Sonic Frontiers Review
Sonic Frontiers is an interesting game to me. When I first saw the first gameplay trailer, I honestly thought it looked like garbage. Everything about what was shown looked choppy from the Sonic’s weirdly snappy movements, the overworld not looking like anything from the series, and the very bad pop-in graphics (which is still a problem in the final game). I thought: “Man, this game looks so awful. The Sonic series is still going to be a joke.” I don’t think I’ve seen a game trailer that disappointed me. Sega would upload more trailers over the next couple of months and my thoughts of the game would start to change. I still wasn’t a fan of a Sonic game being open-world styled, but the game started to look kind of better and the story of Sonic and his friends stuck in a cyberspace dimension with the new character named “Sage”. I was like “Okay, this game is starting to look better now, but the game still looks kind of weird.” Then the final game was released, so I bought and finished the game and I thought the game overall was alright. It does some stuff I like and some stuff I really don’t like, so I decided to express my thoughts through this review.
Sonic Frontiers is a 3D platforming game with open world elements where you can run at the speed of sound freely in large but strange fields. During your exploration of the island, you can solve puzzles, do missions, enter cyberspace levels, and fight strange mini bosses to complete your map of the island you are currently at. Doing any of these will earn you collectables such as vault keys to unlock Chaos Emeralds and character tokens to progress the story. I do find it interesting how you can unlock Chaos Emeralds so easily in this game since previous games had you collect all Red Rings in every stage in order to unlock them, but I don’t really mind this change (at least for this game).
The Gameplay
Since Sonic Frontiers is an overworld-styled game, it means that you are able to move freely in a large map. Like in every modern Sonic game, you are able to boost to gain some extra speed, but the boost in this game has been severely nerfed to the point where it’s pretty much a dash. It's not too bad once you collect the max amount of rings, in which the boost is much faster. The Drop Dash is also in this game, but I never really used it much since it's not much faster than the boost and it requires you to press the jump button three times to use it. The movement in this game is a bit off since Sonic will stop at a halt if you stop pressing forward. This is also the same with the Ring Dash as he'll briefly float in place after the animation is done.
Unique to this game is combat (which I think is a first for the series, not counting the fighting game spin-offs). It threw me off to see Sonic throw hands with these weird robots that look like they came from Neon Genesis Evangelion (especially the first boss from Kronos Island) but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. After each battle or finding some capsules in the islands, you can earn some XP to upgrade Sonic’s skills through a skill tree and learn new moves such as Sonic shooting Sonic Booms through his feet or him making a large Cycloop. The skill tree isn’t huge, so I’m glad I didn’t have to grind for a platformer game.
The combat, however, isn't really challenging. An example I’d like to mention is the parry, which you press both shoulder buttons to activate. Unlike other parry mechanics in video games, you don’t have to press it in time with your enemies’ attacks, you just hold the buttons and it’ll still work (it’s pretty much blocking) which gives you the chance to counter attack. You can also earn an upgrade late game in the skill tree which you can basically mash the attack button and do all the attacks you’ve earned throughout the game with slightly reduced damage. I pretty much mashed the square button and still did some good damage, so I didn’t really notice the penalty. Still, I did like seeing Sonic whooping those robots and the combat never overstays its welcome and you can simply run away if you don’t feel like fighting.
The challenges are also quite easy. Most consist of walking on tiles in the correct order, moving through squares, pushing buttons, etc. The only one I actually had a hard time with was a puzzle called “A Grave Mystery”, where you have to move these black tombstones to make a pattern. Without looking at a guide, you’ll be stuck trying to make the pattern. I feel bad for some poor kid that picks the game up and then stops because they were so confused.
The Cyberspace levels were my least favorite part of Frontiers and it didn’t help that they were all based on Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and Sky Sanctuary (I think one of the Sky Sanctuary levels is taken from Sonic Generations). It would have been fine with them if they based them from other games like Sonic Rush or Colors since it's the 30th anniversary of the Sonic franchise. At least the soundtrack for the levels is great and I really like that they went with a drum n’ bass soundtrack for them. The good thing is that the songs don’t restart when you retry a level (especially for some annoying ones like 1-2 and 3-5). It makes finishing the stages more tolerable. If they added back drifting to these stages, then I think I would have liked the stages more.
The game is also pretty easy if you noticed my comments about the gameplay. For example, you start off with 400 rings and when you max out, a little animation will play and Sonic will move even faster with infinite boost (the boost will drain slowly when fighting an enemy or boss). I bring this up because you can collect these little creatures called Kocos and once you collect enough, you can either upgrade your speed or your ring count. I’ve always upgraded my speed since a 400 ring limit is very generous and you can easily get rings by Cylooping the field (you can get a crazy amount of rings by doing this). I have a theory why Sonic Team made the game so easy to bring in younger fans who watched the Sonic movies since most of them were kids. This isn’t bad at all but the game might be seen as a cakewalk by older fans.
The Jank
I originally wasn't going to make this it's own section, but it's really hard to ignore it once you play the game. Jankiness (if that's even a word) is quite common in Sonic games but it's really weird with Frontiers especially since I played the game on Playstation 5. It wasn't bad to the point where it ruined the game for me, but it's still strange. I'll post my clips so it's easier understand what I'm talking about.
The Music
A staple to each Sonic game is an amazing soundtrack and I’m so glad that Frontiers has an amazing soundtrack and unlike Forces, I can actually remember them. I mentioned how I enjoyed the Cyberspace songs, but the boss fight themes are awesome! Even when I fought the Kronos Island boss, I felt pumped up. I felt like Gohan turning Super Saiyan 2 for the first time. Every boss theme felt like a final boss theme and I loved it! All I can say is that the music is simply awesome! My favorites songs from the game are Cyber Space 1-2, Cyber Space 2-4, and Break Through It All
The Story
The story in Frontiers is written by Ian Flynn, who wrote most of the Archie Comics and the IDW series (Tangle from the IDW comics is even mentioned by name!). You can tell it was written by him since he likes to reference previous games, in which there are a lot of in Frontiers. I saw some fans compare these to Family Guy cutaway gags (it does kind of feel like that), but I’m glad it’s there since it shows there is actually some continuity and it’s the Sonic franchise's 30th anniversary after all. I also like how the characters are written too. Tails acknowledging his inconsistent characterization in the past decade, Knuckles actually being the guardian of the Master Emerald (which previous games forgot sometimes), and Sage and Eggman’s father and daughter dynamic. I can say the game’s characterization is very good.
Anyway, the story takes a more serious tone compared to the games written by Gaff and Potnac (which were more light-hearted and comical) and you can tell with the game’s environment and Sonic’s deeper voice. I think the story was fine yet repetitive. We learn about an ancient alien race that was wiped out in a war with the Guardians and their souls possessing the Kocos. The Chaos Emeralds are established to be alien instead of these weird mysterious sources of power. I’m not bothered by this change since we had no info about them throughout Sonic’s 30 year history. The repetitive part was that you pretty much did the same thing on every island like saving a friend, learning something about the world, helping a Koco out, and proceeding to the next one. Sage’s story is also kind of basic since she goes from not liking Sonic to helping him later on and it felt like she was kind of there without influencing much of the story. Eggman is also in the story but he doesn't have much of a presence. He’s not the main antagonist but it does suck he doesn’t do much besides being stuck in Cyberspace talking to Sage sometimes. Overall I think the story is fine but kind of light and basic.
Conclusion
I'd say I enjoyed my time playing Sonic Frontiers. I thought I'd hate the game with the amount of flaws and jank in the game but somehow I didn't. I liked how they tried to make things different while the story acknowledges how inconsistent the series has been. The game does have some problems, but it wasn't bad enough that made me drop the game. I’m looking forward to the future updates the games will have like Sonic’s friends being playable for the first time since Sonic 2006. They also added some new content back in March like a jukebox mode, photo mode, and Cyberspace challenge modes. In my opinion, you should give this game a shot whether you are into Sonic or not, especially after the new content that will be added soon. I suggest you play the game on PC if you can since that game has a lot of mod support like fixing the pop-in and momentum based controls. If I were to score the game, I'd give it a 6.5/10.
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