Somebody said this version has fewer and shorter Werehog levels, so I decided to give it a try
But it sure compensates for it by absolutely assaulting the player with a barrage of loading screens, saving screens, unskippable cutscenes, visual novel segments and some of the most obnoxious and incessant tutorial popups.
I think something like 60% of my total time with this game was just me staring at the screen and neurotically pressing buttons to make the annoying thing go away. I've developed a pathological hatred towards the flying rat that keeps pausing the gameplay to tell me obvious things: "Hey, Sonic, maybe you should interact with that glowing door?" OMG, you fucking flying rat, really? A glowing door is an interactable object? I wouldn't have figured that out in a million years, even though there are only two doors in this room! It's fucking absurd how stupid the game thinks you are, to the point of pausing the game to tell you how to do an action that it then displays a button prompt for.
One of the things I liked about the original was the hub areas, and they were completely cut from here and replaced with annoying visual novel segments.
It's kinda bizarre, if you think about it, how Sonic Adventure and this came out at the beginning and end of the same console generation respectively, yet Adventure is so much more of a game. Unleashed on PS2 is smaller in scope, more linear, and on top of that looks uglier, with blurry textures and fewer effects, while Adventure was able to have hub dynamically progressing hub areas and several characters with their own unique campaigns (albeit they're all crap, but hey at least they nailed the Sonic campaign and allowed you not to even touch the rest of them). And despite that the ROM for Unleashed is like 4 times heavier.
Sure, it does seem like there are fewer Werehog levels here, but just getting to the first one was a torture. The one good thing I can say about the original Unleashed is at least the Sonic levels and hub areas were great. I can't even really say that about this. This may be a more milquetoast option, but I'd rather play something with higher highs and lower lows.