Sonic and the Black Knight

Poor Sonic. There was a time when he was as respected as Mario, but a succession of very poor games has left the blue hedgehog a shell of his former self.

The games have gone from bright, fun platformers set in cosy fantasy worlds to increasingly ridiculous attempts at building a story and trying to make Sonic into a dark character to appeal to adults. Adults who remember playing the games as kids and miss the blue skies of Green Hill Zone.

Black Knight doesn’t stray from this broken formula casting Sonic, for some reason, as a knight in King Arthur’s court. Black Knight has been built with sword fighting in mind, which is straying somewhat from Sonic’s once simple purpose of just running very fast.

The game does, if nothing else, look very nice even for a Wii title, although the rather small game world soon becomes repetitive as you’re sat down the same route for the 5th time to perform yet another simplistic task.

The controls are weak too, the fighting is poor and simply relies on you jiggling the remote about a bit, and moving any direction but forward is oddly awkward.

The early stages of the game are laughably simplistic and you can breeze through them with your eyes closed, while the latter half is plagued with difficulty spikes compounded by the crap controls that seem to have been put in because they realised it was too easy.

It’s occasionally enjoyable in small doses, but only in a very mindless way, and it’s certainly not good enough to justify a full price purchase.

Verdict: 35%

Another terrible game is another nail in the coffin of the hedgehog. Sega’s mascot has lost his way and this title does not in any way rejuvenate the series.