namely the last one in the game, there is a rather large problem that, due to the speed, you have to do a lot of guess-and-check to get through. You might not see something coming, die, and have to restart and remember what to do at that point because you don’t see it coming early enough.
The second issue is the ridiculous missions. Not only are some of them pointless, but they’re just annoying. Go blasting at the speed of sound, but make sure not to hit any pots? That’s difficult AND obnoxious. The worst of them, though, by far, is that REQUIRED time-attack mission on the Eggmanland (final continent) daytime stage. It’s annoying enough if you want to go for all-S-Ranks or whatever, but it took me forever to get that level done and I couldn’t move any further until I beat it.
The final issue is the boosting system. You shake the Wiimote to boost. When in a level, you pretty much want to stay fast, as it’s the point, especially if you want a good ranking on the level. Sometimes you’ll end up hitting a wall, slowing you down considerably. The logical reaction would be, if you have boost power (F-Zero pun not intended), to turn away from the wall and boost away, right? Unfortunately, the game is stupid and by merely turning Sonic a lot of the times it doesn’t pick up on the change in direction, probably due to the camera angle being the same. So you boost. RIGHT BACK INTO THE SAME WALL. And hit it, slowing you down even more. The worst of it, though, is when you’re trying to homing attack – done also by shaking the Wiimote – but it decides to boost instead. I died countless times because of that.
The daytime stages are still fun, but they are hardly the perfect, flawless return-to-the-good-ol’-days many would have you believe.
Now, the nighttime stages. These are pretty awful, in just about every department. Controlling Werehog Sonic is like trying to stab an exact spot on your body with a very tiny needle. It’s painful and you have to keep trying again because it’s nearly impossible. The Werehog walks extremely slowly, but you can run by pushing the control stick in a direction forcefully. Running Werehog is even worse, though. It moves quickly, but if you want to turn, it’s like trying to turn a car driving at 80mph. I’m not kidding, it’s the sloppiest turn I’ve ever seen in a game. Jumping is just about as annoying while he’s running. It’s like he has so much inertia that it’s impossible to control him well, despite the fact that even his run isn’t THAT fast.
The Werehog levels are also Wiimote/Nunchuk-centric. Battles are EXTRAORDINARILY painful. Save for the occasional stronger-than-usual enemy that you have to use some dodging for, the best strategy for battles is basically to flail your arms. A lot. I’m not kidding. Of course, it irked me so when I realized that you can change the controls to either Classic Controller or Gamecube controller, I changed it to Gamecube immediately. However, you can’t customize the controls, and the attack buttons are L and R. Not only is that awkward and was it less effective than flailing (oddly enough), but you have to press them so rapidly I got worried I would end up wearing down my Gamecube controller for such an unworthy cause so I switched it back pretty quickly. Even worse than the battles is interaction with items like poles, ledges, and grabbable-enemies. All of these, you grab onto using B, and hold it to keep grabbing onto them. This isn’t a problem in earlier levels, but in later levels when they all tend to be above large abysses, you’ll find yourself jumping into the abyss and trying desperately to grab onto whatever it is that’s there, only to fall helplessly. With 2 lives, this is EXTREMELY annoying, because you have to start over frequently.
Of course, there is a system of adding more lives to your starting total by entering doors in each individual temple and finding an extra life computer, yet they never allude to this and you have to figure it out yourself. Once you have a certain amount of Moon and Sun medals (obtained by beating day/night levels, respectively – yes, it is reversed) you can enter the doors and participate in annoying puzzles involving switching between Werehog and regular Sonic to get various items.
Back to the Werehog levels, however; the battles are made even worse by the way the enemies look. It looks like a little kid got a hold of Paint, took a Pokemon, deformed it, inverted the colors, recolored it to be neon-colored, and slapped that onto a 3-D model. They’re awful. When was the last time you saw evil monsters have neon blue coloring, anyways?
Overall, by the end I was liking them slightly better, but the Werehog levels are EXTREMELY tedious, hard to control, and you’ll find yourself screaming as horribly as Werehog when you fall into the abyss. Battles are entirely unenjoyable, and “abilities” you unlock for said battles are relatively difficult to execute when you have 10 enemies surrounding you. You’re most likely to activate the different attacks by flailing at some point, I certainly did.
Viewing the game as a whole, there is one really stupid problem, not uncommon to 3D Sonic games, but especially bad this time: the camera. Not only do the angles get stupid and screw you up, but there is no way to control it. Great.
In the music department, some of the daytime levels are slightly interesting, but none of them are all that memorable. Most of the Werehog stages’ music was pretty much the same-sounding with a different theme depending on the culture of the continent, though Eggmanland’s was an exception, one I actually liked. However, the battle music for Werehog stages is AWFUL. It’s the SAME MUSIC for every stage. And EVERY TIME you get near enemies it starts out the exact same and plays the music. So you get to dread battles not only for awful controls, flailing arms, and ugly enemies, but also for their signature, obnoxious jazz music. I have no problem with jazz, I like jazz, but this is not GOOD jazz.
Graphics are a typical issue on the Wii, but seeing as the PS3/360 versions and Wii/PS2 versions appear to be mostly parallel, I would guess that the Wii version is a PS2 port graphics-wise, as a lot of 3rd-party Wii games are. For the most part, Sonic looks choppy and bad. When you start a level or enter a temple, it does a close-up of Sonic, and he looks…blurry. Especially the Werehog.
Cut-scenes look great, if only they could’ve ported that to the gameplay.
The plot is pretty typical and stupid, Eggman wants to get another monster under his control to destroy the world but in the end the monster doesn’t want to follow his commands anyways and you have to destroy it. But it has some REALLY stupid moments, like when Chip recovers his memory: SPOILER
Chip apparently was released when Dark Gaia was, as he is the good force combating him. Makes you feel confident having that mini-bear/muskrat hybrid protecting the planet, right?
By far, the best part of the game was the final battle, but I had to push myself hard to get to the end of the game. A lack of free time certainly held me back from finishing it earlier than I did to an extent, but I’d be lying if I pretended I couldn’t have finished it earlier. Werehog stages do pretty much outweigh the daytime stages, but even at times when I felt they were even, it didn’t make the game any better for me.
If you see this game for $10, or to rent, it’s probably worth it, maybe $15 max, but any more than that and it’s not really worth it. The only real difficulty in the game is when the controls decide to fail you or when you have to complete a stupid task, and replay value is limited to how much you want to play beyond the final battle, which is probably very little. You can go for all of the Sun and Moon medals, but there’s not much point unless you want to get all of the secret songs and artwork pieces.
All in all, it’s not a bad game for picking up every once in a while and playing a random level or two. I am, however, glad that I did not pay a cent to play the game. I can’t say anything for the 360/PS3 versions, they could be better, but if the Wii version is the best one…that’s pretty pathetic.
