The world's fastest blue hedgehog is back. After glitching his way through the 360 and PS3's Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Unleashed has promised to return Sonic to his high-speed platforming glory days with 3D to classic 2D transitions. In addition to this, Sonic goes through a transformation that will add to the new Sonic experience.

          The plot begins at an untold story between Sonic and Doctor Eggman in an opening that Sega calls "The coolest opening cinematic ever seen in a Sonic game.“ During their confrontation,  Eggman manages to catch Sonic into his weapon and uses the seven chaos emeralds to split the world's continents into pieces, awakening a beast inside in the process. It's up to Sonic to travel through the world and solve the crisis but as the world split, the negative energy in the chaos emeralds transforms Sonic into a werewolf at night, or preferably called a Werehog. Sounds pretty epic to me.

          The levels consist of Sonic traveling between different parts of the world such as Greece or Brazil, each having two different acts. The first act takes place during the daytime which is all about Sonic speeding through stages with the new ring meter that when filled up with rings will allow him to use the Sonic Boost to ram right past enemies and obstacles whilst running even faster than normal, causing a cool motion blur. He'll have more obtainable skills like the Speed Drift to slide around corners and Quick Step to instantly dodge obstacles left and right. So far the daytime gameplay looks nice, fast and plays smoothly. The time when your running in third person plays like the Sonic stages in Sonic Adventure, and the transition to 2D side-scrolling can easily be compared to Sonic Rush or the classic Genesis games. You may be going at mach speed but the levels last for at least 5 minutes and have many different branching paths, making it truly feel like a classic Sonic game.

          Now the second act takes places during nighttime in which Sonic's new transformation takes over and he becomes the Werehog. These nighttime sections split evenly into 50-50 of Sonic to Werehog, whilst Sonic is running through towns in the first act, the Werehog will take on a more platform-oriented gameplay during the second act, using his strength to battle hordes of enemies and break through walls, or using his stretchy arms to grab ledges and climb poles throughout the level. The ring meter switches to a Shield bar for blocking and the Vitality bar for health. The Werehog has many similarities to another Sega game called Ristar, which involved Ristar using stretchy arms to platform through levels and defeat enemies just like the Werehog. The Werehog is also similar to God of War in the sense that it's a third person game and has the Werehog doing many combos and different skills to plow through his enemies. Even though it isn't the fast paced Sonic gameplay we all know and love, the nighttime gameplay still looks really awesome and quite fun.

          The levels also have "hub worlds" probably before the actual acts allowing Sonic to freely roam around the town and gain new items and skills and even do side-quests.

          A new Sonic Team is working on Sonic Unleashed with the lead designer being Yoshihisa Hashimoto. Sega has learned from their past mistakes and their goal is to bring back Sonic and prove he can work in 3D. We'll have to wait and see if Sega will accomplish their goal.