1.5/5 ★ – aloysiusp's review of Sonic Unleashed.

PS3 (played on PS Now/PS4) Hot, hot, hot garbage. Easily the worst game I've played all year. How do I hate Sonic Unleashed? Let me count the ways. Positives first: I think the art design and music are actually very pleasant and well done, and are easily the best aspects of this game. The positives end there. The controls for the hedgehog stages are not nearly as tight as they need to be. For a game whose basis is speed, the controls need to be immediately responsive with no delay. There can't be any kind of drift. Unleashed suffers from both of these problems, and Sonic is incredibly hard to control when moving at top speeds. The levels are designed poorly, with several cheap deaths due to bad, intentionally placed spike traps and pits. And people think the day levels are the best part of this game!? I can't imagine what a "good" Sonic game must look like. The werehog levels suffer from the inverse of this problem: they are slow, clunky, and mind-numbingly repetitive. The stretch on and on, with little to differentiate each and some frustratingly poor design choices. Here, too, the controls are stiff and unresponsive. One of my biggest critiques of poor platformers is that you often can't tell where your characters is in space, meaning most jumps are blind leaps of faith. Unleashed is the epitome of this problem. At least I felt like I could control where Sonic was going during these stages. And all of this, all of it, would be somewhat forgivable if there wasn't a lives system in this game. The number of game overs I got, only to be forced to restart the poorly designed stage I perished in, is innumerable. The peak of this is the final boss fight, where all of these problems coalesce into one steaming pile of dogshit. I legitimately do not know how anyone has beaten this game. It must be a combination of skill, luck, and sheer determination. Sonic Team needs to be put out of their misery. 3/10