Just looking at this game’s cover, you know right away that this game sucks. If you don’t, you’re clearly new to Sonic.

Well, this is the second part of the “Sonic StoryBook Series” (lamest idea ever). The first was “Sonic and the Secret Rings’. Secret Rings wasn’t exactly a good game, but it wasn’t THAT bad either. After playing a while, you upgraded Sonic and you finally got some speed and the gameplay was… okay. It took quite a bit of upgrading before the game was playable enough, so it’s understandable that people quit fast. But, in the end, it wasn’t a bad game.

Now take everything that was bearable in Secret Rings and remove it all and add a sword. This gives you Sonic and the Black Knight.

Now, this isn’t a review. Well, not exactly. I didn’t finish it, only got halfway throug(fighting Arthur), and won’t ever touch this again. So this is more of a first impressions thing… Kinda.

Looks and Sounds

If there’s one thing I won’t diss too much about this game, it’s the graphics. They’re definitely up there by Wii standards. The environments and colors are vibrant and beautiful. there’s a big variety of areas, and a few of them, fields, lakes and the castle are really nice looking. The caves are a bit lame though. Otherwise, enemy and citizen design are generic and boring. The cutscenes are in a storybook style just like Secret Rings. Very light on animation, and the little animation there is is really lame.

The sounds are just what you’d expect from a Sonic game, and Sonic’s voice is fine, just like before. The music is lame though, but I didn’t pay that much attention to it so I can’t judge it properly.

Story
Now this is where the game goes to crap. Even after playing it I can’t comprehend how they thought about it, or why they thought it would be a good idea. Well, it’s about Sonic getting in a storybook about Camelot. But here, King Arthur is an immortal demon because of the scabbard of Excalibur giving him random powers like summoning evil entities from the underworld. So Sonic, with the help of Caliburn(a talking sword that says “Fool” a lot), must gather 3 legendary swords, stealing them from the Knights of the Round Table (who are still loyal to Arthur despite him being evil… don’t know how that makes sense at all), which will give Caliburn the power to defeat Arthur. Well, I can’t go much further than that, but I know there’s more to it, but really… Why? I don’t get it. Why make Arthur, and the Knights of the Round Table for that matter (though they become good guys later), evil? I just don’t get it. The story is horrible, and the cutscenes really don’t help.

Gameplay
If the story wasn’t bad enough, well brace yourselves, the gameplay is even worse.
Now, it takes the basic elements of Sonic and the Secret Rings, but pretty much ruins it all…. Whatever there was to ruin. It’s still “on-rails” (sometimes there’s an alternate path that leads to the exact same place). You pick fairies (which give rings), kills enemies, and do the objectives asked from you. There’s rails to grind, speed boosts that make it impossible to know what’s going on, and citizens you can give rings to.

What really ruins this game is the controls. Secret Rings had simple controls. Lean the Wiimote on the sides to move horizontally, jump with the 2 button(and you slide before you jump)), shake the wiimote to do the homing attack. It was simple and easy to use. Here they ruined it all. Now they added the nunchuk for movement and guarding(Z button), the A button jumps and does the homing… thing (it’s not an attack anymore) and random Wiimote waggling attacks. In theory that could be not too bad, but the controls are just badly implemented. There’s a delay when you attack, sometimes the waggling is just unresponsive and nothing happens, and it just doesn’t work really well at all. When you jump, you have to be at the right height to do the dash, if you’re not you just get back on the ground really fast. Attacking is a chore. Swinging at random brings you nowhere, but trying to do proper attacks is just as useless. Basically, you swing the remote around and hope for the best. Attacking from the air is pretty useless too, unless you’re doing the homing thing. But if you’re doing it and hit an enemy, it’s unclear as to whether you’ll be able to launch an attack or not. The controls are just broken. Nothing works as it should and it just sucks.

The only thing that’s well done here in comparison to Secret Rings is the backtracking. This really didn’t work well in secret rings, but here it’s loads better. But that’s about it.

To have some kind of control on your attacks, focus attacks(I think that’s what they’re called, frankly I don’t care) are the way to go. Hold B and slash, which brings you straight to the next enemy, and you can do it to a series of enemies. And if you wait a bit and attack when your sword glows, it replenishes just a bit of Soul Meter which is used to do those attacks. Those are really the only well done parts of the game.

There’s also boss battles, which require guarding and timing your attacks properly, but they’re barely worth mentioning. Even fighting Arthur is boring. In stages there’s gonna be citizens of Camelot and the surroundings. You have to try not to hurt them, but you can also give them rings. I actually don’t know why I’d do that, but some quests require you to do that. Giving them rings is a simple QTE mini-game that REALLY sucks. Why just not give them the damn rings?

There’s some other gameplay elements. There’s a class system, where you can be either a Cavalier, Paladin or Knight (you start as knight). Depending on which you choose, you have different skills. Those can add to your speed, change your attacks and other stuff like that. This is the alternative to the skills system from Secret Rings which was infinitely better and actually gave you customization. You can also get equipment, which give you other skills, but those are pretty limited. There’s a few cryptic systems like the title thing that gives you followers that do nothing, stuff like that.

What’s really annoying is that this is a slow Sonic game. You’re constantly slowed down to fight enemies, or do puzzles, or give rings to idiots. And even when you’re going fast, those parts are when you don’t really do anything. It’s never a fast game. And considering the combat is horrible, slowing down to fight is not a good thing.

Overall
This game is horrible. I mean… The moment I saw the first trailer for the game, I knew it was going to be crap. THEY GAVE SONIC A SWORD! What’s next, giving him a gun? Oh wait *recalls in horror the… horror that was Shadow the Hedgehog*. Well, this game sucks, that’s really all I need to say. Sega clearly don’t care about Sonic anymore. Simple as that. They don’t WANT to make a good game with him anymore.
Unless they want to make a proper game with him, they might as well just drop him altogether. He’s had a good run in his days, but Sonic is dying and Sega is doing with him what they did with the Genesis: keeping him on life support*coughsegaCD32xcough*.

jobocan Console, Games, Review