I should have expected as much from the team that made Secret Rings. Total letdown.
So I pop the disc in and start a new game in adventure mode. To be honest, the opening sequence actually impressed me. It was well designed, well rendered, and well animated. Easily on par with the kind of stuff you'd expect to come out of Square. Unfortunately, this is the first and last time you'll be seeing cinematics of this calibre in this game. The rest of the cinimatics are presented as barely animated jiggling still frames of the characters sliding across the scenery. Even the ending cinematic is like this. Which leads me to wonder "Did Sega expend their whole budget on this game just in the opening sequence?" Well, after playing though the game, I'm willing to believe that.
For those of you who has played "Sonic and the Secret Rings", you will quickly learn that this is essentially the same game only it replaces Arabian myth with Arthurian myth. Plus, there's a hell of a lot more wiimote shaking than I'd prefer. As a style of gameplay that can best be titled as a "rail-runner" Sonic will run along a preset path and your only job is pretty much to keep Sonic running in that direction and frantically shake your wiimote at anything that gets in your way. There really is no skill behind attacking or keeping yourself progressing to the goal. If you see enemies ahead of you, start shaking the wiimote and Sonic will take care of things. There are very few other controls that you have to concern yourself with. You can move left and right along your path to avoid obstacles, press A to jump when Sonic can't be bothered to do so himself, press Z to block if you feel like bringing Sonic to a complete stop, and occasionally enter into a button timing mini game to give rings to civilians (as giving so many rings to civilians will be the objective in some levels). One other important element to the gameplay is Sonic's special attack (I can't remember the name of) where you hold down B to target the nearest enemy and frantically swing the wiimote (because what else are you going to do in this game?) to quickly attack each enemy consecutively. Though this gives just an inch of depth to the gameplay, Sonic is more than capable of ploughing through the enemies as is or you can just jump over them entirely and move on.
There is also some ultra light RPG elements with item appraising and equipping. But really, I didn't see the point of it. The enhances gained from equipping items onto Sonic are not even worth it and barely effect gameplay. Plus most of the items can't be equipped and serve no purpose other than to have in a collection.
In conclusion, it wouldn't be hard for Sega to make a very good Sonic game. All they have to do is take the engine that they used in the daytime levels for Sonic Unleashed and strip out any stupid gimmicks like annoying sidekicks or talking swords. But at this point I'm convinced that Sega is trying to ruin the Sonic franchise. Why? Well perhaps there's a global conspiracy or something like that. All I can say is that this is game is not acceptable in the slightest.