Sonic Colurs Nintendo Wii Review

Sonic Colours Nintendo Wii Version

We are less than a year away from Sonic the Hedgehog's 20th anniversary and to honour this milestone Sonic Team need to pull out all the stocks so that we don't get another disaster like Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. Sonic has been on a very bumpy road for the last ten years and has become one of the laughing stocks of gaming. If there was ever a good time to make a comeback it would be now.

Sonic Colours is everything that Sonic Unleashed should have been, those horrible beat'em up stages, gone. What we are left with is fast paced gameplay and some brilliant set pieces. Sonic himself controls much like he did in Unleashed only this time he is better rounded meaning that he is easier to control in both the high speed areas and careful platforming areas.
The game is taking ideas from the classic Sonic formula with the most important being that you must slow down every now and then, by doing this the high speed that fans crave feels much more rewarding. Once again the game sees Sonic constantly switching between a 2D and 3D plane to keep the game play fresh and please both newer players and Sonic purists.
In the last ten years Sonic has been let down by multiple gameplay gimmicks that have more bad than good, once again Sonic Team have tried a new gameplay gimmick in an attempt to keep things fresh and to their credit they finally got it right. The unique gameplay element to Sonic Colours are the multicoloured aliens called Wisps who are just basically optional power ups. Yes for once we are not having a gimmick forced on us as if to say “ooh look at what Sonic can do now”, if I must be honest the wisps make the game feel very “Super Mario”.
It seems sonic is taking a few ideas of Mario with the newest being the ability to swim, yes this is never explained but Sonic has all of a sudden learned how to swim, it must because of the Olympic games. This change has both a positive and negative effect. On the upside water doesn't instantly kill Sonic more, on the downside being underwater isn't tense or scary any more and you hardly worry about drowning.
If there was one thing that could single handedly ruin any Sonic game it was instant death pits that came out of nowhere, it used to be that you could tell the quality of a stages design by the number of death pits that would kill you without warning. The frustration caused by those pits is similar to the frustration you feel when you slip on ice only to stand up and slip again. Thankfully the stage design is much better this time around with death pits only appearing in a few stages rather than all of them, the pits are better placed too meaning that you can see them before they can kill you. These changes only help the game to feel more fair which is good because past titles could be frustrating to the point where the player would quit.
While the game does improve on a lot of short comings it does still suffer from shoddy combat and the odd frustrating moments in later stages. The boss battles are well thought out but they lose impact when you realise that you have to fight them twice.
The game is reasonably paced for a Sonic game and while 5 hours may seem short the game does offer several hours of replay value with challenge modes and unlockable stages.

8/10