Dear Sonic Team

How hard is it to make a good Sonic game? I'll tell you, not very hard. You did it for years, why do they all suck now? Sonic Adventure 2 Battle was good, but since then... not so much. Sonic Heroes? Piece of crap. Personally I liked The Secret Rings, though no one else does. The daytime levels in Sonic Unleashed were good, but the nighttime ones as a wolf thing were just terrible.

I just got Sonic and the Black Knight for Christmas. Now, I had heard that like the others it was bad, but after skimming the directions, I was actually excited to try it. The story was kind of stupid, but the gameplay sounded  like a good mix of sonic with some RPG elements, and I thought maybe it was another good Sonic game, but boy was I wrong.

There are three playstyles Sonic can use, one focused on combat, one on speed, and one that's balanced. But for the first like two-thirds of the game, you can only use the balanced one. You can also use other characters, but you don't get them until even later than the different styles for Sonic. So technically these things are there, but only at the end (and since you level up each style separately, there's no real point in doing the other styles when your balanced style is already way higher in level). The other characters are pretty bad, except Knuckle's who is brokenly amazing at anything that's not combat because he can glide, thank god too because getting through some "platforming" sections are near impossible with anyone else because the controls are so bad.

That's the worst part, the controls. I mean, come on, really? Did anyone play test this game at all? You're not actually free to move as you please, you're stuck going forwards, and you can sort of move to the sides a bit. Sometimes you need to move to the side, to avoid something, or collect something, or whatever, but it's like the game fights against you, trying not to let you actually move over at all and trying to keep you centered. Plus, the path is zigzagging around so much that it's hard to tell where you can actually move to. And the "homing attack", it's been great in other games but... well... you have a sword in this one. If you don't swing your sword, then you just bounce off. So you have to jump, press the button again to do the homing attack, and in the millisecond before you hit, swing the wiimote so Sonic swings his sword as he hits the enemies. Of course, half the time the homing attack goes after a different enemy, or ignores the enemy, or goes after an enemy when you didn't see any, and basically is a pain in the butt. I could go on about the controls, but I won't.

Luckily, you had the decency to not torture us for too long, making the shortest game I've played in ages. Took me only about two and a half hours to beat it, though it turned out that wasn't really the end, the story had a twist, and then there were a bunch more levels... adding about another hour bringing the game to an astounded three and a half hours of gameplay.

This is just sad, I used to long Sonic games, what happened to the good ones?
-SF