If you're willing to indulge it creates a world you can care about. The hubs work as breathers and a lot of work was put into the people making them all feel unique and lively. Unleashed has all sorts of hiccups and flaws like this that you have to account for and mitigate to enjoy the good stuff, but the good stuff is really good to me.
#Zenonia 1 full series
Tight, reaction based gameplay in a series that has never really pushed that on it s's players before outside of specific difficult stages at the tail end of games is gonna turn people off. No one is going to know about the routes the medals lie on in the day time stages going into them so you'll inevitably have to replay the stages and sacrifice the pacing of the game to progress.No one is going to know that you should only focus on leveling up a few of the werehog's stats to unlock his other moves that make the levels more fun and quicker.No one is going to react well to the framerate obscuring their vision in reaction based stages. None of Sonic's friends are anywhere to be found. It's a game you have to approach a certain way that isn't made clear going into it. I really like Sonic Unleashed, but I don't blame people for disliking it. Put it all together and you get a bad Sonic game. And throughout the entire game you have to fight against a rubbish framerate. Nothing totally bad, but very contrasting to the good parts of Unleashed. Hub segments arbitrarily force you to move wander around slowly as you look for level entrances and NPCs, you have to hunt for medals and perform a few fetch quests. If it was just the nighttime gameplay (and not in a Sonic game), it would be brushed aside as a generic beat-em-up platformer.
![zenonia 1 full zenonia 1 full](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5d/79/bc/5d79bcd6cd5a3a190802a70fda8809fe.png)
If it was just the daytime levels it would be a decent, albeit unpolished, fresh gameplay experience. But all of it is far from perfect and the nuggets of genuinely good content and hidden amongst so much boring gameplay that nobody wants out of a Sonic game. Individually, no part of Unleashed is offensively bad. You also have to consider the time spent in hub worlds further detracting from the best of the gameplay and poor technical performance. That means the game is a mostly slow, uninteresting and very un-Sonic experience. And it greatly outweighs the daytime gameplay in terms of content. The nighttime gameplay also isn't awful it's just rather bland and repetitive. It did suffer from cheap design at times, but it was overall solid. Especially back in 2008, it was new, exciting and a welcome step up in quality from other recent Sonic games.
![zenonia 1 full zenonia 1 full](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/h-FgnqDytYs/maxresdefault.jpg)
The daytime gameplay is the strongest part of the game, no doubt. Honestly, I think Unleashed is a game that's worse than the sum of it's parts. It's slow and tedious, just like the rest of the game, and now because I died and ran out of lives, not only do I have to do all of it over again, but also Egg Dragoon. There's just nothing fun about constantly dying over and over again to memorize a dumb stage.Īnd now I'm on the final boss. Oh, and the camera sucks, especially in the hub stages. Many times the lock-on prompt would be up, and I press square to homing attack, but instead Sonic launches himself to the other side of the continent and kills himself. Sonic is also way too slippery, and the lock-on is very unreliable. I just completed Eggmanland, and it was honestly the worst stage I have ever played in a video game. It was utterly ridiculous.
![zenonia 1 full zenonia 1 full](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/sonic/images/b/b1/E3ED3.png)
I enjoyed it at first, despite the atrocious framerate, massive padding via Werehog and obscene medal requirements, etc.īut then the stages just became way too much trial-and-error.