Figure this would be as good a time as ever to make an updated “then vs now” review of Sonic Frontiers since the final batch of DLC has finally been released. Truth be told, my overall thoughts have fluctuated on this game, but only ever so slightly. It basically went from an 8.5/10, to an 8/10, back to an 8.5/10 after the Final Horizon update. Not much has changed on that front. I didn’t mention this in my prior review but to my complete and utter surprise, the director of this game, Morio Kishimoto, had then recently (before the game’s release) created a Twitter account and had been regularly interacting with fans. Not only that, he had been regularly asking for fan feedback on what he can do to improve his product and work. Forget about this being Sonic for a sec, when has a situation like this occurred for any AAA game studio? Let alone one overseas? Of course, everyone bombarded him with the typical “it should be more like Sonic Utopia” schlock which…bleh. But nevertheless, there was some genuine advice for improvement people on Twitter tossed around for Frontiers and (eventually hopefully) future iterations of this “open zone” concept, whether it be aesthetics, mechanics, etc. If anything, I’m just really glad Frontiers has become extremely successful. Maybe not so much in terms of critical reception (it’s decent, sitting at 71 on Metacritic last time I checked but I also stopped caring about Metacritic scores as I’ve often vehemently disagreed with a vast majority of the scores given out, whether for games I hate or games I love) but more so in terms of awards won, sales (currently the best-selling 3D Sonic game of all time), fan reception, and most surprising of all, it helped boost Sonic’s already dwindling popularity in Japan, something that was a personal goal of Kishimoto. I’m just really glad to see him happy that his hard work payed off. I may not be a fan of all of Kishimoto’s work mind you (for every Frontiers and Colors, you get a Lost World and Forces), but I can’t deny he’s a very hard-working leader that genuinely cares about Sonic and strives to improve in everything he does. One Way Dream is emblematic of this. So, I guess it’s time to go over not only my current thoughts on the game now that the quote unquote Honeymoon phase is over, but also each of the individual updates as they came out and how they affected the game as a whole, as there has been quite a few quality of life improvements in regards to these 3 updates.
As for the game itself, I still really enjoy it. Running around the open zone area, chaining moves together to seamlessly leap between grind rails, hills and springs never got tiring. The obstacle courses themselves aren’t anything spectacular (at least in regards to the beginning of the game anyway) but they’re also incredibly bite sized and require at least a fair degree of player control over automation so they’re overall pretty enjoyable. I’ve even started to enjoy the Cyberspace stages to a degree. Like, don’t get me wrong, they still aren’t great and they have loads of problems, but like most Sonic games I guess the fun comes in the form of working around or flat out abusing the jank to blast through the stage as quickly as possible. Still would play Gens and Colors any day of the week over these. Unleashed uhh…depends on the stage I guess because some stages are actually way more fun in Cyberspace. Still think the story is easily the best we’ve had in terms of any of the games, and the soundtrack is still utterly incredible man. Tomoya Ohtani did a fantastic job on everything here, I can’t think of a single song on this soundtrack that I DIDN’T enjoy. Even the cutscene music is great. There are definitely a lot of problems and faults but overall, I still have a great time with this game and it’s still some of the most fun I’ve had with a 3D Sonic game in a long while. While I’m looking forward to what they end up doing with this formula in the future, the official Sonic twitter account (I know it’s called X now but let’s be real nobody is calling it that LOL) announced that Frontiers would get multiple waves of content updates. A lot of it sounded vague and uninteresting (what even would be “new Koco”? Would it literally just be Koco with new funny hats on and that would be it?) but the addition of different challenge modes and new playable characters?? I don’t think we’ve had playable characters with substantially different abilities from Sonic in a 3D game since 2006 (there was Black Knight but even then, not really). Of course, these were all free content updates so I kept my expectations relatively low because of this, but to my surprise these free updates ended up offering WAY more substantial content than I ever could’ve known. Buckle down if you wanna keep reading because this review is gonna be a LOOOOOONG one:
We’ll start with the first update, the lightest one content wise. We got a photo mode, Juke Box, a Battle Rush mode, and a Cyberspace challenge mode alongside a slew of quality of life improvements that I’ll get to in a bit. The photo mode is…meh. Nothing special, but functional; does what it needs to do and that’s really about all I can say about it. From the teaser it made it look like we could have Sonic emote and pose like the Spiderman 2018 photo mode which would be incredibly funny if that were the case, but sadly we don’t get that. We get a few filters and a weirdly kinda restrictive camera, but despite that I’ve seen some really great pictures taken using this feature so I guess at the end of the day it works fine enough. The Cyberspace challenge mode and Battle Rush mode are where the true content lies anyway. Cyberspace challenge is, more or less, exactly like how the Egg Shuttle functions in Sonic Colors: a massive gauntlet of all the Cyberspace stages back to back, trying to beat each of them as fast as possible. Like Egg Shuttle, it’s a fun little side thing to do that I felt the game always should’ve had from day 1 so I’m glad to see it return here. Battle Rush is also a big gauntlet, but this time against every single common enemy, mini boss, and Titan from each island. Due to how limited Frontiers’ combat is I didn’t get a lot out of this, but some enemies I had to figure a roundabout way to take them down quickly for a good rank. It’s also nice that it allows you to refight the Titans as this wasn’t something you could normally do in the base game. Each mode grants you a little bonus upon S ranking each: for Cyberspace Challenge mode, it unlocks the ability to Power Boost in Cyberspace. While this admittedly is pretty cool, I didn’t feel a huge difference using this as the Power Boost in Cyberspace is still a lot slower than it is in the Open Zone (as is the regular boost). Battle Rush S ranks unlock Extreme difficulty, a mode where you can’t upgrade your stats and everything kills you in one hit. It’s a novel idea (basically the equivalent of a DMC Hell and Hell mode for Sonic) but it’s still not really THAT challenging and you don’t even get any acknowledgement for beating it. No achievements, no cosmetics, nothing. Pretty underwhelming if you ask me.
Lastly, we have Juke Box mode. I didn’t really know what to expect from this mode, at most I just kinda expected a spot on the islands where you can listen to every piece of music from the game. To my surprise, this ended up being like Sonic Generations, where you unlock a slew of tracks from across the Sonic franchise and can play any one of them while roaming around the Open Zone areas. There are jukebox notes scattered around the islands much like the memory tokens and collecting one unlocks a random song. I think it’s really cool how they managed to implement exploration elements with a silly extra such as this, and it also makes areas like Rhea Island a little less desolate as now there’s a few hidden notes to collect outside of the giant towers. It does certainly change up the atmosphere whenever you play a song from a different game; Seven Rings in Hand in particular goes hard on Ares Island. Also, shout out for putting all the island movement themes to collect as well, so we can play any of our favorite movements on any island we want instead of being stuck on the 7th movement at all times. On top of all of this, there were also a slew of quality of life improvements: one of which being that they finally, FINALLY fixed Elder Koco. Now you can exchange all of the koco you’ve collected all at once and put them into either speed or ring capacity instead of needing to do it one at a time, thank GOD bro that was agony. They’ve also added a button combination to instantly restart Cyberspace levels which is a great feature, and they’ve also allowed us to turn off the Starfall slot machine entirely. I personally think you could still HAVE the slot machine in the game without making it obtrusively slapped into the center of the screen, but whatever I guess, glad they gave us the option. A lot of these were problems that many people criticized and I was kinda surprised they even added these options at all. It really did show that the team was listening to feedback, and given Kishimoto’s statements at the time, it seems we were gonna get a lot more in the next update. Overall this first update was WAY more than I thought it was gonna be to my utter delight. If this was the direction the updates were taking, then the next couple of updates were really going to be something to look forward to.
The next update, as expected was even beefier; adding even more quality of life changes, new challenges and even a brand-new ability, one that Kishimoto himself had been teasing for quite a while now. Might as well get the Sonic’s Birthday stuff out of the way first as it’s the least impactful part of the update, you basically have Sonic in goofy birthday attire and the entire Starfall Islands are decorated like that one Pepto Bismol Walt Disney World cake castle from 1996. Everywhere you go, wrapping paper, streamers, balloons, presents as far as the eye can see. The Koco you collect and your trapped friends still within the haunting confines of their digital prison take the time to put on a cute lil party hat or two. Even the HUD is infected with colorful birthday noise. It’s not something I care for personally but it is pretty funny to look at. The best part about this cosmetic update is that it comes with a new music track that’s essentially a DJ mix of a variety of different Sonic songs not found in the Jukebox update which is pretty cool. I always appreciate Neo Green Hill when I hear it. No, the true meat of the update begins with the Action Chain challenges. Essentially, scattered around the islands are these challenges you activate where the goal is to essentially do as many things as you possibly can within a time limit: engaging with springs, rails and the platforming around the island, battling enemies, doing tricks, collecting rings, all while collecting yellow orbs to boost your score multiplier. It’s a pretty interesting side mode to participate in, and while it is fun, I do have some issues with it. First off: there absolutely did not need to be 10 of these things on each island minus Rhea, that is BEYOND overkill and at times kinda turns these little side challenges into a chore if you wanna do them all. Second, fighting minibosses breaks these challenges in half. If you can build up a decent score multiplier and rush over to a guardian and kill it, it’s pretty much a guaranteed S rank. Still though, I did end up liking the addition and I hope if it comes back for future entries they find ways to improve and innovate off of it. Of course, the challenges themselves are one thing, but if you manage to S rank all of them on every island, you unlock the Spindash. This is something that Kishimoto had teased for quite a while, we even found some leftover data that revealed in game tips about the Spindash back in update 1. Now that we finally have it, uh…I can definitely see why they locked this move behind S ranking all the Action Chain challenges because HOO boy.
The Spindash is completely bonkers broken in Frontiers. It’s like a mix between SA1’s Spindash (in terms of how high and far you can launch yourself with it) and Lost World’s Spindash (where it’s more of a second form of boost in a way). Essentially, it’s like the boost already in Frontiers, just objectively better in every way. It’s just as maneuverable with the ultra-tight turning Frontiers already has, it goes just as fast (if not faster), you can use it whenever you want while moving or standing still (you don’t even have to rev it up if you don’t want to), it has a hitbox and damages enemies, it consumes the boost gauge just like the boost, and the biggest feature of all? You aren’t constantly glued to the ground at all times. When you use the Spindash, you absolutely LAUNCH off of inclines and ramps. You get so much airtime and distance with this thing it’s borderline ridiculous. Now, normally I’m not really that engaged with the whole “fly through like half the stage by going off a ramp” mentality, but I feel it works here for a couple of reasons. Reason 1 is that being glued to the ground at all times was kind of a big problem Frontiers had in general and reaching things like memory tokens in unintended ways is pretty amusing. Reason 2 is that this is essentially an endgame unlockable: something you don’t have equipped by default and something you have to put the work into getting. As a crazy game breaking toy that the game essentially goes “ok you’ve won, have fun now”, I think I can allow it. The quality of life improvements further enhanced this by allowing a slider for air deacceleration and no deacceleration when boosting through the air. While I think this is fun to play around with, this sadly only applies to boost jumps and not your regular jump, which means moves like the drop dash are still affected and jumping after hitting a dash pad still kills your speed. Honestly, and this can apply for the next game too, all I want is the equivalent of the short hop from Gens, Colors, and Unleashed. The ability to keep your speed while lightly jumping to clear small gaps feels immeasurably good to pull off, I dunno why they ever got rid of this ability to begin with.
The final “big” addition this update introduced are the new Koco. Like I said before, I didn’t’ really know what to expect when this feature was teased because…well, what was I even SUPPOSED to think? They gave us nothing to work with at all. However, to my utter shock, these new Koco ended up being the best part of all of update 2. Yeah, INCLUDING the Spindash. These new Koco are big bois with fancy getup and costumes, and when you collect them and turn them into the Elder Koco, it expands your boost gauge stamina. While this feature is kinda negated by just cylooping an infinity symbol and having temporary infinite boost, it’s still a cool upgrade that I’m surprised they didn’t already put into the game prior. That’s not even the best part though, as to get to these Koco, you need to complete the huge platforming challenge tied to them, similar to the platforming challenges already scattered around the island. The difference being that these platforming challenges are way harder to clear in comparison. Some are a reaction-based test, some have tricky moving platforms over the edge of the map, some are miniature puzzles in a way that you need to figure out to progress, some have massive wall running sections with tons of spiked balls and hazards to avoid with strict timing. I had a REALLY fun time acing these, in fact I found them so fun I often ended up going through them again even after I collected the Koco. IMO this is honestly how the platforming challenges should’ve been throughout the game, or at the very least they should’ve thrown them in there from the start and mix them with the ones already in the game. I love a good challenge and while I didn’t find these hard or anything, they definitely had me engaged throughout. Easily the best part of the new update. Aside from the air deacceleration, the only other QOL changes they added were actually also pretty substantial. You got things like disabling the cinematic camera for your skill tree moves, which I didn’t really mind so I kept them on, but then you have the ability to disable the music distortion when boosting in the Cyberspace stages which I was super happy to see added (which, by the way, was a suggestion I offered to a Sonic affiliated person on Twitter back when update 1 dropped. You’re welcome 😉). They also added an island progression screen, showcasing everything you’ve completed on each island and what % you have that specific island complete. It counts everything, from side stories, island puzzles, Cyberspace portals, and yes, even memory tokens. It’s essentially something only added for 100% completion nuts such as myself, and as I’ve already 100%ed everything prior, seeing those completion screens light up was truly worthwhile. What’s more, if you do end up 100%ing every island, you even get a special cosmetic reward for doing so (Sonic gets a crown. That’s about it. It’s literally exactly like Kingdom Hearts and I love it for that)! The extent to how beefy update 2 was, even in comparison to update 1 was nothing short of impressive. All that was left was the final content update, later dubbed “The Final Horizon”. All that was left to do was wait.
And so now here we are, the third and final major content update for Sonic Frontiers. Might as well start talking about the DLC of which this entire Backloggd page is about, right? This DLC is a major rehaul of all of Ouranos Island, as many felt the ending to Frontiers was lackluster and rushed (which I certainly do agree). This update content wise is absolutely monstrous. If you thought the previous 2 updates were content packed, you haven’t seen ANYTHING yet my friend. This DLC, on average, took me about 10 hours to beat, roughly 15 (give or take) to fully 100% it. The fact that this content update (which, I must reiterate, is 100% free btw) managed to be WAY longer in length than freaking Sonic Forces, a paid 3D Sonic game, is mind boggling. There’s so much to do and talk about that I should probably break down the different topics in order from what I feel is the most important downwards. Let’s start with the new playable characters: again, considering this was a free content update I didn’t expect much from them, I mostly just kinda expected a reskinned Sonic with some new moves sprinkled here and there, but no, they did it. They actually COOKED here. I was flabbergasted when playing this DLC man, you have no idea. For the record, I’ve never been against Sonic’s friends being playable again in a 3D space, it’s just that more so every time they’ve tried to implement different playstyles they’ve almost all failed so spectacularly. With this game, I can thankfully say we’re on the right track now.
I’ll start with Amy first, as she was by far my favorite to play as out of the 3 which is just ABSURD. I can’t believe I’m saying this but they actually made Amy, AMY of all characters, fun to play as in a 3D Sonic game!!!!! I just can’t believe it, I really can’t. Gone are the days of a painfully slow character with boring level design, limited movement and a laughably worthless antagonist chasing after you, and gone are the days of an even SLOWER character with pitiful combat, a momentum killing double jump, and a pointless invisibility technique; all of that garbage is now behind us thankfully. Amy in Frontiers is not only speedy like Sonic (all of them are in fact) but her aerial mobility is second to none. She jumps super high, has a triple jump and can glide after the 3rd jump using her tarot cards. Moreover, this glide also carries your momentum, so you can cross tremendous distances if you were already going fast beforehand. And if THAT weren’t enough, she has a bounce stomp like Sonic, with the difference being this one sends you WAY higher into the air and slows your fall. The amount of height and aerial control you have while playing as her is just absurd and it feels extremely good to just jump around as her. If there’s anything I don’t like about her, though, it’s her combat. All of her attacks are performed using her tarot cards, which feels weird. Like, I’m fine with her tarot card glide and all that, but having her attack using her cards instead of her hammer (which is only used for the quick cyloop equivalent) is a decision I still don’t fully understand. That’s not even really what I don’t like about her though, it’s more so the fact that her combat style was just not designed for this game’s enemies; or at least, not the enemies in The Final Horizon update specifically. Her attacks at a glance are more so constructed to deal with multiple enemies at once, whether it be her multi-homing attack or her card spin attack. Even with her poison debuff parry she still isn’t as good at dealing damage as the other characters. If it weren’t for Sonic’s superior combat arsenal and quick Cyloop, I’d go as far to say Amy would be my favorite character to play as in Frontiers as a whole, which, again, is just crazy to me.
Next up is Tails, and while he is very fun to play he can be a bit of a mixed bag in some areas. His flight is, unfortunately, not as good as it was in SA1. There’s a little delay at the beginning of the flight (though it is cool looking) and it only goes up to a set height depending on what elevation you start the flight at. It still feels good to fly around overall but I do wish we could get the SA1 flight in an open zone environment, that would be pretty cool. His main form of attack is, perhaps unintentionally very humorous. He just sorta chucks wrenches at you. Very angrily. Just add in the metal pipe sound effect for further improvements (thank you to whoever made that a mod btw). The attack functions similarly to the dummy ring bombs from Sonic 06, except these are so much better in every way. For one, throwing them from a standstill feels far less slow and clunky in comparison, you’re not forced into a poorly handled first person view, it has a clear arc with how you throw it, you can throw it just as fast while airborne, you can even effectively block projectiles with it (which is a challenge you do on one of the new platforming challenges). You can later nab an upgrade later to charge the attack and send it flying, creating a cluster of wrenches that not only deals multihit damage to enemies but also acts as a platform to jump on. He has his combat purpose as a fairly mobile flying character with ranged attacks to poke at enemies from a distance. So far, he is fairly fun to play as, though nothing spectacular. However, by unlocking the max ring boost from his skill tree, Tails uses the Cyclone from SA2 and completely breaks the game in half. I’m not even kidding you, this thing is utterly ridiculously broken (in a good way). Perhaps this is why they limited Tails’ flight the way they did, as this grants the ability to freely fly and gain altitude as you see fit, all at incredible speeds. Combine this with infinite boost and you can pretty much skip almost every single one of Tails’ platforming sections with a couple of exceptions. He even gets to use the thing as a laser cannon attack. If only Tails had this version of the Cyclone then maybe the mech stages in SA2 wouldn’t have sucked nearly as much. Unsurprisingly this thing is a blast to just fly around the island. Yeah yeah, it’s broken and kinda throws challenge out the window but again, I’ll allow it. It just FEELS good to fly around the island at mach speed.
Finally, we have Knuckles. He’s certainly still rougher than the rest of them, but he unfortunately isn’t the best of them. He can glide and climb walls as you would expect but both of these aspects to his character come with a big asterisk at the end. Like for instance, yeah, he can “climb walls” but unfortunately only context sensitive walls. He can climb the green surfaced walls that Sonic can, and he can also climb exclusive red walls that only he can climb. That’s about it. With that being said, just like Sonic’s wall running his climbing controls very good and it’s very fast but I still wish you could climb any surface that you’d normally slide down on. He can also glide but the gliding feels all sorts of wrong. He has a huge startup animation before he takes off and his steering is awful, SA2 gliding this ain’t. It’s not as bad as like, the gliding in 06 with how that one gets stuck on walls, is a set speed and loses altitude way too fast. This one, like Amy’s tarot card glide, keeps your speed depending on how fast you were going beforehand, and you can later nab an upgrade that allows him to glide much faster indefinitely without even losing altitude. I just don’t get the point of the delay or the bad turning. There is a funny tech you can do to somewhat alleviate the turning issue, however. If you mash the glide button repeatedly, you spam the startup animation and stay in place somewhat, and from there you can turn in the direction you want to travel in instantly. You can watch footage of me performing it here. That being said though, when it comes to combat there’s nobody else I would want to pick. His attacks at first might not look like the deal a ton of damage, but therein lies his debuff parry that lowers defenses. Combine that with his regular 3 hit combo, stomp and drill attack and enemy health bars in this game absolutely MELT, which is especially impressive considering how much they’ve beefed up the enemies in general in this DLC which I’ll get to later. In hindsight I should’ve expected Knuckles to be the strongest out of all of them but it is very satisfying nonetheless seeing these bullet sponge mini bosses drop like flies when using this guy. Even though he still has issues, I still managed to have some fun using him.
The structure of the Final Horizon is very interesting. Essentially, you start playing as the 3 new characters do a variety of things, whether that be the new puzzles scattered around the island, fighting WAY tougher minibosses, platforming challenges to find either Koco that give you a huge amount of XP to level up your skill tree, or Koco that reveal a large chunk of the map. There are objectives to find for each character but for the most part I explored what I could to upgrade and complete a variety of challenges. The platforming challenges themselves are REALLY well done, maybe a bit messy in terms of looks and aesthetic as they’re fairly obtrusive and blocky, but they essentially brought back the new Koco challenges and ran with the idea for every character. These were all a lot of fun and crafted some fun challenges around each character. The game swaps between each character automatically after a certain number of objectives have been completed. Sonic doesn’t really get any platforming challenges in the traditional sense like the other 3: instead, he gets a variety of new Cyberspace stages to play with and tower climbs that lead to Master Koco trials. I’ll get to the Cyberspace stages in a bit, I wanna first talk about the Towers because oh my LORD. They basically took the tower climbs in Rhea Island and cranked them up to 11. They’re way harder, way longer, and the platforming is even more satisfying than it was beforehand. I played on hard mode throughout the DLC (I heard that some level design elements change with easy and normal mode) and I loved every single one of these tower climbs, they were genuinely fantastic. This can apply to a good chunk of this DLC, but they really toned down the automation and fully expect you to do a lot of the platforming this time around. I will say though that they should’ve provided more safety nets on these towers for people who aren’t that good at Sonic games on easier difficulties, as once you fall off the tower you have to climb all the way back up from scratch. I personally didn’t mind this as I never really fell off apart from a couple of mistakes I made on the final tower. In any case, once you get up to the top of these towers, you need to participate in the Master Koco Trials. These are combat trials against a handful of supped up enemies that you need to complete within a time limit. They were fine, nothing outstanding but nothing too amazing either, just fun to have something new to do. The Tower climbs are really the true standout with Sonic if I’m being real. The Cyberspace stages also got a pretty big change. The Cyberspace stages in the DLC are remixed versions of Cyberspace stages already in the base game previously, with familiar layouts mixed with brand new design, new objectives, and some absolutely incredible music remixes. Like for instance in the remix of 1-7, you play with a ton of cars lined up everywhere for you to bounce on and the entire stage has moon gravity. Or you could play with a bomb on your head and you race against the clock to collect stopwatch icons to slow the countdown, race against a shadow clone of Tails, constantly pick up canisters of Rocket Boosts which works similarly to how boosting used to work (in that it kills enemies). Not all of them are winners, the one that has a speed gauge that increases the longer you boost and makes you explode if you Spindash wasn’t very fun, but these feel like more means of experimentation for future titles so I’m glad most of them are still very fun to go through. The lack of automation also applies to these levels, there’s a lot of ramps you can go off of by spindashing and to my shock even the loops aren’t automated! The camera does the whole fangame thing where it follows Sonic from behind which I’m not really a fan of but regardless it’s very weird to see non-automated loops in a 3D Sonic game. The side objectives are different too. Clearing with an ideal clear time is still a factor of course, but you also have the return of the numbered rings from Lost World and the silver moon medals from Forces. Thankfully the numbered rings aren’t as braindead as they were in Forces, as acquiring all of them in a row can be quite tricky at times. They’re spaced out in an out of order sequence on a series of tight platforming that often you need to go a real roundabout way of getting, and in the case of 4-H, they’re spaced throughout the ENTIRE stage, meaning if you miss even one, you need to restart the entire level again for another attempt. The silver moon medals are also much more challenging to get than Forces, though their structure is more similar to that game, being relatively close together and needing to be collected quickly. There are also objectives where you need to rescue animal buddies but these SUUUUCK. You need to locate them, pick them up piggyback style, and carry them over to the marked area to “rescue” them. Not only are your movement options gone when you do this, which means the jank controls of Cyberspace don’t really lend these objectives any favors ESPECIALLY when platforming over bottomless pits across small boxes, but it completely snaps the pace of the stage in half. I really don’t wanna see these types of missions come back again, I’ve had my fill.
The guardian minibosses have been ridiculously beefed up this time. Not only do they hit way harder and attack in much faster, more erratic intervals with brand new attack patterns to boot (Spider Tank and Caterpillar don’t even get their gimmicky sections anymore), but they’re way tankier too. Even with a maxed-out Sonic it took kind of a while to down some of these guardians. The changes to these minibosses are not necessarily the most gracefully handled thing out there though, a lot of them are kind of a goofy mess to fight, particularly the ones that just sorta sit there and vomit projectiles at you endlessly, but Ninja+ was great fun, Tower+ is bonkers crazy and zips around like a bat out of hell, Ghost has brand new fights with the different platforming structures around it (I particularly liked the one where you need to traverse a maze to get to its pillars), I even enjoyed fighting Tank+ for as messy as it was. I also appreciated that they made the Starfall event actually kinda fun this time! Instead of a slot machine blocking your screen and the only reward you get being purple coins, the starfall items are instead replaced with Koco, and Red and Blue seeds of defense, and picking one up gives you a TON of them at once, making this event a must do to instantly max out a character of your choice, or at least getting close to maxing them out. I also enjoyed the story being told here, Sonic using the Master Koco trials to turn his Cyber corruption into a form of power, while his friends end up feeling what he felt throughout the entire game. I particularly enjoyed the side story interactions where they end up explaining a lot of the architecture of the Starfall Islands and what they were used for, and even explained things that didn’t really need to be explained. I particularly found it humorous that the floating rails, springs and platforms in the open zone aren’t really there at all and Sonic is only hallucinating them due to being high on Cyberspace. I guess the only major things left to talk about are the final Master King Koco challenge and the true final boss. You wanna talk about a major difficulty spike? Look no further than the Master King Koco challenge. You need to fight against every Titan boss in the game back to back (minus Supreme for obvious reasons), with a max of 400 rings and no way to refill it, level 1 stats, and the only way to parry their attacks is with a perfect parry (which for this and the final boss on hard mode, is a frame 4 parry window instead of the infinite hold to parry we’ve had prior). This challenge was simply too much for so many people. Even on easier difficulties where the parry window is a lot wider, a lot of people couldn’t even finish this mode. While I was able to beat it on hard mode eventually (I even did a flawless run on hard mode before writing this review), I can definitely see why this game never had a tighter window to parry attacks. Particularly with these Titan fights, their attacks just aren’t well telegraphed to be able to react in a split second at all. Wyvern is especially bad with this. It twirls around in so many different ways before attacking and some attacks just sorta…happen in an instant; and to make matters worse, parrying is the ONLY WAY to deal damage to this guy. I think there should be a compromise if future games are going to have combat systems with a parry: shrink the parry window down to be tight, but not like…frame 4 tight lmao (the one on easy mode for instance would be fine for a regular parry), and for those who hit a perfect parry get rewarded with the slowdown that comes afterwards. IDK, just spitballing ideas here.
All that’s left is the true final boss. The thing this entire DLC has been slowly building up to. You’ve completed all the trials, awakened a new hidden power within Sonic, all of your friends have gathered the Chaos Emeralds, and after a brief match with Supreme (sadly was not changed), The End itself comes down, transforms the Titan into an eldritch multiarmed abomination, Sonic awakens his hidden power, and the true fight begins...
The true final boss is a mess in so many different ways. The camera is probably the worst it’s ever been, CONSTANTLY getting obscured by the trees that are in front of the fight, actively blocking your view of the energy orbs you need to parry. The boss is also weirdly unintuitive (what makes this funny to me is that 100%ing everything in the DLC unlocks…hints on how to beat the final boss). You need to sever the cord from the Titan in order to deal damage and prevent it from regening health, but in order to reach the cord you need to use the dodge button to retarget onto the cord and sever it, which is never really explained properly. In order to go into phase 2 you need to cyloop the center of Supreme’s body when it gets knocked down (not really hinted at what you need to do there either). There’s an attack that drains almost all of your rings if you get hit by too many energy spheres (also not explained well). And on top of all of this there’s still so many more instances of unpolished jank that I haven’t even covered with my brief explanation of this boss fight.
…this is now my favorite final boss out in the entire Sonic franchise.
Yeah bet you didn’t see that coming huh? Despite the moments of irritation and jankiness, I loved the HECK out of this final fight. The anime spectacle is off the charts once again (seriously how do they make Super Sonic so COOL bro he’s literally that guy), the perfect parry actually makes deflecting its attacks engaging because this time the attacks are designed AROUND the frame 4 parry, there’s a decent amount of challenge fighting it, the atmosphere is immaculate and the transformed Supreme is genuinely pretty creepy (especially the way it swats you away, then afterwards you see this massive 4 legged creature towering over the trees scuttling towards you, pretty unnerving for a Sonic game. You even get kinda but not really blood just like in Unleashed!), once I figured it out I had a lot of fun, and the ending afterwards finally concluded Frontiers with a nice little bow on top. I also adore the music during this fight, both the orchestral rendition (though it doesn’t really sound like real orchestra, the beginning of that track gives me straight goosebumps every time I hear it) and the godly Kellin Quinn rendition of I’m Here (though I do wish there was more screaming). Maybe I’m a sucker for spectacle considering how terrible pretty much every Sonic final boss prior to this was (though the Ikaruga shootemup was pretty good), but I don’t care. It’s gonna take quite a lot to top this.
The update as a whole wasn’t perfect, by a LONG shot lmao. The pop in still isn’t fixed (in fact it’s now noticeable in Cyberspace), there are some quirks I had with the minibosses, playable characters and the final boss, and the update as a whole was still rushed to an extent (the characters don’t even move their mouths anymore during the character interaction side stories), but I still had a blast with what I played. I know I also keep mentioning the music, but I’m just gonna come out and say it: this is Tomoya Ohtani’s best work and it’s not even close. From the new character themes, to the boss music, to the open zone themes, to some of the cyberspace soundtrack (there are a lot of composers that work on those to be fair, along with a bunch of other tracks not listed here), there’s so much variety and it’s all incredible. Sonic’s Second Wind theme in particular speaks volumes to not only how immensely talented of a composer he is, but also just to how much he GETS Sonic on a thematic level. Bless you Tomoya Ohtani, and I hope you continue to improve and deliver incredible music for years to come. Now that it’s almost certain they’re innovating and improving on this open zone concept, I can finally say something I haven’t said in years:
I’m excited to see what the next 3D Sonic game will turn out to be.
As for the game itself, I still really enjoy it. Running around the open zone area, chaining moves together to seamlessly leap between grind rails, hills and springs never got tiring. The obstacle courses themselves aren’t anything spectacular (at least in regards to the beginning of the game anyway) but they’re also incredibly bite sized and require at least a fair degree of player control over automation so they’re overall pretty enjoyable. I’ve even started to enjoy the Cyberspace stages to a degree. Like, don’t get me wrong, they still aren’t great and they have loads of problems, but like most Sonic games I guess the fun comes in the form of working around or flat out abusing the jank to blast through the stage as quickly as possible. Still would play Gens and Colors any day of the week over these. Unleashed uhh…depends on the stage I guess because some stages are actually way more fun in Cyberspace. Still think the story is easily the best we’ve had in terms of any of the games, and the soundtrack is still utterly incredible man. Tomoya Ohtani did a fantastic job on everything here, I can’t think of a single song on this soundtrack that I DIDN’T enjoy. Even the cutscene music is great. There are definitely a lot of problems and faults but overall, I still have a great time with this game and it’s still some of the most fun I’ve had with a 3D Sonic game in a long while. While I’m looking forward to what they end up doing with this formula in the future, the official Sonic twitter account (I know it’s called X now but let’s be real nobody is calling it that LOL) announced that Frontiers would get multiple waves of content updates. A lot of it sounded vague and uninteresting (what even would be “new Koco”? Would it literally just be Koco with new funny hats on and that would be it?) but the addition of different challenge modes and new playable characters?? I don’t think we’ve had playable characters with substantially different abilities from Sonic in a 3D game since 2006 (there was Black Knight but even then, not really). Of course, these were all free content updates so I kept my expectations relatively low because of this, but to my surprise these free updates ended up offering WAY more substantial content than I ever could’ve known. Buckle down if you wanna keep reading because this review is gonna be a LOOOOOONG one:
We’ll start with the first update, the lightest one content wise. We got a photo mode, Juke Box, a Battle Rush mode, and a Cyberspace challenge mode alongside a slew of quality of life improvements that I’ll get to in a bit. The photo mode is…meh. Nothing special, but functional; does what it needs to do and that’s really about all I can say about it. From the teaser it made it look like we could have Sonic emote and pose like the Spiderman 2018 photo mode which would be incredibly funny if that were the case, but sadly we don’t get that. We get a few filters and a weirdly kinda restrictive camera, but despite that I’ve seen some really great pictures taken using this feature so I guess at the end of the day it works fine enough. The Cyberspace challenge mode and Battle Rush mode are where the true content lies anyway. Cyberspace challenge is, more or less, exactly like how the Egg Shuttle functions in Sonic Colors: a massive gauntlet of all the Cyberspace stages back to back, trying to beat each of them as fast as possible. Like Egg Shuttle, it’s a fun little side thing to do that I felt the game always should’ve had from day 1 so I’m glad to see it return here. Battle Rush is also a big gauntlet, but this time against every single common enemy, mini boss, and Titan from each island. Due to how limited Frontiers’ combat is I didn’t get a lot out of this, but some enemies I had to figure a roundabout way to take them down quickly for a good rank. It’s also nice that it allows you to refight the Titans as this wasn’t something you could normally do in the base game. Each mode grants you a little bonus upon S ranking each: for Cyberspace Challenge mode, it unlocks the ability to Power Boost in Cyberspace. While this admittedly is pretty cool, I didn’t feel a huge difference using this as the Power Boost in Cyberspace is still a lot slower than it is in the Open Zone (as is the regular boost). Battle Rush S ranks unlock Extreme difficulty, a mode where you can’t upgrade your stats and everything kills you in one hit. It’s a novel idea (basically the equivalent of a DMC Hell and Hell mode for Sonic) but it’s still not really THAT challenging and you don’t even get any acknowledgement for beating it. No achievements, no cosmetics, nothing. Pretty underwhelming if you ask me.
Lastly, we have Juke Box mode. I didn’t really know what to expect from this mode, at most I just kinda expected a spot on the islands where you can listen to every piece of music from the game. To my surprise, this ended up being like Sonic Generations, where you unlock a slew of tracks from across the Sonic franchise and can play any one of them while roaming around the Open Zone areas. There are jukebox notes scattered around the islands much like the memory tokens and collecting one unlocks a random song. I think it’s really cool how they managed to implement exploration elements with a silly extra such as this, and it also makes areas like Rhea Island a little less desolate as now there’s a few hidden notes to collect outside of the giant towers. It does certainly change up the atmosphere whenever you play a song from a different game; Seven Rings in Hand in particular goes hard on Ares Island. Also, shout out for putting all the island movement themes to collect as well, so we can play any of our favorite movements on any island we want instead of being stuck on the 7th movement at all times. On top of all of this, there were also a slew of quality of life improvements: one of which being that they finally, FINALLY fixed Elder Koco. Now you can exchange all of the koco you’ve collected all at once and put them into either speed or ring capacity instead of needing to do it one at a time, thank GOD bro that was agony. They’ve also added a button combination to instantly restart Cyberspace levels which is a great feature, and they’ve also allowed us to turn off the Starfall slot machine entirely. I personally think you could still HAVE the slot machine in the game without making it obtrusively slapped into the center of the screen, but whatever I guess, glad they gave us the option. A lot of these were problems that many people criticized and I was kinda surprised they even added these options at all. It really did show that the team was listening to feedback, and given Kishimoto’s statements at the time, it seems we were gonna get a lot more in the next update. Overall this first update was WAY more than I thought it was gonna be to my utter delight. If this was the direction the updates were taking, then the next couple of updates were really going to be something to look forward to.
The next update, as expected was even beefier; adding even more quality of life changes, new challenges and even a brand-new ability, one that Kishimoto himself had been teasing for quite a while now. Might as well get the Sonic’s Birthday stuff out of the way first as it’s the least impactful part of the update, you basically have Sonic in goofy birthday attire and the entire Starfall Islands are decorated like that one Pepto Bismol Walt Disney World cake castle from 1996. Everywhere you go, wrapping paper, streamers, balloons, presents as far as the eye can see. The Koco you collect and your trapped friends still within the haunting confines of their digital prison take the time to put on a cute lil party hat or two. Even the HUD is infected with colorful birthday noise. It’s not something I care for personally but it is pretty funny to look at. The best part about this cosmetic update is that it comes with a new music track that’s essentially a DJ mix of a variety of different Sonic songs not found in the Jukebox update which is pretty cool. I always appreciate Neo Green Hill when I hear it. No, the true meat of the update begins with the Action Chain challenges. Essentially, scattered around the islands are these challenges you activate where the goal is to essentially do as many things as you possibly can within a time limit: engaging with springs, rails and the platforming around the island, battling enemies, doing tricks, collecting rings, all while collecting yellow orbs to boost your score multiplier. It’s a pretty interesting side mode to participate in, and while it is fun, I do have some issues with it. First off: there absolutely did not need to be 10 of these things on each island minus Rhea, that is BEYOND overkill and at times kinda turns these little side challenges into a chore if you wanna do them all. Second, fighting minibosses breaks these challenges in half. If you can build up a decent score multiplier and rush over to a guardian and kill it, it’s pretty much a guaranteed S rank. Still though, I did end up liking the addition and I hope if it comes back for future entries they find ways to improve and innovate off of it. Of course, the challenges themselves are one thing, but if you manage to S rank all of them on every island, you unlock the Spindash. This is something that Kishimoto had teased for quite a while, we even found some leftover data that revealed in game tips about the Spindash back in update 1. Now that we finally have it, uh…I can definitely see why they locked this move behind S ranking all the Action Chain challenges because HOO boy.
The Spindash is completely bonkers broken in Frontiers. It’s like a mix between SA1’s Spindash (in terms of how high and far you can launch yourself with it) and Lost World’s Spindash (where it’s more of a second form of boost in a way). Essentially, it’s like the boost already in Frontiers, just objectively better in every way. It’s just as maneuverable with the ultra-tight turning Frontiers already has, it goes just as fast (if not faster), you can use it whenever you want while moving or standing still (you don’t even have to rev it up if you don’t want to), it has a hitbox and damages enemies, it consumes the boost gauge just like the boost, and the biggest feature of all? You aren’t constantly glued to the ground at all times. When you use the Spindash, you absolutely LAUNCH off of inclines and ramps. You get so much airtime and distance with this thing it’s borderline ridiculous. Now, normally I’m not really that engaged with the whole “fly through like half the stage by going off a ramp” mentality, but I feel it works here for a couple of reasons. Reason 1 is that being glued to the ground at all times was kind of a big problem Frontiers had in general and reaching things like memory tokens in unintended ways is pretty amusing. Reason 2 is that this is essentially an endgame unlockable: something you don’t have equipped by default and something you have to put the work into getting. As a crazy game breaking toy that the game essentially goes “ok you’ve won, have fun now”, I think I can allow it. The quality of life improvements further enhanced this by allowing a slider for air deacceleration and no deacceleration when boosting through the air. While I think this is fun to play around with, this sadly only applies to boost jumps and not your regular jump, which means moves like the drop dash are still affected and jumping after hitting a dash pad still kills your speed. Honestly, and this can apply for the next game too, all I want is the equivalent of the short hop from Gens, Colors, and Unleashed. The ability to keep your speed while lightly jumping to clear small gaps feels immeasurably good to pull off, I dunno why they ever got rid of this ability to begin with.
The final “big” addition this update introduced are the new Koco. Like I said before, I didn’t’ really know what to expect when this feature was teased because…well, what was I even SUPPOSED to think? They gave us nothing to work with at all. However, to my utter shock, these new Koco ended up being the best part of all of update 2. Yeah, INCLUDING the Spindash. These new Koco are big bois with fancy getup and costumes, and when you collect them and turn them into the Elder Koco, it expands your boost gauge stamina. While this feature is kinda negated by just cylooping an infinity symbol and having temporary infinite boost, it’s still a cool upgrade that I’m surprised they didn’t already put into the game prior. That’s not even the best part though, as to get to these Koco, you need to complete the huge platforming challenge tied to them, similar to the platforming challenges already scattered around the island. The difference being that these platforming challenges are way harder to clear in comparison. Some are a reaction-based test, some have tricky moving platforms over the edge of the map, some are miniature puzzles in a way that you need to figure out to progress, some have massive wall running sections with tons of spiked balls and hazards to avoid with strict timing. I had a REALLY fun time acing these, in fact I found them so fun I often ended up going through them again even after I collected the Koco. IMO this is honestly how the platforming challenges should’ve been throughout the game, or at the very least they should’ve thrown them in there from the start and mix them with the ones already in the game. I love a good challenge and while I didn’t find these hard or anything, they definitely had me engaged throughout. Easily the best part of the new update. Aside from the air deacceleration, the only other QOL changes they added were actually also pretty substantial. You got things like disabling the cinematic camera for your skill tree moves, which I didn’t really mind so I kept them on, but then you have the ability to disable the music distortion when boosting in the Cyberspace stages which I was super happy to see added (which, by the way, was a suggestion I offered to a Sonic affiliated person on Twitter back when update 1 dropped. You’re welcome 😉). They also added an island progression screen, showcasing everything you’ve completed on each island and what % you have that specific island complete. It counts everything, from side stories, island puzzles, Cyberspace portals, and yes, even memory tokens. It’s essentially something only added for 100% completion nuts such as myself, and as I’ve already 100%ed everything prior, seeing those completion screens light up was truly worthwhile. What’s more, if you do end up 100%ing every island, you even get a special cosmetic reward for doing so (Sonic gets a crown. That’s about it. It’s literally exactly like Kingdom Hearts and I love it for that)! The extent to how beefy update 2 was, even in comparison to update 1 was nothing short of impressive. All that was left was the final content update, later dubbed “The Final Horizon”. All that was left to do was wait.
And so now here we are, the third and final major content update for Sonic Frontiers. Might as well start talking about the DLC of which this entire Backloggd page is about, right? This DLC is a major rehaul of all of Ouranos Island, as many felt the ending to Frontiers was lackluster and rushed (which I certainly do agree). This update content wise is absolutely monstrous. If you thought the previous 2 updates were content packed, you haven’t seen ANYTHING yet my friend. This DLC, on average, took me about 10 hours to beat, roughly 15 (give or take) to fully 100% it. The fact that this content update (which, I must reiterate, is 100% free btw) managed to be WAY longer in length than freaking Sonic Forces, a paid 3D Sonic game, is mind boggling. There’s so much to do and talk about that I should probably break down the different topics in order from what I feel is the most important downwards. Let’s start with the new playable characters: again, considering this was a free content update I didn’t expect much from them, I mostly just kinda expected a reskinned Sonic with some new moves sprinkled here and there, but no, they did it. They actually COOKED here. I was flabbergasted when playing this DLC man, you have no idea. For the record, I’ve never been against Sonic’s friends being playable again in a 3D space, it’s just that more so every time they’ve tried to implement different playstyles they’ve almost all failed so spectacularly. With this game, I can thankfully say we’re on the right track now.
I’ll start with Amy first, as she was by far my favorite to play as out of the 3 which is just ABSURD. I can’t believe I’m saying this but they actually made Amy, AMY of all characters, fun to play as in a 3D Sonic game!!!!! I just can’t believe it, I really can’t. Gone are the days of a painfully slow character with boring level design, limited movement and a laughably worthless antagonist chasing after you, and gone are the days of an even SLOWER character with pitiful combat, a momentum killing double jump, and a pointless invisibility technique; all of that garbage is now behind us thankfully. Amy in Frontiers is not only speedy like Sonic (all of them are in fact) but her aerial mobility is second to none. She jumps super high, has a triple jump and can glide after the 3rd jump using her tarot cards. Moreover, this glide also carries your momentum, so you can cross tremendous distances if you were already going fast beforehand. And if THAT weren’t enough, she has a bounce stomp like Sonic, with the difference being this one sends you WAY higher into the air and slows your fall. The amount of height and aerial control you have while playing as her is just absurd and it feels extremely good to just jump around as her. If there’s anything I don’t like about her, though, it’s her combat. All of her attacks are performed using her tarot cards, which feels weird. Like, I’m fine with her tarot card glide and all that, but having her attack using her cards instead of her hammer (which is only used for the quick cyloop equivalent) is a decision I still don’t fully understand. That’s not even really what I don’t like about her though, it’s more so the fact that her combat style was just not designed for this game’s enemies; or at least, not the enemies in The Final Horizon update specifically. Her attacks at a glance are more so constructed to deal with multiple enemies at once, whether it be her multi-homing attack or her card spin attack. Even with her poison debuff parry she still isn’t as good at dealing damage as the other characters. If it weren’t for Sonic’s superior combat arsenal and quick Cyloop, I’d go as far to say Amy would be my favorite character to play as in Frontiers as a whole, which, again, is just crazy to me.
Next up is Tails, and while he is very fun to play he can be a bit of a mixed bag in some areas. His flight is, unfortunately, not as good as it was in SA1. There’s a little delay at the beginning of the flight (though it is cool looking) and it only goes up to a set height depending on what elevation you start the flight at. It still feels good to fly around overall but I do wish we could get the SA1 flight in an open zone environment, that would be pretty cool. His main form of attack is, perhaps unintentionally very humorous. He just sorta chucks wrenches at you. Very angrily. Just add in the metal pipe sound effect for further improvements (thank you to whoever made that a mod btw). The attack functions similarly to the dummy ring bombs from Sonic 06, except these are so much better in every way. For one, throwing them from a standstill feels far less slow and clunky in comparison, you’re not forced into a poorly handled first person view, it has a clear arc with how you throw it, you can throw it just as fast while airborne, you can even effectively block projectiles with it (which is a challenge you do on one of the new platforming challenges). You can later nab an upgrade later to charge the attack and send it flying, creating a cluster of wrenches that not only deals multihit damage to enemies but also acts as a platform to jump on. He has his combat purpose as a fairly mobile flying character with ranged attacks to poke at enemies from a distance. So far, he is fairly fun to play as, though nothing spectacular. However, by unlocking the max ring boost from his skill tree, Tails uses the Cyclone from SA2 and completely breaks the game in half. I’m not even kidding you, this thing is utterly ridiculously broken (in a good way). Perhaps this is why they limited Tails’ flight the way they did, as this grants the ability to freely fly and gain altitude as you see fit, all at incredible speeds. Combine this with infinite boost and you can pretty much skip almost every single one of Tails’ platforming sections with a couple of exceptions. He even gets to use the thing as a laser cannon attack. If only Tails had this version of the Cyclone then maybe the mech stages in SA2 wouldn’t have sucked nearly as much. Unsurprisingly this thing is a blast to just fly around the island. Yeah yeah, it’s broken and kinda throws challenge out the window but again, I’ll allow it. It just FEELS good to fly around the island at mach speed.
Finally, we have Knuckles. He’s certainly still rougher than the rest of them, but he unfortunately isn’t the best of them. He can glide and climb walls as you would expect but both of these aspects to his character come with a big asterisk at the end. Like for instance, yeah, he can “climb walls” but unfortunately only context sensitive walls. He can climb the green surfaced walls that Sonic can, and he can also climb exclusive red walls that only he can climb. That’s about it. With that being said, just like Sonic’s wall running his climbing controls very good and it’s very fast but I still wish you could climb any surface that you’d normally slide down on. He can also glide but the gliding feels all sorts of wrong. He has a huge startup animation before he takes off and his steering is awful, SA2 gliding this ain’t. It’s not as bad as like, the gliding in 06 with how that one gets stuck on walls, is a set speed and loses altitude way too fast. This one, like Amy’s tarot card glide, keeps your speed depending on how fast you were going beforehand, and you can later nab an upgrade that allows him to glide much faster indefinitely without even losing altitude. I just don’t get the point of the delay or the bad turning. There is a funny tech you can do to somewhat alleviate the turning issue, however. If you mash the glide button repeatedly, you spam the startup animation and stay in place somewhat, and from there you can turn in the direction you want to travel in instantly. You can watch footage of me performing it here. That being said though, when it comes to combat there’s nobody else I would want to pick. His attacks at first might not look like the deal a ton of damage, but therein lies his debuff parry that lowers defenses. Combine that with his regular 3 hit combo, stomp and drill attack and enemy health bars in this game absolutely MELT, which is especially impressive considering how much they’ve beefed up the enemies in general in this DLC which I’ll get to later. In hindsight I should’ve expected Knuckles to be the strongest out of all of them but it is very satisfying nonetheless seeing these bullet sponge mini bosses drop like flies when using this guy. Even though he still has issues, I still managed to have some fun using him.
The structure of the Final Horizon is very interesting. Essentially, you start playing as the 3 new characters do a variety of things, whether that be the new puzzles scattered around the island, fighting WAY tougher minibosses, platforming challenges to find either Koco that give you a huge amount of XP to level up your skill tree, or Koco that reveal a large chunk of the map. There are objectives to find for each character but for the most part I explored what I could to upgrade and complete a variety of challenges. The platforming challenges themselves are REALLY well done, maybe a bit messy in terms of looks and aesthetic as they’re fairly obtrusive and blocky, but they essentially brought back the new Koco challenges and ran with the idea for every character. These were all a lot of fun and crafted some fun challenges around each character. The game swaps between each character automatically after a certain number of objectives have been completed. Sonic doesn’t really get any platforming challenges in the traditional sense like the other 3: instead, he gets a variety of new Cyberspace stages to play with and tower climbs that lead to Master Koco trials. I’ll get to the Cyberspace stages in a bit, I wanna first talk about the Towers because oh my LORD. They basically took the tower climbs in Rhea Island and cranked them up to 11. They’re way harder, way longer, and the platforming is even more satisfying than it was beforehand. I played on hard mode throughout the DLC (I heard that some level design elements change with easy and normal mode) and I loved every single one of these tower climbs, they were genuinely fantastic. This can apply to a good chunk of this DLC, but they really toned down the automation and fully expect you to do a lot of the platforming this time around. I will say though that they should’ve provided more safety nets on these towers for people who aren’t that good at Sonic games on easier difficulties, as once you fall off the tower you have to climb all the way back up from scratch. I personally didn’t mind this as I never really fell off apart from a couple of mistakes I made on the final tower. In any case, once you get up to the top of these towers, you need to participate in the Master Koco Trials. These are combat trials against a handful of supped up enemies that you need to complete within a time limit. They were fine, nothing outstanding but nothing too amazing either, just fun to have something new to do. The Tower climbs are really the true standout with Sonic if I’m being real. The Cyberspace stages also got a pretty big change. The Cyberspace stages in the DLC are remixed versions of Cyberspace stages already in the base game previously, with familiar layouts mixed with brand new design, new objectives, and some absolutely incredible music remixes. Like for instance in the remix of 1-7, you play with a ton of cars lined up everywhere for you to bounce on and the entire stage has moon gravity. Or you could play with a bomb on your head and you race against the clock to collect stopwatch icons to slow the countdown, race against a shadow clone of Tails, constantly pick up canisters of Rocket Boosts which works similarly to how boosting used to work (in that it kills enemies). Not all of them are winners, the one that has a speed gauge that increases the longer you boost and makes you explode if you Spindash wasn’t very fun, but these feel like more means of experimentation for future titles so I’m glad most of them are still very fun to go through. The lack of automation also applies to these levels, there’s a lot of ramps you can go off of by spindashing and to my shock even the loops aren’t automated! The camera does the whole fangame thing where it follows Sonic from behind which I’m not really a fan of but regardless it’s very weird to see non-automated loops in a 3D Sonic game. The side objectives are different too. Clearing with an ideal clear time is still a factor of course, but you also have the return of the numbered rings from Lost World and the silver moon medals from Forces. Thankfully the numbered rings aren’t as braindead as they were in Forces, as acquiring all of them in a row can be quite tricky at times. They’re spaced out in an out of order sequence on a series of tight platforming that often you need to go a real roundabout way of getting, and in the case of 4-H, they’re spaced throughout the ENTIRE stage, meaning if you miss even one, you need to restart the entire level again for another attempt. The silver moon medals are also much more challenging to get than Forces, though their structure is more similar to that game, being relatively close together and needing to be collected quickly. There are also objectives where you need to rescue animal buddies but these SUUUUCK. You need to locate them, pick them up piggyback style, and carry them over to the marked area to “rescue” them. Not only are your movement options gone when you do this, which means the jank controls of Cyberspace don’t really lend these objectives any favors ESPECIALLY when platforming over bottomless pits across small boxes, but it completely snaps the pace of the stage in half. I really don’t wanna see these types of missions come back again, I’ve had my fill.
The guardian minibosses have been ridiculously beefed up this time. Not only do they hit way harder and attack in much faster, more erratic intervals with brand new attack patterns to boot (Spider Tank and Caterpillar don’t even get their gimmicky sections anymore), but they’re way tankier too. Even with a maxed-out Sonic it took kind of a while to down some of these guardians. The changes to these minibosses are not necessarily the most gracefully handled thing out there though, a lot of them are kind of a goofy mess to fight, particularly the ones that just sorta sit there and vomit projectiles at you endlessly, but Ninja+ was great fun, Tower+ is bonkers crazy and zips around like a bat out of hell, Ghost has brand new fights with the different platforming structures around it (I particularly liked the one where you need to traverse a maze to get to its pillars), I even enjoyed fighting Tank+ for as messy as it was. I also appreciated that they made the Starfall event actually kinda fun this time! Instead of a slot machine blocking your screen and the only reward you get being purple coins, the starfall items are instead replaced with Koco, and Red and Blue seeds of defense, and picking one up gives you a TON of them at once, making this event a must do to instantly max out a character of your choice, or at least getting close to maxing them out. I also enjoyed the story being told here, Sonic using the Master Koco trials to turn his Cyber corruption into a form of power, while his friends end up feeling what he felt throughout the entire game. I particularly enjoyed the side story interactions where they end up explaining a lot of the architecture of the Starfall Islands and what they were used for, and even explained things that didn’t really need to be explained. I particularly found it humorous that the floating rails, springs and platforms in the open zone aren’t really there at all and Sonic is only hallucinating them due to being high on Cyberspace. I guess the only major things left to talk about are the final Master King Koco challenge and the true final boss. You wanna talk about a major difficulty spike? Look no further than the Master King Koco challenge. You need to fight against every Titan boss in the game back to back (minus Supreme for obvious reasons), with a max of 400 rings and no way to refill it, level 1 stats, and the only way to parry their attacks is with a perfect parry (which for this and the final boss on hard mode, is a frame 4 parry window instead of the infinite hold to parry we’ve had prior). This challenge was simply too much for so many people. Even on easier difficulties where the parry window is a lot wider, a lot of people couldn’t even finish this mode. While I was able to beat it on hard mode eventually (I even did a flawless run on hard mode before writing this review), I can definitely see why this game never had a tighter window to parry attacks. Particularly with these Titan fights, their attacks just aren’t well telegraphed to be able to react in a split second at all. Wyvern is especially bad with this. It twirls around in so many different ways before attacking and some attacks just sorta…happen in an instant; and to make matters worse, parrying is the ONLY WAY to deal damage to this guy. I think there should be a compromise if future games are going to have combat systems with a parry: shrink the parry window down to be tight, but not like…frame 4 tight lmao (the one on easy mode for instance would be fine for a regular parry), and for those who hit a perfect parry get rewarded with the slowdown that comes afterwards. IDK, just spitballing ideas here.
All that’s left is the true final boss. The thing this entire DLC has been slowly building up to. You’ve completed all the trials, awakened a new hidden power within Sonic, all of your friends have gathered the Chaos Emeralds, and after a brief match with Supreme (sadly was not changed), The End itself comes down, transforms the Titan into an eldritch multiarmed abomination, Sonic awakens his hidden power, and the true fight begins...
The true final boss is a mess in so many different ways. The camera is probably the worst it’s ever been, CONSTANTLY getting obscured by the trees that are in front of the fight, actively blocking your view of the energy orbs you need to parry. The boss is also weirdly unintuitive (what makes this funny to me is that 100%ing everything in the DLC unlocks…hints on how to beat the final boss). You need to sever the cord from the Titan in order to deal damage and prevent it from regening health, but in order to reach the cord you need to use the dodge button to retarget onto the cord and sever it, which is never really explained properly. In order to go into phase 2 you need to cyloop the center of Supreme’s body when it gets knocked down (not really hinted at what you need to do there either). There’s an attack that drains almost all of your rings if you get hit by too many energy spheres (also not explained well). And on top of all of this there’s still so many more instances of unpolished jank that I haven’t even covered with my brief explanation of this boss fight.
…this is now my favorite final boss out in the entire Sonic franchise.
Yeah bet you didn’t see that coming huh? Despite the moments of irritation and jankiness, I loved the HECK out of this final fight. The anime spectacle is off the charts once again (seriously how do they make Super Sonic so COOL bro he’s literally that guy), the perfect parry actually makes deflecting its attacks engaging because this time the attacks are designed AROUND the frame 4 parry, there’s a decent amount of challenge fighting it, the atmosphere is immaculate and the transformed Supreme is genuinely pretty creepy (especially the way it swats you away, then afterwards you see this massive 4 legged creature towering over the trees scuttling towards you, pretty unnerving for a Sonic game. You even get kinda but not really blood just like in Unleashed!), once I figured it out I had a lot of fun, and the ending afterwards finally concluded Frontiers with a nice little bow on top. I also adore the music during this fight, both the orchestral rendition (though it doesn’t really sound like real orchestra, the beginning of that track gives me straight goosebumps every time I hear it) and the godly Kellin Quinn rendition of I’m Here (though I do wish there was more screaming). Maybe I’m a sucker for spectacle considering how terrible pretty much every Sonic final boss prior to this was (though the Ikaruga shootemup was pretty good), but I don’t care. It’s gonna take quite a lot to top this.
The update as a whole wasn’t perfect, by a LONG shot lmao. The pop in still isn’t fixed (in fact it’s now noticeable in Cyberspace), there are some quirks I had with the minibosses, playable characters and the final boss, and the update as a whole was still rushed to an extent (the characters don’t even move their mouths anymore during the character interaction side stories), but I still had a blast with what I played. I know I also keep mentioning the music, but I’m just gonna come out and say it: this is Tomoya Ohtani’s best work and it’s not even close. From the new character themes, to the boss music, to the open zone themes, to some of the cyberspace soundtrack (there are a lot of composers that work on those to be fair, along with a bunch of other tracks not listed here), there’s so much variety and it’s all incredible. Sonic’s Second Wind theme in particular speaks volumes to not only how immensely talented of a composer he is, but also just to how much he GETS Sonic on a thematic level. Bless you Tomoya Ohtani, and I hope you continue to improve and deliver incredible music for years to come. Now that it’s almost certain they’re innovating and improving on this open zone concept, I can finally say something I haven’t said in years:
I’m excited to see what the next 3D Sonic game will turn out to be.