This review contains spoilers
I’ve played Lost World & Forces twice and even with that this has probably been the most burnt out I’ve been after playing a Sonic game.
I’ve been cautiously optimistic for Sonic Frontiers ever since about May-June of 2022, with Forces there was really nowhere to go but up and Frontiers somewhat lived up to what I was expecting from it, it returns and reforms the Sonic Gameplay to this open world-esque setting and if you want me to be completely honest I don’t think this works completely with Sonic The Hedgehog.
The cyberspace levels here are a horrible comparison so I’ll use something else, compare it to let’s say the gameplay of Generations or even daytime Unleashed, those are linear yeah and I think that’s what works best with Sonic The Hedgehog. Frontiers has some level of linearity to it with some auto completing sections and 2D sections (which are some of the worst things I’ve ever seen here), but it generally approaches this open world exploration heavy style of gameplay with how reliant the game is on collecting vault keys and memory tokens, that alone is around 90% of the entire game, and for me at least it’s stuck in this zone where it’s not fun to reach top speed and it’s not fun to explore either, but still controlling Sonic himself is still fun, they even fixed the double jump issue I had in Forces! The skill tree in general was an extremely welcome addition, combat in Frontiers is one of its strong suits for sure, it’s so sun to execute different types of combos while seeing enemies get stronger with every island.
Another aspect I think is the absolute best thing about Frontiers is it’s writing, in my opinion it had the best story in a sonic game since the “Adventure” duology a whole 21 years ago, and the best character interactions since 06. It’s seriously semi rewarding wasting time collecting the rubbish the game wants you to just to see what cutscene comes next. Especially with the fact that Frontiers keeps a limited character roster, you really get to see Sonic’s relationship with each one grow to its fullest extent. I mean this is the first game Amy isn’t an annoying brat and actually has some depth to her character, even with the symbolisms of the whole Koco love story that Kronos had going on. Tails and Knuckles I feel similarly about as well and I don’t think I even have to mention Sage. They try to add in references to every part of Sonic’s history without it feeling like nostalgia bait, it’s just wholesome references telling us that the writers infact aren’t smoking something heavy like they were the last 2 mainline entries.
The soundtrack of course is a banger as expected from a Sega game, although I feel like with every Sonic game aside from Lost world, the scores have been continuously getting weaker and weaker, the main theme of Frontiers I wasn’t the biggest fan of and it’s inclusion in the Supreme battle was uhhh…. a bit anticlimactic for the most part to say the least. With its length of 20 hours or so Frontiers’ soundtrack is repeated so much with how long some of the islands in it take you to complete… don’t get me wrong it’s very good that Sega made a game long enough to warrant its price but still I got so tired of hearing a lot of the tracks. Something else I noticed was it’s performance issues, I don’t know if it was because I was playing it on PS4 but there are some horrible cases of stuff being close to you taking so long to load, or with the case of something like Quranos island, textures will take 3-5 seconds to fully render, and even then they don’t even look that good.. other than that though Frontiers did look pretty good graphically aside from some annoying lighting issues.
Overall if Sonic Frontiers really is the blueprint for future games then I won’t have much of an issue. It’s a good concept and I’m sure a bunch of effort was put into it, a lot even paying off but it’s still a heavily flawed game at the end of the day. I’m anticipated for what comes next but won’t be holding my breath too long.
I’ve been cautiously optimistic for Sonic Frontiers ever since about May-June of 2022, with Forces there was really nowhere to go but up and Frontiers somewhat lived up to what I was expecting from it, it returns and reforms the Sonic Gameplay to this open world-esque setting and if you want me to be completely honest I don’t think this works completely with Sonic The Hedgehog.
The cyberspace levels here are a horrible comparison so I’ll use something else, compare it to let’s say the gameplay of Generations or even daytime Unleashed, those are linear yeah and I think that’s what works best with Sonic The Hedgehog. Frontiers has some level of linearity to it with some auto completing sections and 2D sections (which are some of the worst things I’ve ever seen here), but it generally approaches this open world exploration heavy style of gameplay with how reliant the game is on collecting vault keys and memory tokens, that alone is around 90% of the entire game, and for me at least it’s stuck in this zone where it’s not fun to reach top speed and it’s not fun to explore either, but still controlling Sonic himself is still fun, they even fixed the double jump issue I had in Forces! The skill tree in general was an extremely welcome addition, combat in Frontiers is one of its strong suits for sure, it’s so sun to execute different types of combos while seeing enemies get stronger with every island.
Another aspect I think is the absolute best thing about Frontiers is it’s writing, in my opinion it had the best story in a sonic game since the “Adventure” duology a whole 21 years ago, and the best character interactions since 06. It’s seriously semi rewarding wasting time collecting the rubbish the game wants you to just to see what cutscene comes next. Especially with the fact that Frontiers keeps a limited character roster, you really get to see Sonic’s relationship with each one grow to its fullest extent. I mean this is the first game Amy isn’t an annoying brat and actually has some depth to her character, even with the symbolisms of the whole Koco love story that Kronos had going on. Tails and Knuckles I feel similarly about as well and I don’t think I even have to mention Sage. They try to add in references to every part of Sonic’s history without it feeling like nostalgia bait, it’s just wholesome references telling us that the writers infact aren’t smoking something heavy like they were the last 2 mainline entries.
The soundtrack of course is a banger as expected from a Sega game, although I feel like with every Sonic game aside from Lost world, the scores have been continuously getting weaker and weaker, the main theme of Frontiers I wasn’t the biggest fan of and it’s inclusion in the Supreme battle was uhhh…. a bit anticlimactic for the most part to say the least. With its length of 20 hours or so Frontiers’ soundtrack is repeated so much with how long some of the islands in it take you to complete… don’t get me wrong it’s very good that Sega made a game long enough to warrant its price but still I got so tired of hearing a lot of the tracks. Something else I noticed was it’s performance issues, I don’t know if it was because I was playing it on PS4 but there are some horrible cases of stuff being close to you taking so long to load, or with the case of something like Quranos island, textures will take 3-5 seconds to fully render, and even then they don’t even look that good.. other than that though Frontiers did look pretty good graphically aside from some annoying lighting issues.
Overall if Sonic Frontiers really is the blueprint for future games then I won’t have much of an issue. It’s a good concept and I’m sure a bunch of effort was put into it, a lot even paying off but it’s still a heavily flawed game at the end of the day. I’m anticipated for what comes next but won’t be holding my breath too long.