Yeah, it's a mechanic the game doesn't tell you about afaik, but it's a lifesaver for getting easy S ranks on the nighttime levels.
Yep. There's absolutely no issue with the response of the controls in Unleashed. Although the QTE finishers are amongst the most crappy of all mechanics. Enemies scale invisibly by zone; a Deep Nightmare in Windmill Isle will have only a fraction of the health that the same Deep Nightmare in Jungle Joyride will have. There's no way for you to know this until you start attacking them and see how rapidly their health car depletes. When you're fully levelled up, enemies in earlier levels will start going down in as little as a single hit. That would be nice, if not for the fact that performing these finishers is mandatory to score enough points for an S-rank. I just did a run through of Windmill Isle as the Werehog and only performed a finisher on the miniboss at the end - I got an A rank. Everything else went down too easily to perform finishers on. Or those few that didn't were left with something like 49% of their health after a single blow. That's enough to allow you to initiate a finisher, but gives you barely any time to do so. Plus the game forces you to wait until the enemies are standing upright, and they must not be flinching/lying down from an attack and not winding up to attack you in order for you to be allowed initiate a finisher. And even then you have to be positioned the right distance from them or else you might grab them instead of start up a finisher. Urgh... Unleashed is so good in so many ways. The Werehog levels are actually rather fun just to blast through once you've levelled up plenty. What really sucks about them is that they're so unrefined and unbalanced. Functional, but nobody got around to critically analysing and polishing the mechanics they'd implemented. Overly long levels, bottomless pits abound (including on balance beams with sweeping camera angles), somewhat button mashy combat in excessive abundance and little variety in gameplay from one level to the next. It's not bad, just fairly average. Then it's juxtaposed against the daytime gameplay and the state of the Sonic franchise back in 2008... It's easy to see why Unleashed got such a critical bashing. I can't even say that it was unfair.
Oh yeah, the QTEs and their complete mangling of the scoring system in the night stages are awful. The Werehog has a whole bunch of legitimately cool moves and combos, but absolutely none of them matter when you can just slap the enemy a few times and then do a finisher for the best score. Not to mention that it makes the already-long night stages take even longer.
What makes this all the worse is that they can just tweak the scoring system a bit to make it better. If they rewarded you more for using the longer combos, and penalized using the same combo over and over, combat would feel less repetitive. It'd also mean that, to get S ranks, you actually need to level up to get more moves - and you could still get an S rank when fully leveled up.
Bad take. I always felt like the Wii version was pushing those night stages on you big time and when I played it, I remember just wanting them to end. You play through like 5 or 6 of them in a row and they all suck ass and you just want them to send. I never felt that with the 360 version. Yeah, they're tedious, but at least you only have to go through one and then it's over. It also helps that the 360 version has combos rather than just generic slashes so at least there's some engagement in combat. I also never felt like they were fast and I have no idea what reality you live in where they can be considered that.
"Amazing. Every word of what you just said... was wrong." - Luke Skywalker LOL just kidding. However, that's not at ALL how I felt. First, there are only three acts per world (except Eggmanland, but at least it doesn't take you a single 75 minute level like the HD version). And comparing the two, I always felt the Werehog Wii levels were much more brisk because they were split evenly and short. There are fewer places you have to stop, and I found that you have a lot more freedom in movement when running. You can beat all of them in like 5 minutes. Plus, splitting the Werehog levels into separate acts means you don't have to keep playing continuously.
That's...really not helping, dude. On to my actual point: I only played the Wii version myself, but from what I've seen/been told, the HD version had fewer but longer Werehog levels. Actually, from the accounts I'd heard at the time, the Wii Werehog levels were literally the HD levels broken into smaller chunks. Whether that's actually true or not, I can't say that playing 3 10-minute levels would actually be worse than 1 30-minute level. Seems to me like the exact same amount of shit.
Nah, the Werehog levels are pretty different between the two versions. For instance, the balancing beams that are all over the place in the HD version are nowhere to be seen in the SD one. EDIT: I played nighttime levels in the two versions back-to-back just to make sure, and yeah, they're extremely different.
