I grew up absolutely loving Sonic the Hedgehog. The first game console I had ever owned was a SEGA Genesis, and to this day I still rank Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as my favorite game of all time ever in the history of man. However, ever since Sonic was evicted from the home of his own and forced to sleep over on the couches of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, the games have seen a definite decline.

Does Sonic Unleashed make up for the shortcomings of the abysmal Sonic the Hedgehog? Well, that’s what I’m about to tell you. If you read after the break.

It seems that every new Sonic game promises to be the game that returns the series to its furiously fast roots. In fact, Sonic Unleashed looked like it was going to be exactly what longtime Sonic fans have wanted. Remember the first trailers? The one that showed Sonic going absurdly fast through bright and colorful environment, reminiscent of his golden days on the Dreamcast? You know, this one?

Yeah, we were lied to. Only about a third of the game has you running around at lightning speeds, picking up rings and generally gazing in awe at just how freaking fast the game is. But that third of the game? Sublime. Simply sublime in every way. The controls for the Sonic segments are responsive, if not minimalistic. In fact, other than a few quick time events when you try an especially long jump, you aren’t doing too much. You press up on the left joystick to go forward, X (on PS3) is to jump and your shoulder buttons to slide left and right to avoid obstacles or switch grind rails. The simplicity of it also tends to be its downfall, since it basically means that the only enjoyable part of the game is where you can sit back and more or less watch a real-time cutscene, because the parts of the game where you are that Werehog thing are so insipid that you will more than likely find yourself unable to withstand them long enough to get to the good parts.

Oh yeah. It’s that bad. At night, when Sonic transforms into a Werehog, you suddenly find yourself being yanked into an entirely different, awful game. Let’s start with the obvious fact of being a Werehog: The game slows down. Sonic is, was, and forever shall be about blinding speed. The fact that Sonic has been slowed to a steady jog is bad enough, but then they added the combat. The bland, repetitive, tedious, uninspired, repetitive, bland combat that is so terribly devoid of anything resembling fun that I had to take an hour break between Werehog levels in order to go play a better, more fun game. As I have been trying to gather all the trophies in Grand Theft Auto IV, that was the game I chose and only after I had spent somewhere between 90-minutes and two-hours trying to earn the trophy for bowling a turkey, I felt prepared to play through another terrible Werehog stage.

But why are these Werehog stages so terrible? Well, the controls are unresponsive, the enemies are bland and uninspired, the bosses are terribly predictable and therefore not challenging, the level environments are terribly designed and I am fairly certain that at some point in my playing Sonic Unleashed I offended the camera’s honor because it seemed to do everything in its power to make me dead. Not from the enemies, mind you – outside of the occasional boss, the enemies are pushovers. No, where the camera gets you is with the God awful platforming. Many times you will find that even if you maneuver the camera manually, you won’t be able to see where you need to jump, and even if you can see where you need to jump, you usually have no idea if you’ll be able to make it because, unlike Sonic the Hedgehog, platforming with the Werehog is akin to trying to skip a cinder block across a pond. It just doesn’t work.

What makes the Werehog segments that much more tedious and frustrating is the fact that when you die, your experience (yes, you gain experience) and the points you’ve earned are reset to zero every time you die. This usually wouldn’t be a big deal, except that Sonic Unleashed feels the need to rely on the archaic letter-grade system, whereby you are awarded a grade depending on how fast you clear a stage, or how many enemies you kill… or how many points you have. Obviously, when your points are reset back to zero right before a boss battle because a platform was further than you thought, it takes a lot of the wind out of your sails.

The worst part about the Werehog/Hedgehog aspect of Sonic Unleashed is that you have almost no control over when you play as either. Before and after every mission you are forced to watch a cutscene (that you cannot skip) and then you discover if you are Sonic or… whatever the hell the Werehog is. After that minor mystery is solved, you then make your way to the mission selection hub by walking through another game hub filled with mindless townspeople who have little to nothing of importance to say. You see, though, it’s not as easy as simply completing a level to unlock the next. God no, that would make way too much damn sense. Instead you have to collect these coins that are scattered around each stage, only unlocking the next stage once you have collected enough of these coins. This method of artificially extending the length of the game only works to frustrate the player, and adds yet another layer of mind-numbing tedium to a game that already feels painfully tedious.

At least the presentation is decent. The pre-rendered cutscenes are quite beautiful to watch, and the in-game cutscenes are what you would expect from a Sonic game. The environments are bright and colorful, as they should be, and some of the particle effects are rather pretty to stare at. But then again, I’m not entirely sure you could screw up the look of a Sonic game unless you slap him in a gunmetal gray power plant for the entire adventure. The in-game music is, for the most part, well done. However, there is this one particular song that plays every time you engage in a fight as the Werehog that makes you feel like you should be playing the slots at the Golden Nugget. It’s terribly out of place and after the eighteen-bajillionth time of hearing it, may very well be capable of driving a man to murder. The voice acting is nearly as insufferable, with the new character of “Chip” possessing what could very well be the most nerve-grating voice in the history of man.

Look, here’s the deal. When you are actually playing as Sonic, the game is a blast. Sure, it’s a bit shallow but I can overlook that when I’m actually having fun. Here’s the problem: The Werehog parts are so bad, so uninspired and fundamentally yawn-inducing that you (and by “you”, I mean “me”) just don’t feel it’s worth the time to tread forward for the three minutes of awesomeness that comes with actually being able to run absurdly fast. If you are somebody who follows the chronology of the Sonic universe… you’re a sad, hopeless human being who desperately needs a hug.

At first I wanted to give Sonic Unleashed a 1. Then I remembered that I have Turning Point a 1 back in February, and while Sonic Unleashed is a pretty boring and uninspired game, it isn’t broken. Which counts for something. So, reluctantly, it gets a deuce.

NOTE: I fucking hate number scores…

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