system, and Game Informer criticized the game's high difficulty, citing the camera as causing most deaths. Some reviewers were unhappy that the majority of the game was not spent playing as Sonic; playing as Tails, GameSpot wrote, made a level boring. Similar criticism was offered by Eurogamer, finding that the supporting cast annoyed rather than fleshing the game out; they considered the camera system to be the worst they had ever seen in a video game. On the positive side, 1UP felt that despite the control and level design problems, the game still played like a Sonic game. The plot was criticized as confusing and inappropriately dark. GamesRadar considered it overwrought and "conceptually challenged", and Eurogamer found its voice acting painful and its cutscenes cringeworthy. Some reviewers unfavorably compared the story to that of an anime or Final Fantasy. The romance between Sonic and the human Princess Elise was especially criticized; for GamesTM, it marked the point "the [Sonic] series had veered off into absolute nonsense." "This ... is a mess from top to bottom", wrote GameSpot, that "only the most blindly reverent Sonic the Hedgehog fan could possibly squeeze any enjoyment out of". IGN said that the game had some redeeming qualities, with brief segments of gameplay that demonstrated how a next-generation Sonic game could work, but found it "rips them away as soon as it shows them" and concluded that the game failed to reinvent the series. Eurogamer believed that Sonic the Hedgehogs mistakes would have been noticed even if the game had been released in 1996. Despite the mostly negative reception, Game Informer and Dave Halverson of Play Magazine defended the game. Game Informer described it as ambitious and praised the graphics, story, amount of content, and replay value, but believed only Sonic fans would enjoy the game. Halverson initially gave the Xbox360 version a 9.5/10, praising each character's controls and abilities and calling it the best 3D Sonic game yet. In the following issue, Halverson reassessed it as 8.5/10, writing that he had been told that the load times and glitches in his review copy would not be in the final version of the game. In a later review of the PlayStation3 version, Halverson was frustrated that the problems had still not been corrected and that the performance was worse despite the extra development time; Halverson gave this version a 5.5/10. The A.V. Club said in