Sonic Colours has sat here at the office for some time. It’s partly because it arrived as I was preparing to head to America for a month and partly because after playing a bit of it, I lost interest. We’ve got it on both the Wii and the DS so I played on both.

I have to say, I absolutely hate the DS version. The whole, using both screens at the same time is annoying and often I simply lose track of where Sonic is. That generally means he will die, run into something bad or pass by numerous things that would have been valuable had I seen them. Overall, I couldn’t play more than 10 minutes of the thing and kept thinking to myself "Who thought this was a good idea?!"

The Wii version is more palatable as it has some decent gameplay and graphics, for a Sonic game, on the Nintendo Wii.  I don’t know that the colours inclusion is at all ground breaking as the use of those extra powers is limited and the whole game, as always, is completely on rails. There is some backtracking that you can do and you can of course do any level as many times as you want or need to in order to attain whatever goal it is you are interested in attaining.

Aside from the standard Sonic controls of run, jump, spin and crouch you have colour powers. By collecting certain coloured Wisps you can gain particular powers. The powers are generally useful only in certain parts of levels and generally useful in attaining something specific. There do seem to be areas where you need to use the powers to progress past a certain area but those are few and far between. There are seven differently coloured Wisps and white ones. Each of the seven impart a special ability to Sonic while the white ones offer a boost.The powers include things like turning into a laser or give him the ability to drill, stick to walls, hover or eat obstacles (as the Purple Frenzy).