Five Things Sega Could Do To Save a Sonic Unleashed PC Port
Sega has a tendency to release PC ports of their games on Steam out of the blue. Valkyria Chronicles and Bayonetta were big surprises, only announced basically the same day they went up for sale. One PC port some Sonic fans have been requesting (including myself) is 2008’s Sonic Unleashed.
I’d argue that Sonic Unleashed is still, a decade later, the best example of the “boost” gameplay later popularized in Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations, and most recently, Sonic Forces. Sonic’s levels in Unleashed are fast, challenging and frenetic in a way none of those other games ever really matched. The problem is what surrounds Sonic’s levels – a good 75% of Unleashed’s gameplay is slow, tedious busy work, dominated by levels where you control the plodding “Werehog.” This was a long-running problem Sonic Team was struggling with back then; they seemed to be better at making 2-3 hour experiences in an industry that expected something closer to 8-10 hours. So, they compensated by padding out the clock.
That makes Unleashed the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was the last of their games to contain such a significant amount of padding, with later games embracing their shorter completion times (until Sonic Lost World, anyway). Because of what a slog Sonic Unleashed can be, only the most dedicated really dig in and uncover its bright spots, with most getting scared away by how often and how hard the game slams on the brakes.
Sonic Team’s Takashi Iizuka stated just as recently as last year (2017) that he was open to the idea of a PC port for Sonic Unleashed, so if someone were just so happening to be working on one, I humbly present you with a wishlist of features that I think may help elevate the game to the forgotten classic I believe it to be. Each change will be rated on how hard it would be to implement, and just for the sake of fun, I’ll throw in some left field requests at the bottom that I don’t necessarily think would be possible, but I’d like to see just the same.
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