With Sonic Unleashed racing towards a Novembor release, we finally got hands-on-time with a few near-finished levels. from the Wii version. Consider us impressed. That's especially true for the back-to-basics daytime stages , which sees the hedgehog sprint through some beautifully rendered and impressively complex environments at breakneck speeds. As we've mentioned before, the game transitions back and forth between a 3-D behind the back and 2-D side scrolling, with the breakdown in the areas we played falling at about 70-30. Each stage boasts a lots of hidden, alternate routes, as well as plentiful opportunities to take advantage of the new drift mechanic, which is a heck of a lot of fun.
The nighttime stages, in which sonic transforms into a burly, snarling werehog, aren't as compelling, but they are more enjoyable then skeptics may have feared, thanks to some intricate platforming that complements the rather simplistic fisticuffs.