Sonic and the Secret Rings (Wii)

As an avid Wii player and also a massive fan of Segas previous Sonic the Hedgehog games, I purchased this with high hopes.
Although very action packed, with plenty of different games, I felt very disappointed.

The whole game has a Middle Eastern theme and there are two ways in which you can go about playing:

Challenges: 100 high velocity missions set in stunning fantastical locations.

Play with friends: 40 party games for up to 4 players

The Challenge Mode is slighty disappointing to me and I could not continue to play after the first 5 minutes. There is a very, very long story book played before you get into the actual game. You feel like you are waiting a long time for it to start, all for this irrelavant and boring feature. Although there are many missions mainly based around "ring collecting", I feel from what I saw, they were quite boring and standard!

On a different note - the Party Mode has a massively brilliant range of games; some are very generic, but unlike other party games for the Wii, there are some truly original/different games too: for example on one game, there are a pile of mats in the middle of the room and you have to move your Wii remote in a motion as though you are actually pulling the mats away. Whoever pulls the most mats off wins! - sounds crazy but it is quite fun!
This mode is basically set out where all player start in boats at the beginning of a river and whoever wins each party game, moves up the river. Whoever gets to the end first wins the whole thing! After each party game, it takes you on to this screen, and takes approx 3 minutes of you having to sit and watch the boats move down the river - this can be very boring and frustrating! Also, you can fall into whirl pools down the river which sends you backwards, or be blown forward by the wind to take you further to the front. I feel that whoever wins the game is not truly the winner because of this.
You can have up to 4 players which is brilliant if you actually have 4 remotes and 4 friends who are willing to play this with you all the time. If you do not have all 4 players, you play against the CPU to make up for these players - this is personally a downfall for me as I do not like to play it this way, but you dont get a choice.

On gaming websites, this game generally gets a score of about 6-7/ 10 which I feel is definately too generous.

This can be played by kids as well as adults. The story book feature would be targetted more towards kids but the hardness of some of the games may be aimed more towards adults.

RRP is £39.99 but you can get this miles cheaper from all different shops such as Zavvi.

Back of the box:
"An evil genie has brought mayhem to the magical storybook world of the Arabian Nights, He's hunting the all-powerful Secret Rings, and there's only one hero standing in his way. Now able to slow time and boost himself to incredible speeds, Sonic will need to be faster than ever on his most dazzling adventure yet!