Sonic and the Secret Rings

Probably the best new Sonic game on home consoles since the Mega Drive, Sega have beaten Nintendo and Mario to the punch by getting their 'icon' onto the Wii first.

Sonic plays a lot like Excite Truck, holding the Wii remote horizontally and tilting it left or right to steer as you manoeuvre Sonic through the seven levels. And yes, that is right, there are only seven levels - but fortunately, Sega have gotten around this by setting mulitple paths and objectives to extaned the life span and meaning that you will visit each level many times over. There are various other abilities that Sonic has at his disposal including pushing the remote forward when in the air to either charge and destroy enemies or to gain a speed boost.

Sonic can also jump, brake and skid to help you navigate your way around each course. The 'Secret Rings' you pick up also give you extra abilities, but using them to your fullest can take extended play and most aren't necessary for completing the game, just achieving higher scores and faster level completion times. Overall, the controls are decent enough, but there does seem to be a delayed reponse between button presses sometimes which can make precise control difficult on some of the more demanding courses.

The graphics are fairly good for the Wii, with no noticeable slowdown - impressive considering the speeds the game can fly along at when you build up some speed. The detail of the backgrounds is also impressive taking into account that most players will probably whiz straight past, barely noticing the backgrounds at all. To be honest, the graphics are not much better than an XBox game could manage, but the difference here is that the Xbox would never be able to run this game due to its sheer speed, with only F-Zero GX (another Sega game) on the Gamecube being the only game of the last generation to create such an intense feeling of speed.

It's a shame the sound doesn't match the graphics, as the voice acting is poor (not helped by awful dialogue) and the cheesy rock music will have you turning the volume down in no time at all. The sound effects are good though, with the collection of rings still sounding like the original games, and otherwise complement the game perfectly.

One problem many gamers might have, is the fact that there is a set course through each level and you are not free to go zooming off through the landscape and exploring wherever you want. However, the on-rails style play means that the game can retain its sense of speed (massively important for Sonic games) and reminds me of NiGHTS on the Saturn more than anything else, especially with the temptation to go back and beat your best scores and times, which was a key ingredients of NiGHTS.

Overall, Sonic and the Secret Rings is a fun game which most experienced gamers will have no problem beating, but it does have limited replayability which does shorten its lifespan, especially with only seven worlds to experience. A good game, but it's probably best to wait for it to drop in price (got my copy for £25 rather than the RRP of £40) unless you are a Sonic fan.