Sonic and the Secret Rings review

Game: Sonic and the Secret Rings
Platform: Wii
Genre: Action
Developer: SEGA
AKA: Sonic to Himitsu no Ring (JP)

Reader review by pickhut

October 04, 2010

Sonic and the Secret Rings is the console successor to Sonic 06. That's rough. However, you'd think Sonic Team learned from their experience with that mess of a product and strove to improve with the follow-up, reassuring the gaming public that 06 was a freak accident.

Sonic Team was successful... in creating another bad game.

You're probably thinking, "Oh, so this is another 06?", and I really wish I could say yes. The more I played Secret Rings, the more I realized Sonic Team managed to make this worse than its predecessor.

This game's downfall is the inability to control Sonic properly at any given time. Since this is a Wii release, someone on the development team thought, I assume, that throwing in a control gimmick would make this title stand out from other Sonic games and arouse interest. This, in turn, produced one of the most difficult to control Sonics in the history of the series. Sonic will always "run" forward (takes awhile for him to get going after any kind of stop) without your help, only allowing you to move left, right, and jump. You can move back... but you seriously can only walk backwards after coming to a complete stop with the brake button. I don't even need to provide examples to let you know this is going to be a pain if you miss specific objects.

It's bad enough that Sonic has literally been transformed into a living train, but it gets worse when you make the shocking discovery that the control response is horrible. When Secret Rings forced me to play four to five tutorial stages in a row at the beginning, I thought it was me, that I just didn't fully grasp the "feeling". Thankfully, and with my dignity intact, that wasn't the case. With every command input, I normally had a 50/50 chance of actually seeing Sonic obey them on screen. If I wanted to quickly turn left to avoid a cactus, I would, with the Wii Remote on its side, tilt the left side forward. Simple enough, right? Unfortunately, I then usually watch in horror as the blue hedgehog casually moved to the left, eventually hitting the cactus. Attacking a locked on enemy would either sometimes result in getting hurt or just fly right past it. Jumping? Jumping is just as bad: randomly unresponsive. And all you're doing is pressing a button!

Imagine performing all these moves constantly, on the go, in every stage. It hurts. It hurts so much.

The biggest sin a developer can commit is to take away control from a gamer, and Sonic Team was victorious in doing so with this project. Now, I'm sure this wasn't intentional from the start, when they thought up the concept of "The Sonic Express", however, I'm also sure early in the development cycle they realized the controls felt, well, crappy. But they continued making the game. Maybe Sonic Team thought they could fine-tune things before release? I don't know. I just can't believe they went ahead with this, especially after the wreak of Sonic 06. I'll just end with this: I never completed Sonic and the Secret Rings. I gave up, because it was insanely frustrating. Why am I bringing this up? Because I finished Sonic 06. That game had problems up the wazoo, but I beat Sonic, Shadow, and Silver's episodes, beat the last episode, and saw the credits. That's how bad Sonic and the Secret Rings is in comparison.

Rating: 2/10

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