More of my favorite game of 2022, but honestly even adding more of what I could have wanted.
The towers have really good challenging platforming, the three characters are fun to play around with, the 40ish new songs are excellent, the mini bosses actually take effort to beat and ones that were gimmicks are now more traditional fights, the new final boss is kino (I still prefer the og The End fight a bit tho, it’s much better than Supreme though), and seeing all the soul and effort put forth and Sonic being his 2000s rawkino self again has brought me more joy than very few other things have. Frankly just playing the game, walking around the map exploring going from objective to objective with the movement system, blending spindashes and boosts and using the environment and characters' movesets to cheese different objectives and obstacle courses best I could was just such a fucking blast.
But its time to cover the part of the update that I feel the most strongly about, the cyberspace stages are legit some of the best fucking 3D sonic levels ever imho. They so excellently test your platforming skills by being more challenging than the base game stages, they have an absolute metric fuckload of different paths to take, good usage of the spindash will let you soar through the air like its an SA1 stage, the music is incredible, and there's a shitload of collectibles and objectives in every stage that encourage replayability, and there's also next to no 2D sections at all (I dont have a huge problem with 2D stuff personally but fans have desperately wanted thsi). This is everything that people have been asking for out of 3D Sonic stages and nobody's talking about it, its such a shame. This is what I need more of in the future of Sonic, if they take this level design ethos into the next Sonic game, we could have some of the best Sonic platforming we've ever seen.
There’s some issues, increasing Knux’s speed too much makes climbing challenges way too finicky, and the boss rush near the end is goofy and should’ve been an optional thing, there's definitely some bugs like jump deceleration being decreased affecting the other three characters negatively, etc
But if you like Frontiers it’s more Frontiers, and I fucking love Frontiers and I certainly enjoyed having more of it.
The towers have really good challenging platforming, the three characters are fun to play around with, the 40ish new songs are excellent, the mini bosses actually take effort to beat and ones that were gimmicks are now more traditional fights, the new final boss is kino (I still prefer the og The End fight a bit tho, it’s much better than Supreme though), and seeing all the soul and effort put forth and Sonic being his 2000s rawkino self again has brought me more joy than very few other things have. Frankly just playing the game, walking around the map exploring going from objective to objective with the movement system, blending spindashes and boosts and using the environment and characters' movesets to cheese different objectives and obstacle courses best I could was just such a fucking blast.
But its time to cover the part of the update that I feel the most strongly about, the cyberspace stages are legit some of the best fucking 3D sonic levels ever imho. They so excellently test your platforming skills by being more challenging than the base game stages, they have an absolute metric fuckload of different paths to take, good usage of the spindash will let you soar through the air like its an SA1 stage, the music is incredible, and there's a shitload of collectibles and objectives in every stage that encourage replayability, and there's also next to no 2D sections at all (I dont have a huge problem with 2D stuff personally but fans have desperately wanted thsi). This is everything that people have been asking for out of 3D Sonic stages and nobody's talking about it, its such a shame. This is what I need more of in the future of Sonic, if they take this level design ethos into the next Sonic game, we could have some of the best Sonic platforming we've ever seen.
There’s some issues, increasing Knux’s speed too much makes climbing challenges way too finicky, and the boss rush near the end is goofy and should’ve been an optional thing, there's definitely some bugs like jump deceleration being decreased affecting the other three characters negatively, etc
But if you like Frontiers it’s more Frontiers, and I fucking love Frontiers and I certainly enjoyed having more of it.