The Gamespot Review for Sonic Unleashed is up.

I can save you the trouble of checking, they gave it a 3.5. The problems they sighted were, mostly, repetitive combat and a bad camera. Though these are both true, there is more to the game. One obvious one is how beautiful everything looks, but there is more beyond that.

The biggest plus which is overlooked is how fun and fast the regular sonic stages are. They feel like they're pulled out of the 16 bit sonics, but updated for today. The Gamespot review says that poor level design makes for cheap deaths on these stages, and that it is not true, or at least no more true than it was on the Genesis. The stages fly by so fast it is difficult to see what is coming up, but that is what makes the stages fun and exciting.

Another thing I enjoyed was actually the Warehog in limited doses. Sure his combat is repetitive, but not anymore than Spider-Man FoF (which gamespot gave a 7.0). When the werehog stages were split between platforming sections and combat they're just fine. When they combine the 2 in the same spot it gets extremely annoying, because your attacks will sned you off the stage. Still that doesn't happen too often. The game makes up for it too with some pretty enjoyable boss battles as Warehog.

The main thing that I didn't like isn't even mentioned. To access the later stages you'll need to collect Sun and Moon tokens. These are scattered in the stages and in the world map. The real problem with them is that you'll have to stop your blitzkreig to wander around stages you've already completed and try to find these stupid tokens. You'll spend a lot of time slowing down and searching every corner of every stage. Personally, I prefer the way it was in the orginals, complete Green Hill Zone 1 and then you play Zone 2. As sonic you'll often fly right past a token and have no way of going back to obtain it and the Warehog is slow enough already. Why do you have to make things so frustrating Sonic Team?

The other problem I had were the challenges. After completing a stage you can play it challenges which are as straigtforward as completing it within a certain time, or as complicated as beating a werehog stage without being able to regain health.The problem is that the objective is always secondary to the REAL objective of getting through the stage without dieing. Unfortunatly in challenge modes, your checkpoints don't count, so if you die you'll have to start over... sorry. The only reason this isn't a big issue for me is because you are never required to do any of these, so if that gets too annoying, you can just do something else.

Well, given my experience, I think gamespot is being overly hard on Sonic. In this case, while the game isn't a 9.0 or an 8.5 it is still good. I would have expected about a 6.5 or 7.0, but that isn't even close. For me, this is just one more nail in the coffin of what used to be the best review site on the web. Its not that I'm a huge fanboy for Sonic, its just with the time they took to get the review out and then the poor quality, Gamespot's reviews aren't looking too good.