Everyone who claims the game to be hard & awful should get their brains checked!
The game doesn't give off very good first impressions when you see the awful hub-worlds that involve moving the control stick around until the game finally decides to select the location you want - At least on Sonic 06 you could jump up onto the rooftops & muck around - I don't see why they couldn't make propper hubs. But thankfuly, the levels turned out superb!
When you first play the daytime stages, you can't help but fall addicted to them. The speed is intense, you start to feel like an unstoppable force - which you actually are, pretty much. Most deaths tend to be comical ones as opposed to going wrong difficult areas. This makes the game too easy, though. As fun as rocketting around at extreme speed is, it's missing the challenge. Sure it can be a bit of a target to get a rank S on some of the more tedious stages, but it's still missing harder parts of stages. The only hard daytime stage in the game is on the seventh continet, but the way it's made makes it a stage you'd rather avoid.
But after you beat the game, you still can't help but play some of these stages again with no particular reason. They're just addictive. It's also nice to compare times with your records, or your records with other poeples'. You might even play the stages with no particular will to beat your time, but get excited when you find you've beaten your record in the end of stage results.
The daytime stages involve a lot of speed, & when they put in shortcuts, you need to have a good sense of awareness while focussing of maintaining a good time, so it's not really mindless running. Some more tedious shortcuts require you to work them out, while others require a good eye. For exsample, on Chun-Nan, when you take the first upper route of the level, you find yourself doing an action chain (Homing attacking a line of enemies), but if you let yourself fall instead of attacking the last enemy, you can continue the attack on a lower line of enemies, which leads you to a hidden section of the stage &, if you go through all the Light Dash sections (Most of you should know that a Light Dash is a move that makes you fly or run - depending on what game you're playing, on this game, he seems to fly through them - through a row of rings), you will be rewarded with Secret Illustration 2. This goes to show that keeping an eye out for shortcuts is rewarding, you should also keep an eye out for stray item boxes to get more unlockables.
Sadly, performing a Light slows you down in this game, unless you do one in the air, which isn't very common.
After the sheer speed & fun of the daytime stages, you then get the slow, combat-based night-time stages with questionable controlls, gameplay & just about questionable everything.
At night, due to the corruption of the Chaos Emeralds' power, Sonic turns into a feirce Werehog with big (And stretchy) arms.
Nobody will like the Werehog at first. The contolls seem hard to use & he's not easy to control. Fighting feels like a choore. But after the first couple of stages, you'll get used to it & it will then seem like a breeze. But you're either going to love the Werehog or hate him. The combat system is simple: Beat all the enemies to a pulp & move on. This doesn't go over very well for people who don't like the Werehog, as it involves the dodgey motion sensoring of the wii remote & nunchuck, or bashing L & R like crazy with a GCN controller. Sometimes you vary between L & R (Or wii remote & nunchuck) too quickly & do a special attack by accident, but it doesn't really change the outcome of the fight - which is good since it can happen a lot unless you have a brilliant sense of timing. The Werehog also features jumping glitches where he refuses to jump 8/10 times you tell him to. It's like the daytime stages with the homing attacks (And boost if you're using the wii remote) - it just doesn't respond 9/10 times.
The Werehog's super-stertchy arms come in quite handy as they let you grab onto ledges, swing on poles & deliver devistating atacks on your foes. If you like the Werehog, you'll be begging for more Werehog stages by the end of the game - For people like that, they'll be please with the whopping five Werehog stages on the seventh continet. For a lot of you, you'll rather not do those stages, though.
But the Werehog does get rather enjoyable once you aquire all te combat upgrades & get all four of his stats to the highest level (That's level 5, by the way), then you get a huge health bar & deadly attack power, plus, Unleashed Mode (Where the Werehog goes hyper & can completely obliterate most enemies in at most a couple of combos) is powerful on its own, combined with the attack, you end up thrashing enemies with complete ease. Though the Werehog levels can seem hard at first, you'll get used to them & find them a breeze late in the game.
But the Werehog falls short on ease when it comes to platforming sections. These can be very cruel, they can be from merely sliding against a wall to loads of tedious jumps. There's one stage in the game where you have to jump accross moving logs with nothing but whirlpools beneath you, it involves many tough leaps.
In short, the quality of the Werehog's gameplay is yours to decide, as it appeals to some people, but not others, so you can't really put an un-biast grade on them.
The game's storyline is lightly told, there isn't much sense of acheivement as there should be when you complete the game, but you can still understand hwat's going on. The music in the game fits the stages, too. In the daytime, you have really fast-paced & enthusiastic music, to make you want to go as fast as possible, & in the night-time you get music that helps you concentrate, you can tell it's for night-time levels by hearing it alone without knowing the game it's from. As soon as you enter a fight, you get music that encourages you to start mashing those buttons.
The bosses are simple, but effective & easy to get an S-Rank on, but aren't must of a challenge, as with most of the game. But there are only eight bosses in the game - Four Werehog bosses, three daytime bosses & the last boss (Take a guess who with).
The game falls short on Daytime stages & bosses, & has way more Werehog stages, but also falls short in general, you should be able to beat it in two-four days, but it's worth playing!
Sonic Unleashed is by far the best Sonic game ever since he went 3D. It still doesn't beat the classics, though.
SEGA want to revive Sonic, this won't revive it, but it's still helping our favourite hedgehog recover. If their next attempt is 100% consistant of our beloved daytime stages of Sonic Unleashed, it might just revive Sonic completely.