Honestly, I don't see why everybody's jumping all over were-hog... what I've seen of it looks quite promising. It didn't really look like a beat-em-up to me except that it doesn't use the usual Sonic attack system.
Regular Sonic appears to be an awful lot like Secret Rings, and Sonic Rivals 2 from what I've seen. Plenty of branching paths to reach areas but not *that* much exploration and the platforming is a second priority to speedrunning. I liked Secret Rings for the emphasis on speedrunning, if gave it sort of an 'arcade appeal' where I would come back and try to shave a few seconds to get a better time, and have a good time doing it. I didn't do the same for Mario, Zelda, and Metroid... all of which I believe are better games.
Though I also like the exploration and the depth, and if it were *perfect* this would be like running through the Sonic 3 levels in 3D/2D switching. I also like platforming and as I said, it seems to be second priority here. However we can see the other side of Sonic, which promises much more platforming with the stretchy arms and the combat system probably won't be too awful bad. (no crawla bouncing across hordes though, I loved doing the light attack/homing attack in the enemy rooms of SA's Final Egg no matter how pointless it felt)
Basically I like the premise, both the regular Sonic, and the werehog, however its not impossible, and perhaps not unlikely that Sonic Team is going to miss the mark somewhere that would make the game not live up to the gameplay promise (and I don't mean the hype promises of Sonic's comeback). Especially with the werehog because that is new, which is probably why everyone's concerned about it, and then there's the Wii version which is apparently being approached properly but there hasn't been any real footage to back that up... werehog has more than that.
