Sonic Unleashed is kind of Not Good. But it helped me appreciate Haste, which is.

Unleashed Recompiled is a triumph of engineering and Haste: Broken Worlds is a triumph of Landfall.

By Lyn, March 6th, 2025

Sonic Unleashed has been my registered favorite Sonic game for years, a fact apparently helped by the fact that I could not really play it for years. Since my 360 red ringed many many many years ago I had only my memories of the game to rely on. Attempting to run it via emulator was plagued with crashes, slowdowns, visual bugs, and general sadness all around, so I have not passed the two hour mark for well over ten years.

The recomp changed this! Sonic Unleashed for the Personal Computer is a capital-P Perfect port of the game! It runs great, it looks great, and I can finally get a pure, unobstructed, even slightly enhanced experience of the game!

My experience of the game is that it's perhaps not that good.

The plain easiest part to criticize is the Werehog levels, the beat-em-up style night levels in which you play as stretchy-arm werewolf Sonic. Divorced as I was from the experience of playing them I really did not remember them being as tiresome and long as they are - and they are Tiresome and Long. Especially during the beginning, when you lack any real stylish, flashy moves. The appeal of mashing [X] and [Y] to pound enemies into the dirt fades after a couple hours, and the attempts at platforming are boring bordering on infuriating. The bad platforming is compounded by the medal hunt system meaning you may either be thwarted by the z-axis twenty times before collecting a medal or worse, miss the medal entirely and need to complete the level again if you end up needing it.

These annoyances could be overlooked if the day levels pulled their weight - the levels where you play as good old regular 3d Sonic - but I was somewhat horrified to find they did not. These are the things everyone says are great! The levels everybody says they wish were the whole game! The levels I remember playing and replaying and replaying as a kid! What happened?

The kinetic experience of blinding speed and split-second decision making as I boosted and drifted around world cities was entirely absent as I instead kind of vaguely pointed my analog stick in the direction I wanted Sonic to go and hoped he got the message. Optimal routes in 3d are nearly impossible to spot before you've already missed them and in 2d you're liable to have your entire momentum immediately halted by an unavoidable wall because you did not have the precognition to jump thirty seconds earlier. Lesson for next time, I suppose. Replayability? Maybe, but I'd prefer a replayability that leans less on rote memorization.

Unleashed Recomp is so perfect, runs so beautifully and flawlessly - native on Linux, even! - that it has successfully removed the rose tint from my glasses. I genuinely cannot be more excited for more future recomps!! This experience has honestly been fantastic, because being reintroduced to reality in this way has given me much much more appreciation for what I have in front of me.

And what I have in front of me is Haste: Broken Worlds, a 3d platformer roguelike (nothing's perfect) that delivers on that insane kineticism that I was hoping to get out of Unleashed.

For generations people have been trying to create a 3d Sonic that is good and in my (albeit limited) experience this is the game that has managed to achieve it, and it managed this in a pretty clever way: it removed the jump button. Your [A] button is replaced instead with a dive button that allows you to adjust your trajectory as you fly through the air. Landing as parallel as you can to the ground helps you maintain your speed, which nets you points you can use to get items to give you bonuses.

This loop is supported by the fact that this team simply understands how a 3d platformer is supposed to work. Rings and coins are traditionally used to guide the player through levels, but in Haste they also do the job of tutorializing you, suggesting routes that help you tune in to the game's perfect landing system - teaching you how to angle yourself to get better at the game. Despite the levels being procedural every jump felt like it had a perfect place to land. Whether that's slight of hand on the side of the controls or the world generation, each micro-level was so fun that I'd regularly skip out on shops or events on the 'world map' to just play more of them.

Haste feels like how I remember Sonic feeling. Total control, high energy flying through the air collecting rings sparks as I gradually become more familiar with the game's controls, letting me pull off tighter and riskier maneuvers in pursuit of S-ranks. This is the game I remember my childhood favorites being. Landfall is making something special.