Previews// Sonic And The Secret Rings

So, Sonic the Hedgehog on XBOX 360 wasn’t so hot, in a nutshell. It doesn’t bring much joy for fans of the blue blur. Even if collectively they don’t have a clue what they want from a perfect Sonic game it is still a shame for most of us who feel that standards have been slipping since the original Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast.

In these rough times for the franchise, it can only be forgiven that nobody was really jumping on the hype train when Sega announced its latest project for the Nintendo Wii. The idea of not even being able to control the blue blur properly was enough for it to just about give up on the game. Strangely enough though, after having a good old go on the game already, we at SPOnG contest that this outing might just be worth your while.

In Sonic and the Secret Rings, the fastest thing alive is sent into the pages of a book based loosely on The Arabian Nights. Some big fat purple dude called Erazor Djinn is wrecking havoc by erasing the pages of the book so he can rewrite the future – to an ending that bigs him up, most likely. A fairy called Shahra befriends Sonic and asks for his help to stop Djinn. As a result, you’ll be racing through jungles, deserts, temples, pirate ships and even outer space in later levels, meeting familiar faces along the way.

While there’s a heck of a load of familiarity, this is technically a brave new world for Sonic. Control is relatively simple once you get used to it: Sonic runs constantly and using the Wii remote you can tilt to the left or right to move the hedgehog accordingly. You can speed up by tilting forward or even stop and reverse to an item you missed by tilting back. Immediately using this ‘on-rails’ method of play, the camera problems that have long dogged Sonic Team productions seemed almost non-existent. Hooray!

You can jump using the [2] button and brake using [1] on the remote. The trick comes when you are faced with obstacles such as gaps and enemies – holding down the [2] button will have Sonic charge up his jump and leap higher, but if you’re running at full pelt you’ll still be sliding towards your obstacle as you’re charging. This means that you have to look ahead and plan your course of action so that you have enough time to skilfully charge up while you slide towards a cliff’s edge, and then jump across when you get within distance.