You can rattle through the exposition and actually start enjoying some gameplay in the same time it would take to initiate a pointless conversation in the other version. Instead you get a map of the town, and click on each area to see what the people within have to say.
The bloated and largely unnecessary adventure game trappings, for example, have gone, so there's no more wandering around rigid hub towns, triggering random conversations in search of clues. In adapting the game for the Wii, Sonic Team has been forced to drop or change most of the problematic elements from the 360 and PS3. A flabby, meandering hybrid of various ill-fitting genres in its big-boy console incarnation, it's plagued by camera issues and an overly complicated structure that leaves the player shuttling between lifeless locations, trying to work out which level they need to tackle next and what they need to do to find it. It's by far the leading format of this console generation, but too often Wii owners are palmed off with botched ports games developed for the more powerful consoles crudely squashed into a Wii-shaped box, with half-hearted motion controls tacked on the side.Įvery now and again, however, a game comes along where the Wii's limitations prove to be beneficial, highlighting just where the rush to bigger, shinier toys can lead developers astray, and Sonic Unleashed fits that bill. Reviewing the Wii version of a multi-format release can be a thankless task.