Sonic Unleashed Review
Shockingly Relevant Once Again in 2025
Say what you will about Sonic fans: you gotta admire their dedication. In lieu of an official remaster or even just a PC port of Sonic Unleashed, fans recompiled their own version of the Xbox 360 game that runs natively on PC - You can find it here. It’s an impressive endeavor which I can appreciate as a true believer in media preservation, but it’s also a little confusing. All this effort to keep a game like Sonic Unleashed alive? Not unlike the Star Wars prequels, Unleashed has gone from being regarded as mediocre at best to some kind of lauded all-time classic in certain circles. To borrow a pun from the back of the game’s box, the difference is night and day. There’s more than just nostalgia or blind fan loyalty behind this shift in perception, though; Unleashed is everything you’ve heard about it all at once. It is both a marvelous return to form for a franchise which was struggling to latch onto its identity and a bloated drag wasting hours of playtime on a half-baked imitation of far better games.
Being split down the middle is basically Sonic Unleashed’s whole theme. In this game, Dr. Eggman’s scheme to harness the power of the ancient evil, Dark Gaia, has cursed Sonic to transform into the “Werehog” by night. As such, the game has two types of stages: Day stages featuring the high speed platforming Sonic is known for, and Night stages that play more like action games like God of War. It’s actually kind of amazing just how well you can line the game’s best and worst moments up with this dynamic.
We’ll start with the good stuff: daytime. Unleashed comes after years of Sega’s meandering attempts to convert Sonic’s fleet-footed style from 2D into 3D effectively, culminating in the unmitigated disaster that was Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). That game made it abundantly clear that 3D Sonic needed some serious work, and this is where Unleashed truly delivers. Rather than just trying to apply 2D Sonic design philosophy to 3D spaces, Unleashed created a brand-new system for 3D Sonic gameplay that feels as fast and effortless as the classics. Built around the ring-fueled Boost which lets Sonic plow through enemies at top speed, Day stages are both larger and more focused than they’d ever been for 3D Sonic. The basic tension of keeping Sonic at top speed while watching out for obstacles and shortcuts is enhanced by snappy moves like the stomp, slide, and quick step which make it easy to adjust course on the fly. It’s a system which rewards practice and precision with an exhilarating flow that all the best speedrun games provide.
This is the first example of what came to be known as “Boost Sonic” among fans. The fact that this control scheme has continued to appear in games as recent as last year’s Sonic X Shadow Generations shows how well it holds up; even Sega knew they struck gold here. Replaying the day stages to perfect your times is so much fun that I was willing to deal with the game’s inconvenient extra life system to do it. Even though later games would make minor refinements to the formula, there remains a lot of value in Boost Sonic’s debut. The levels complement Sonic’s globe-trotting adventure by doubling as high-speed tours of the various regions he visits. You’ll notice the settings change from busy streets or tribal villages into ancient ruins or vast wilderness as you blast through the stages. The fact that these levels are longer than later Boost Sonic levels makes them a bit harder to master, but the sheer amount of ground you cover also makes Sonic’s speed feel tangible. The controls aren’t quite as sharp as later Boost Sonic games - putting the homing attack on the same button as boosting is often inconvenient - but it’s nothing game-breaking. Finally, the huge scale of these stages is often a little too much for the Xbox 360 to handle, causing framerate drops that feel especially tough to deal with in such a high-speed game. Fortunately, the PC fan port runs a lot better on modern machines.
Just like a bright summer day, though, the sun must set eventually in Sonic Unleashed - and it absolutely kills the mood. Sonic’s transformation into the Werehog costs him his speed and style, but fortunately, he gets clunky controls and dull combat to make up for it! Wait, that’s not good. Just as your first dip into the earliest Day stages has you sold on their style, just a few moments in the first Night level will have you begging to go back. Levels alternate from open areas where you beat up lame enemies to platforming segments built around slow and clunky climbing mechanics. Though it’s dressed up with a long list of combos, nothing about the combat pushes it past mindless button-mashing. There’s no fun way to string moves together, no interesting ways to interact with enemies, and no incentive to do anything but mash out whatever your strongest available combo is until everything on the screen eventually dies. The story tells us the Werehog has greater strength than Sonic’s normal form, but Sonic’s boosting and homing attack dispatch many of the same enemies far faster than the Werehog can by flailing about. Fighting as the Werehog feels weak and foolish instead of empowering in any way. In between fights, you can count on “enjoying” really slow walks along balance beams, jumping mindlessly between climbing poles and platforms, and running around in search of keys to slowly carry to the door you’re trying to unlock. Enthralling stuff.
It sounds too simple just to say that the Werehog doesn’t work, but that’s really the long and short of it. Moving feels bad and fighting feels bad. The game can’t even run these worthless levels properly on original hardware; framerates can crawl even lower than they do in the busiest parts of the Day stages, and sound effects and visual cues often fail to trigger or show up at the wrong times and places. You would think the part of the game entirely focused on combat would have better boss fights, but it’s the same barely-functional slop as the rest of the Night stages. You actually feel the passion and effort put into the Day stages evaporate every time the story drags you back into the Werehog. Lots of great games have slumps, though. Normally you just power through and get back to the good stuff. This brings me to what may actually be Unleashed’s greatest sin: the way the game structures progression.
Something I’ve neglected to mention about the Night stages thus far is that they are long. The first run of a normal day stage will probably take your average player something like five minutes. With the focus on speed, better players can do them even faster. Night stages instead take about fifteen minutes on average. Yes, that’s right: the worst stages of the game take roughly three times as long to beat. That alone means you can’t just say Unleashed is half good and half bad; it really works out to something more like 40/60, if you want to boil it down to numbers. To make matters worse, though, every new stage is gated behind collectible sun and moon medals. Sun medals unlock day stages and - you guessed it - moon medals unlock night stages. Both types of stages have both types of medals, but Day stages have more moon medals than sun medals and vice versa. The problem is that the larger Night stages simply have more medals in general. Standard Day stages have seven moon medals and three sun medals, while Night stages have ten sun medals and six moon medals. Other medals appear in bonus stages and hub worlds, making a total of 400 medals split evenly between the two types. To beat the game, you need 120 of each medal - 60% of total medals.
What’s so bad about this? The medal hunt isn’t so hard, but it only serves to drag the game out - particularly in its weakest moments. Not only does it force you to be much more thorough than you might want to be in a speed-based game, but the grand majority of your medal hunting is going to happen in the part of the game which is borderline unplayable. Even though I’d rather be shaving precious seconds off my best times in the Day stages, It’s still fun to go off the beaten path and find some medals. A return visit to a Night stage, however, offers no appeal. It’s just busywork, and busywork is Sonic Unleashed’s fatal flaw. The mind-numbing dullness of the Night stages feels like busywork. Scrounging up a mass of medals, with only a few of them hidden somewhere creative, feels like busywork. Playing those two random stages where you have to “control” Tails’ plane by just pressing whatever button shows up on the screen feels like busywork.
This is what makes Sonic Unleashed a uniquely frustrating game. I can scarcely point to any other title which insists on burying all of its most inspired and enjoyable elements under such a massive mountain of worthless time-wasters. I really can’t emphasize enough how fun the good parts are. Every Day stage is a blast, the story’s actually pretty solid for a Sonic game, and the music is the only part of the experience that never falters. Unfortunately for Unleashed, though, a good game isn’t fun in fits and starts - it’s fun from start to finish. Sega may have thought they needed a certain amount of content to justify a $60 price tag, but forcing fans to wade through a sea of mediocrity doesn’t add more to the game. The value of a game is in the experience, not the volume of content. Sonic Unleashed’s best moments make me want to say I like the game, and clearly plenty of folks like those moments enough to work hard to preserve the game. Games are holistic experiences, though; you simply can’t take all the hours of boredom and disappointment out of consideration. There’s a lesson to be learned from this game: don’t ever let a game get in its own way. Developers need to make sure that every part of their game uplifts the whole, because enough weak moments will drag the whole game down with it.