Sonic UnJ2MEashed ★☆☆☆☆

There are parts of this that almost work as a budget, janky version of Sonic Rush. The boost works, the art is rather nice and the renditions of Unleashed level music are surprisingly good. But then there are no sound effects and the music cuts out after a few seconds (I don’t know if that’s an emulation problem or if the game is just like that) and you run into the brick wall that is the utter shambles of the jump physics and collision detection that makes platforming in this game barely manageable. I guess it’s impressive that this ran on mobile phones at all but it constantly feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.

It is, mercifully, short. Only four of the locations from Sonic Unleashed are here and all the hub worlds and everything else extraneous is gone. Even the plot is barely there. There are some brief bits of dialogue at the start of levels between Sonic and Chip that are lines taken from the main gain, divorced from their original context. Other than that there all there is is some interstitial titles between levels that were clearly written by someone who was not given much if any guidance on what the story in the game is meant to be. It refers to Sonic in werehog form as just “Werehog” as if it was a name and talks about Sonic going to “Athens, Greece” instead of Apotos (which is actually based on Mykonos) even though the title cards for levels actually do use the made up names for these places, correctly calling it Apotos. This itself is weird because that’s not the name for the level in the console versions of the game, that’s the name of the hub area. The level is actually meant to be called Windmill Isle! The ending screen also just goes on a weird ramble that “We cannot live without the night, we all must sleep, we all must rest. Darkness is a part of our world, just as much as light.” Sure, great!

One last funny note is that after you beat each boss you get a Chaos Emerald. You might think that this means you are going to get all seven before you fight the final boss and there will be a Super Sonic section, but when you get to the final boss you only have five of them and then after defeating it the game just gives you two more and then ends.