They really had something going. How did they fumble it this hard?
I liked the base game. It wasn't anything special but I enjoyed my time with it and was happy to see a good Sonic game from Sonic Team again after over a decade without one. This new content however is just filled with tons and tons of questionable design choices, and I'm aware that pre-patch it was far worse, so I can't even imagine how bad it was then.
Having new characters to play as was nice on paper but they all started out extremely un-fleshed out and were very unfun to play as until I started to unlock most of their skill trees, which required finding lots of Kocos and was very boring. Once those skills were unlocked though it became much more fun and I started to enjoy overworld exploration far more. The new cyberspace stages, on the other hand, aren't good at all though. Minus 4-D which I kind of liked. Having alternate paths is cool but it doesn't matter much when the level design is so obtuse and hard to traverse. Glad they're optional.
Over the course of the past few months I've heard tons of praise for the final boss. Lots of people have said the final boss is great and makes up for this campaign's faults. I have no idea what they're talking about. That boss fight sucked. Were we really playing the same game? I haven't played a game with a final boss fight with design that cryptic since Paper Mario: Sticker Star. I even had to restart the fight at one point because the boss got bugged. Any chance of this getting a higher score from me was ruined by that fight.
Sonic Frontiers made me cautiously optimistic for Sonic's future but this campaign destroyed most of that optimism. The fact the story makes almost zero noticeable changes from the main game's story and has basically the same outcome makes me wonder what reason this update even has to exist, beyond having an excuse to play as more characters. The effort for this really should have just gone into working on another project instead. I fear Sega has not learned from Frontiers' success and will continue to not give Sonic Team the time and budget they desperately need.
I liked the base game. It wasn't anything special but I enjoyed my time with it and was happy to see a good Sonic game from Sonic Team again after over a decade without one. This new content however is just filled with tons and tons of questionable design choices, and I'm aware that pre-patch it was far worse, so I can't even imagine how bad it was then.
Having new characters to play as was nice on paper but they all started out extremely un-fleshed out and were very unfun to play as until I started to unlock most of their skill trees, which required finding lots of Kocos and was very boring. Once those skills were unlocked though it became much more fun and I started to enjoy overworld exploration far more. The new cyberspace stages, on the other hand, aren't good at all though. Minus 4-D which I kind of liked. Having alternate paths is cool but it doesn't matter much when the level design is so obtuse and hard to traverse. Glad they're optional.
Over the course of the past few months I've heard tons of praise for the final boss. Lots of people have said the final boss is great and makes up for this campaign's faults. I have no idea what they're talking about. That boss fight sucked. Were we really playing the same game? I haven't played a game with a final boss fight with design that cryptic since Paper Mario: Sticker Star. I even had to restart the fight at one point because the boss got bugged. Any chance of this getting a higher score from me was ruined by that fight.
Sonic Frontiers made me cautiously optimistic for Sonic's future but this campaign destroyed most of that optimism. The fact the story makes almost zero noticeable changes from the main game's story and has basically the same outcome makes me wonder what reason this update even has to exist, beyond having an excuse to play as more characters. The effort for this really should have just gone into working on another project instead. I fear Sega has not learned from Frontiers' success and will continue to not give Sonic Team the time and budget they desperately need.