Sonic Unleashed is seen as one of the biggest 3D entries in the history of Sonic. Whether you like the werehog or not, it brought a massive overhaul to the game design philosophy of Sonic working in the third dimension. The beautiful environments based on real-life locations, fast gameplay and a unique lighting engine all housed under the “Hedgehog Engine” helped achieve a major milestone for fast-paced 3D platformers. Fast forward towards the end of the downer year that is 2016, it has brought us one thing that can shed some meaningful insight on the development of Sonic Unleashed; the release of an Xbox 360 preview build.

At least, the first disk.

Sonic Retro forum user N!NJA released the build two days ago and already there has been several discoveries thanks to the efforts of others data mining information, uploading screenshots, videos and more. In addition the build also comes with debugging tools that highlights NPC and enemy behavior status, camera direction and gameplay control modifiers. While you can run the build on a modified Xbox 360 console, it is recommended to use a dev kit as you may run into crashes forcing you to shut down the console.

Some of the notable differences include…

60fps! …but not very stable, lots of screen tearing and drops

Unused level and object layouts

Placeholder graphics

Old menu system seen in early E3 previews

Old GUI, especially for the Sonic the Werehog stages

…and more!

N!NJA promises to release builds for other Sonic titles in the near future. If you want a quick look at the preview build, hit the jump to check out some links! Stay up to date with the discoveries thread on Retro to see what all has been unearthed from the preview build thus far or take a look at the build for yourself in the discussion thread.

From the Sonic Retro Forums

Discussion Thread (Download the build here here)

Discoveries Thread

N!NJA’s Screenshot Gallery

Videos

[Source: Sonic Retro Forums]