Some characters have a hard time making the leap from their original 2-D roots into the realm of 3-D gaming. Sonic is one of those characters. Sonic continually proves that he works best in 2-D side scrolling action. Every time he goes 3-D, the gameplay tends to suffer immensely. Enter Sonic Unleashed, a 3-D sonic game that plays very much like the old 2-D games. At the beginning of the story Sonic disrupts another world domination attempt by Dr. Eggman, only to find himself captured and the energy from the chaos emeralds used split the world up. For whatever reason, the energy used to split the world also transforms Sonic into a werehog. After a beautifully pre-rendered backstory, the gameplay begins. Sort of. There’s a lot of story to this game, and most of it rather uninteresting. You can’t skip cutscenes, so you’re forced to sit and wait while the characters try to figure out what we already know. Then you’re treated to a series of very short tutorials which help you get use to the gameplay mechanic. And finally, after all that, you get to tackle the first Day stage. The Day stages are a BLAST to play! After so many failed attempts to bring Sonic into 3-D, I think the developers have finally figured out what makes Sonic so much fun! The levels tend to play like a racing game. You’re able to move left and right while you run along the levels. You can side step quickly to dodge obstacles, slide through tight spots, hone in on enemies for attacks, and unleash speed boosts. There are many branching paths, just like the original sonic games, and you can reach many of them by performing special moves. Rarely does Sonic crash into a wall or stop unexpectedly, and if you ever get stuck you can turn around and run back the way you came (Something that was decidedly missing from Sonic’s last Wii outing). Another nice feature is that if you do accidentally hit an enemy, you won’t loose all of your rings. The camera is up high enough so that you always have a clear view of what’s coming at you, and at various times the camera will actually move to the side and you’ll play sonic just as you would in the 2-D games. The world is 3-D, but the gameplay turns 2-D, and it’s wonderfully refreshing. There is never any lag at all, and the game runs at a steady 30 fps. While it would have been awesome to see Sonic go 60 fps, 30 is just fine and doesn’t detract from the gameplay in slightest. However, despite how great the Day stages are, the inevitable Night stages are a nightmare to play. During the night, Sonic turns back into his Werehog persona and you spend the time trekking through levels, beating up enemies and making your way, SLOWLY, to the end of the stage. This is where the game truly suffers, and I just wonder what on earth was going through the developers heads when they came up with this garbage. As a werehog, Sonic is incredibly sluggish. He attacks with arms which, for reasons never explained, can extend out like rubber. Attacking is done by waggling the remote and nunchuck. The Nunchuck operates the left arm, and the remote operates the right. To make matters worse, there is absolutely no targeting system for attacking enemies. Often times I found myself shaking both controllers and hitting nothing, despite Sonic’s apparently wide swipes. I hate to use the term Waggle, because it implies that the developers just chucked in some pointless wiggling to appease the Wii’s motion sensing ability. But unfortunately that’s exactly what this feels like. There is absolutely no need for the controls to be this bad. And to be perfectly honest, after 5 minutes of playing as a werehog, I was getting very tired. Twilight Princess used the Wiimote wiggle to attack, but for that game it was fine and you never got exhausted playing. In Unleashed, I found myself dreading the werehog stages because of how mindlessly repetitive, unimaginative, and tiring they were. In my first 40 minutes I played 2 Day stages and 5 Night stages. On top of the god-awful controls for the Night time stages, there’s also some serious lack of focus in the menus and direction of the game. Many of the menu buttons will only work if you use the analogue stick to highlight them, which is disorienting because other menu buttons work fine by pointing and clicking. Throughout the game I continually collected hidden movies, artwork, and other special features, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to access any of it. I think I already mentioned that this game has a lot of story. Between the cutscenes you can’t skip you’ll also have to talk to the local NPC to gather information. In each area you’re presented with a map of the land, and you can go and talk to people by clicking on highlighted areas. You’ll uncover move of the story this way, but it’s distracting and decidedly boring, especially when people tell you they can’t help you. There are even some instances where you’ll be given a choice to ask for help, which is rather absurd since there is never a reason to refuse help from anyone. To top off the unbalanced nature of this game, these “talking” sessions are presented as simple images with text, which seems very cheap when compared to the vibrantly animated cutscenes with full audio and dialogue. Graphically, Sonic Unleashed is way head of many Wii games. The character models are smooth and flexible. The Animations are fairly well done. Even the voice acting isn’t all that bad. The Day stages are gorgeously detailed and move along at an incredibly fast pace. There’s even some motion blur effects which only add to the fine craftsmanship. But even here, there’s a trade off. The Night stages tend to be bland and uninteresting. The extending arms of the werehog are very bizarre and just feel like bad programing. And the “fur” on Sonic is overly pixilated up close. It’s almost as if two totally different teams made this game and they just lumped them both together. Overall Sonic Unleashed is a mixed bag of 1 part awesome and 3 parts failure. The Day stages are so perfectly tuned and enjoyable it’s hard to believe that the game can really have moments of terrible gameplay. Why the developers couldn’t just focus on the Day stages completely and make a game around that, I don’t know. There are, quite literally, 3 times as many werehog stages as there are Day stages, and that’s a true disappointment. It’s a real struggle to grumble your way through the Night levels in the vain hope of getting a chance to play a single Day stage. If you can muster it, the Day stages will remind you of why Sonic is so awesome. But the Night stages will just leave you scratching your head and asking yourself “why on earth did they do this?”