Sonic is back in one of his better 3D adventures in a while, but can you really call it a Sonic game? I applaud that the developer didn't want to put him through the same story he's been through in the all of his 3D titles: Dr.Eggman is up to no good and Sonic needs to go find all seven chaos emeralds. Then there's a secret epic ending where he uses them to fight off a giant evil monster with the rock anthem of the game rooting you on. By the time you were done, you got the feeling you just played the final battle to a Power Rangers' game.

So thankfully Secret Rings is different, but I can't say I ever want to see this story again. Sonic wakes up and accidentally rubs a ring while grabbing for his clock. A genie of the ring awakens, a girl who explains to Sonic he needs to stop the evil genie Erazor Djinn from destroying the stories of the Arabian Nights book. She takes Sonic into the book on a flying carpet (ooh, magic) and what ensues is a quest for the seven world rings. Not to be confused with seven chaos emeralds, mind you.

What I do enjoy about this story is that it at least makes sense since you're given a good reason for why you travel to a particular level next. This comes as a breath of fresh air after playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Xbox360, since your trip through radically different enviornments were never explained with any real thought.

But in all honesty, the story of Secret Rings is just fine once you get into it - and then running from dinosaurs and flying on magic carpets doesn't seem so strange anymore. But for your first amount of playtime you'll definitely feel like you're navigating a Prince of Persia menu system, or fighting in a level straight out of God of War.

The Wii has gotten plenty of reviews for its other games with the combination of two words: "controls" and "intuitive." It's safe for me to say you can throw "intuitive" right out the window for this one. Aside from tilting the Wii Remote side to side to run left and right, everything else needs to be learned, and some of it many will struggle with for some time before they get it down. The main culprit is jumping. If you're running towards a big jump, you'd think you need to slam down the jump button right at the edge of the platform and hold it down as long as you can to make a successful leap over the gap. But the reality is that jumping has been altered Tony Hawk style. Holding the jump button charges up your jump by showing Sonic bend his knees and start skidding on his feet. It's the actual release of the jump button that then makes Sonic leap into the air. The longer you hold down the button, the higher he'll jump.

This is incredibly frustrating to people who try to "pick up and play" the game, because they're so used to how Sonic games work - where last-second jumping is often required to get out of tricky situations. The style of jumping in this game, however, requires you to plan your jumps in advance, so this is incredibly annoying your first time through a level because enemies and obstacles appear right in front of you at times. How are you supposed to plan ahead for that? The truth is that if you want to do exceedingly well in a level, you have to practice it and eventually memorize what to do and where. I'm not saying this style of gameplay in which you must memorize the track is a bad thing - it's certainly a fun challenge - but people who pick it up and play it their first time are left with a bad taste in their mouth. Sonic is a racing game of sorts, so you can't expect to only need to play it once. It's meant to be practiced and perfected, just like intense racing games.

The most entertaining control of the game is the homing attack. Once in their air, a target will appear on the closest enemy, and when the target turns red you physically thrust the controller towards the screen to attack them. This feels really good, but the 3% of the time when it doesn't respond correctly makes you start wondering if it's your fault or the game's. Navigating through levels for the very first time can be a frustrating experience, but by practicing it and getting better at it you can eventually pull off every level with ridiculous accuracy. This game is no push-over, and there's a lot of skill involved in doing the levels perfectly. The controls aren't broken, they just aren't very forgiving at times.

There are only seven to eight levels in the game, but each has around ten to twelve missions within it which you're forced to complete some of. These missions are generally a smaller chunk of the main level that require you to complete it in a particular way. There's always the classic "get 100 rings" or "defeat 20 enemies" missions, but most are actually pretty clever. They spent a lot of time placing those rings or enemies in certain spots specifically for their particular mission to make it a greater challenge. It never feels like they copied and pasted an area of a level and changed some code to change the requirement - they took the time out to make each mission challenging in its own way. Some missions require you to not collect any rings, so they place a wicked amount of rings spread all over the level. With your first time through the game, the challenge is to simply beat these missions because some of them become very difficult, but later on you try to beat them fast enough to get Gold medals.

I've read a lot of reviews complaining that you shouldn't be forced to do some of these missions before unlocking other levels. I honestly don't understand the problem with this since it helps you practice getting comfortable with the controls before moving on to more difficult environments. On top of that, anyone ever played Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine? That game acts in the same way - you're forced to complete submissions of a level before you can unlock the next. You're not required to complete every mission, but it's there if you want to.

The best thing about this game, and also the most crippling, is that Sonic goes through an RPG element of "leveling up" and gaining new abilities. As you play, you earn experience for each level you complete, and you're given new "skills." These skills are similar to Paper Mario's badge system, if you're familiar with it. Each skill has a required number of skill points needed to equip it, and the more you level up, the more you're able to equip at once. There are just over one hundred different skills which range from increasing your max speed or acceleration, to a quicker lock-on of enemies or double your slide as an attack. What's great is that you can really enhance Sonic exactly as you see fit. What's lame is that he really, really sucks when you first start playing.

I'm not lying either. Sonic's acceleration sucks so bad at first, that it takes forever to get to any reasonable speed, and it just feels downright awkward all around. These first few hours of playing the game are incredibly frustrating. You're not only expected to understanding the controls as you trip all over the level, but you're forced to use a Sonic who feels chained to the floor. Anybody who tries to simply play the game to see what it's like is instantly left with a terrible impression. Which is why you'll often see people say it's the slowest Sonic game ever or that the controls simply don't work. The truth is that they're wrong, but you have to have the patience to get there. For this fact, the game fails on a large level.

But if you do see it through, you'll end up discovering there's a fourty to fifty hour game on your hands, full of excellent gameplay and exciting challenges. I was able to level up Sonic to his max of 99, with 666 maximum badge points, and let me tell you - he screams through the levels so fast that it leaves my roomates' heads spinning. It is incredible to watch, and a brilliant idea of giving the player the ability to play Sonic at such break-neck speeds if they have the skill to do it. But the important thing is that they have to earn it, and some simply won't have the patience to make it past the rough to get there.