Sonic Unleashed Review: 30% Excellent

“If you loved Generations, you’ll also love half of Unleashed.” That’s what they told me. I disagree.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some very good stuff in this game, but I don’t think it approaches anywhere near half of it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sonic Unleashed is made up of two kinds of stages: daytime and nighttime. By daylight, Sonic is the speediest hedgehog alive, zipping from point to point as always. By night, he’s the fierce werehog, slow but powerful, solving puzzles and brawling through waves of enemies.

The daytime stages are, for the most part, a lot of fun. Sonic Unleashed was the first 3D game in the series to feature the so-called “boost formula.” If you aren’t familiar, the idea is simple: Go forward really fast, in relatively linear stages. Every enemy you defeat, every ring you collect, they all add to a meter. Hold a button to boost, draining the meter. While boosting, you are invulnerable to enemies, but not other stage obstacles such as spikes and pits.

The formula has been around for a while now, and for good reason: It’s pure, unadulterated fun. Speeding through the daytime stages is, for the most part, an absolute blast. It’s such a visceral feeling, and it’s exhilarating watching the world move past. To top it off, the environments are stunning, even 17 years after the game’s initial release.

Toward the end, though, the level design doesn’t quite hold up. As the game progresses, the stages simply ask more than the controls can manage, leading to Sonic careening off in the wrong direction unless you know the layouts extremely well, and it can be frustrating for all the wrong reasons. It’s the sort of thing that’s better on replay but feels unfair the first time through.

Despite a few misgivings later on in the game, though, I found the daytime stages to be a joy overall. They don’t have quite the level of refinement of the stages in Sonic Generations, but they’re still absolutely worth playing.

Unfortunately, the game isn’t just daytime stages. A substantial amount of the game is dedicated to the night. It’s an entirely different kind of gameplay, altogether.

The nighttime stages aren’t bad, per se. Wailing on enemies can be a lot of fun, and there are an absolute ton of different combos Sonic can learn by spending experience—yes, there’s an experience system too, and you’ll want to dump all your points into the werehog—and a plethora of enemy types that range from basic to interesting to annoying as hell. But as fun as it can be in short doses, these stages go on entirely too long. And much like the daytime stages, toward the end they can be really frustrating, and not for the right reasons.

The story is… well, it’s there. Eggman broke the planet and let out some great evil, and Sonic has to save the day. Typical Sonic stuff. Eggman loves letting ancient evils run rampant. Sonic also has a new sidekick, Chip, who is suffering memory loss and follows Sonic along for the ride because… uh… well, because he’s in the story. He doesn’t do much for the majority of the game except deliver some of the most annoying dialogue in the series. Yeah, annoying even by Sonic standards. There are some surprisingly well-made FMV cutscenes with production values far beyond what you might expect from a Sonic game, and a lot more in-engine cutscenes that are good enough for what they are.

Honestly, the story didn’t leave much of an impact on me other than “yeah, that sure is a Sonic story” and “I can’t stand Chip.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with Sonic Unleashed is that the pacing simply isn’t even close to what it should be. I genuinely think an attempt was made. Strictly by physical size, the daytime stages are much larger. If you do the optional content, there’s also far more of them. That’s all well and good, but the nighttime stages are so much slower that they still manage to be a much, much larger amount of the game by time, whether you play absolutely everything or just the bare minimum to beat the game, and that’s what players are going to feel, regardless of the size of the stages. And while the night stages aren’t awful, they certainly aren’t exciting or fun enough to justify that amount of playtime, let alone in a Sonic game where they also feel rather out of place.

To make matters worse, the game also has a medal system used to unlock stages. If you don’t collect the required medals, you can’t progress the game, period. Medals are, for the most part, hidden among stages and hub worlds, requiring the player to slow down and explore. That’s easy enough at night, but feels completely at odds with how the daytime stages are designed, and either way amounts to little more than needless padding. I’m not ashamed to admit I used cheats to remove this requirement, and I feel the game was better for it.

Sonic Unleashed is a game with some major strengths. When it shines, it glows brighter than a lot of the series. But these strengths are betrayed by a noticeable quality dip toward the end, and serious pacing problems throughout. Combine that with a truly annoying sidekick, and you wind up with a game that, despite being genuinely fantastic at points, is largely just unpleasant to play on the whole. Great at its best, tedious and irritating for the rest.

30% excellent is good, but it’s not enough to hold up the rest of the game. I don’t regret playing this, but I will likely not play it again.