After about 4 hours of play last night, I can safely say Unleashed met my expectations, granted they were lowered by early reviews. The opening cinematic is beautiful but once I picked up the controller, all hopes I had of Sonic returning to greatness were instantly dashed. By now you must be thinking "Gee Rider, is it really that bad", and in short NO!!! It's not bad at all, I just want people to know it's not going to be the radical change in quality it was hyped up to be.
The Story, which thankfully stops the Hyper-realism attempted by certain lesser 3D platformers(*cough* Sonic Next-gen *cough*), follows Sonic's attempt to piece the continents of the world back together after Robotnik's most recent scheme for world domination separates them from the planet's core. Immediately after the following cutscene, I was treated to the tutorial level, which I advise all to pay attention to, showing that this is a very different kind of Sonic game (No spin-dash, new Homing attack controls, and of course the new moves of the game Quick Step and Sonic drift). This game is like the offspring of Rush(DS) and Secret Rings(Wii), and like those 2 games, the controls of both the 3D and 2D plain take some getting used to, but once you get them down, you'll never want to go back. The first level of this game alone is easily 5x more advanced than anything in Sonic Next-Gen(360/PS3). And most importantly, the load screens are short and the Framerate has yet to dip from all that I've played(So basically IGN screwed up, the 360 version's just fine).
And now the Were-hog, the most disputed feature of the game. Don't believe the complaints, the Were-hog sections work just fine. The controls are tight and the animation is solid. If I had any complaints with these sections, the camera can get a bit jumpy when you try to do anything more than what it wants (think Adventure 2 but more tame) but honestly it works so well that I wouldn't mind seeing a spinoff game dedicated to these sections alone (albeit requiring some more polish).
So what holds Unleashed back from greatness? 1 word, pacing. I can forgive the occasional camera issues, but this game seriously needs to decide its direction. I timed the game from the end of the first daytime stage to the beginning of the 2nd, 57 freaking minutes! The hubworlds are well designed, and the Were-hog gameplay isn't bad, but they're seriously overpowering the best quality of the game, the fact that it's 3D and (barring off Secret Rings) fun for the first time in 4 years. It's like eating a pile of Belgian Waffles that have gone soggy from an oversaturation of syrup, they're still good waffles but all of the delicious natural flavoring has been covered up by the standout additions. nonetheless I've enjoyed what I've played so far and look forward to reviewing it upon completion. So far, I'd say a solid 7 to 7.5 out of 10.
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