Daytime levels are excellent, and the Werehog could've been a lot worse. Just don't expect the game to go easy on you.
The Sonic series has been given quite a bit of bad press as of late, due in large part to the cheesy and halfbaked Shadow the Hedgehog and the horribly rushed and absolutely terrible Sonic 2006. Sonic and the Secret Rings scored a semi-victory for the franchise, but the controls still drove many away. Now, Sonic is back again in his newest console adventure, Sonic Unleashed. Is Unleashed the success that many are desperately hoping for, or does it fail just as hard as Shadow and '06?
The daytime levels, those that feature the blue blur as we've come to love (or hate) him, are definitely the better part of the game. The sense of speed is amazing, thanks in large part to the speed boost ability that made its debut in Sonic Rush. The game switches between 3D and 2D almost seamlessly, further enhancing the experience.
The 3D portions play like a combination of Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic and the Secret Rings. At its fastest points, the game almost plays as if it were on-rails (like Secret Rings), with the new Quick Step move letting you move between "lanes" and helping you avoid spike strips and various other obstacles. While there are plenty of fast moments in 2D as well, that's where more of the hardcore platforming takes place at.
However, like most Sonic games, focusing on nothing except being fast will get you killed. A lot. As a matter of fact, Unleashed's daytime stages are quite possibly the hardest stages in the entire Sonic franchise. There are probably more pitfalls and speed traps in this game than Sonic Rush, Rush Adventure and Secret Rings combined. It's rewarding to finally finish a stage after spending so much time learning it and it's even more rewarding to be eventually be able to speed through the stage flawlessly, but those who tend to spike their controller after dying two or three times might want to stay away.
The daytime stages are absolutely beautiful. Despite the levels being city-sized, the game (almost) never misses a beat, further adding to the aforementioned sense of speed. There's an interesting variety of stages for Sonic to tear through, from a peaceful village to an icy glacier.
Not everything's perfect in the day, though. Sega's mapped all of Sonic's functions (not counting the new sidestep move) onto the four face buttons, while they traditionally only used two buttons. Sega had the right idea, as I recall divebombing to my doom while trying to Lightspeed Dash in Adventure 2, but why in the hell would they map the Homing Attack to a separate button than Jump? Lightspeed Dash gets its own dedicated button, which is pointless given how few times you actually use it in this game.
This leads to perhaps the biggest flaw in the daytime stages: Air Boosting. After getting a certain powerup, if Sonic jumps and isn't locked on to an enemy/object, he performs the speed boost, jetting forward through the air. Extremely useful, but the Air Boost button is mapped to the same button as the Homing Attack. The targeting system is extremely picky, often giving the player only a split second to attack or dropping off at random. You can guess what happens from there...
However, despite these flaws, the daytime stages are quite possibly the best 3D Sonic stages to date.
And then...there's the night stages, with Sonic the Werehog. No, the Werehog isn't the cancer that kills the entire package like everyone's first instinct might tell them, but it sure doesn't do anything to help the game, either. The Werehog stages play like the confused lovechild of a mindless beat-em-up and a second-rate Mario/Sonic-knockoff platformer. The beat-em-up part isn't even the true problem; it's repetitive at best and clumsy at worst, but the Werehog stages are actually at their best when it's just you and dozens of the enemy. No, the real problem lies in the platforming.
The platforming in the Werehog stages can be absolutely insane. For every easy "jump from falling platform to falling platform" segment, there's a "jump to some far away platform with no grabbable ledges with so little room for error that it puts the Mega Man series to shame" segment, or sometimes even a "walk across a tightrope under giant swinging hammers while carrying an object" segment.
As sadistic as that sounds, I would have absolutely no problem with those types of challenges if the camera and controls didn't work against you. The evil camera, which has been a staple of every 3D platformer since their birth, is here with a vengeance. The camera switches between being fully controllable and only giving a view of Sonic's left and right sides at random, but you don't really have to bother; everytime you need to rotate the camera, it won't work. For the tightrope sections, it's not uncommon for the camera to lock into a helpful position initially only to twist to some angled view once you've made it halfway through. When grabbing onto a pole, Sonic has to be perfectly still before he'll jump away, which leads to a great deal of frustration in the final levels when everything that he grabs breaks away as time passes.
Like the daytime stages, the targeting is annoying in the night, but it's much more apparent here as you have to lock onto anything that you want to grab, even ledges. You can hold the grab button while jumping and Sonic will automatically reach for the first thing that he locks onto, solving the issue somewhat, but otherwise the timing is even more strict than the daytime missions.
Just like Sonic, the game engine gets ugly once the sun goes down. The slowdown that's rarely apparent in the day shows up everywhere when Sonic is the Werehog, including open fields and even in cutscenes. The night levels lack the charm of their daytime brethren, and altogether feel very dull.
Overall, the Werehog stages are bearable when they don't ask you to do anything spectacular, but get frustrating once the heavy platforming kicks in. It's not offensively bad, just mediocre.
Both the night and the day missions are connected by several hub stages, much like Sonic Adventure or Sonic '06. While I understand that many people love these, I feel that they're a giant waste of time, and I began to envy the Wii version's menu-based system.
The music is varied and is overall great. Those that hate the franchise's rock music will be happy to hear that there's only one cheesy song in the game, and it only plays during the credits. The other audio is okay, I suppose; it would've been better if Sonic didn't open his mouth every two seconds in the daytime stages...
Sega found the formula for a good console Sonic game in Unleashed's daytime stages; but they felt the need to artifically inflate the game's length with the night stages, and that's what keeps Sonic Unleashed from being great. Those who loved the Adventure games should waste no time in buying this; everyone else should rent and see if the Werehog and the game's tough difficulty is for you.