I bought Sonic and The Secret Rings today. Boy do I regret it.

Before I bought this game, I read plenty of reviews... Most of them seemed to follow a similar theme... This game is 'flawed', but a step in the right direction for an otherwise failing series, which finally sees the Hedgehog beginning to understand what the third dimension should mean for him.

Those reviews are quite misleading.

Saying this game is fun on ANY level is a down-right lie. This is one of the worst games I've ever experienced. I SERIOUSLY wanted to like it... I prepared myself for a somewhat flawed, but still generally enjoyable experience... What I got was a punch in the balls that cost me £40.

Lets start with the controls. I love the Wii, I think the remote is an amazing innovation, and I genuinely feel like motion sensativity is the next step for gaming... But this game does not demonstrate control evolution... Its controls would have worked much better on a traditional pad... But because they fealt obligated to include Wii motion-controls in some way or other, the game suffers from bad responsiveness. I'd forgive this if the end result was actually more fun to weild, as sometimes is the case with similarly 'tacked-on' Wii controls, but this is simply not true of Secret Rings.

Then there's the story and presentation... As is becomming common place for this series, the story is laughably poor, presented with hillariously bad voice-acting (although thankfully you can switch it to Japanese, which I highly recommend). What's more, I had heard that instead of proper cut-scene I would be getting cheap storybook still-frame storytelling... I had made my peace with this, because I've seen similar techniques in other games, and they're usually done in quite an enjoyably arty way... Such is not the case with Secret Rings, the cut-scenes are just plain dull.

What about the design? Surely it's impossible for a company like Sega, famous for their arcade machines, to get a concept so simple and arcadey wrong? All this game needed was a fluid stream of fast-paced arcade action for us to race-through and have a blast... But no, we're presented with a plethora of complex menus to navigate, with all the action broken up into tiny segmented levels, poorly organised over a variety of pages, all seperated by a healthy supply of loading screens. You'll understand as soon as you start the game, and what should be a 2 minute training mission is segregated into a 15 minute collection of individual levels.

But surely when you finally get into it, and get down and dirty with a solid level it must be pretty satisfying? Wrong... The levels are poorly designed, and frustratingly difficult. That sense of fluid, arcade action of the 2D titles is no where in sight, because every few seconds you either get stuck, or fall off a cliff. In fact most of time the only way to complete a level is to die over and over again until you've memorised the path, and even then you'll die repeatedly trying to pull it off, because the oh-so-important homing attack (which you'll need to use to bounce of several targets in sucsession or else fall to your death) just doesn't work half the time. And if you're thinking that there'll be a sense of satisfaction when you finally pull off a perfect run of a level, you'll be wrong. Or at least the satisfaction will not be of a high enough degree to make up for half an hour of extreme frustration.

Don't even get me started on the broken camera, sufice to say it's another reason to hate this game.

There is an RPG ability building element which works nicely enough, although it would've been nice if they'd explained the complex ring menu system, instead of just shoving it down our throats (right after spending 15 minutes teaching us how to jump). I'm also not confident this RPG system really has any place bogging down what should be an out-of-the-box arcade action title.

My final conclusion is that any reveiw you've read with anything in the least bit positive to say about this game is being highly optimistic, and is largely comparing it the previous 3D entries, which of course were even worse... This is a fair comment, but don't make the same mistake as me, and think of that optimism as reason enough to actually BUY the game... Just trust that the series is on the up, but avoid actually PLAYING the game like the plauge.