Sonic suddenly becomes a Twilight Princess spin-off with cinematics as the only root of positive entertainment
In Sonic Unleashed you start off venturing through a world that consists of seven individual continents, each of which were contaminated by one of seven chaos emeralds retained by Dr. Eggman -- emeralds that, for no explicit reason, can somehow respectively manipulate the formation of at least 1/7 of the entire earth by themselves alone. So we have a plot element that states the emeralds need to be retrieved so people can be happy and safe in their homes, otherwise these once unknown summations of detriment and evil will plunder the earth and kill everyone. Talk about cliche' at best.
Aside from the usual terrible plot lines invented by Sonic Team, Unleashed suffers from various fundamental problems that can easily convince the player that simply spending their time eyeing up their surroundings and messing around with the environment proves to be more fun in the long-term. One problem for example is the camera, which is either uncontrollable and useless by forcing you into 2D gameplay that can only be supported by trial and error--in the case of playing as the regular Sonic--or it can be manually shaken with the right control stick, even though its about as supportive as a camera-man suffering from parkinson's.
A second problem is the unresponsive controls, characterized by situations such as treading across a line extending vertically and shifting your weight right and left so that you don't fall off, the unfortunate fact being that you will typically end up falling anyways some time or another. Command initiations are faulty as well, causing you to occasionally run into the imperishable large set of spikes awaiting you as Sonic even when you are able to see it in time with the harmful 2D style camera input.
Tedious platformer elements are also very fundamental in Unleashed, and with a lack of depth perception and a primitive increment-based life system, how could a person who normally enjoys such a genre experience enjoyment without inventing their own self-harming dogma? You will also have to be prepared for retrieving unique 'moon' and 'sun' medals scattered across each respective level, which, mind the player, only served to infuriate the already under-payed, over-worked Japanese developers.
Unfortunately I can't see how Sonic Unleashed qualifies above a mediocre rating aside from its one or two beautiful CGI cutscenes. Please rent instead of considering a purchase if at all possible, you will understand my appeal at its apex by the time you reach the final boss.