Sonic Frontiers

Fast download, even faster uninstall. 

When it comes to inconsistent franchises, Sonic might take top spot. Since his debut in 1991, the blue blur has been host to a wealth of games ranging from good to bad, to downright awful. Most of these disappointing titles are due to issues translating Sonic’s fast and agile gameplay to 3D, whereas his more celebrated entries are that of his more two-dimensional adventures. That said, Sonic Frontiers is the franchise’s biggest leap into 3D yet, and while it can sometimes show potential, Frontiers is an absolute chore to play too much of the time. 

Inspired by Nintendo’s efforts with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Sonic’s latest adventure takes him to several large sprawling open zones, filled with a variety of activities to tackle, enemies to conquer, skills to unlock, and a deeper mystery to solve as Sonic is tasked with rescuing his friends who are trapped inside cyberspace prisons. 

As Sonic and his friends are out tracking down the Chaos Emeralds, they are flung into a dimensional portal, and each of Sonic’s companions are then trapped, awaiting rescue. And, before too long, Sonic discovers that Knuckles too has been trapped in one of the same prisons, an act that happens outside of this adventure in the animated short Sonic Frontiers Prologue. While rescuing them is easy enough, it takes its toll on Sonic, infusing him with a mysterious dark energy. 

The story that follows is largely bland for quite some time. While there are some nice callouts to previous games and even the comic books, most of it annoyingly repeats in the steps needed to progress it. However, it’s not until another character becomes central to the story that it even then begins to pick up. It eventually gets to a point where it’s pretty damn interesting, but as this comes within mere hours of finally completing this 20-25 hour adventure, that’s a lot of mediocre storytelling to endure until it finally pays off. 

While everything is voiced, with much of the standard set of actors returning to their roles, I wasn’t sold on Roger Craig Smith’s more grown-up take on Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic has been a character I’ve never really enjoyed hearing until later entries with much of Smith’s vocals being decent to sometimes really good. Here, however; I honestly don’t care for the new direction as I find it does not suit the character whatsoever. 

The biggest issue with progressing its story is the method used to do so. While the game takes place across five zones, three of these play host to one of Sonic’s companions. The first area is Amy, then Knuckles, and then finally Tails. As you track them down, you’ll need to procure memory tokens to then interact with them further. These tokens are rewarded almost everywhere, from completing puzzles to fishing, to simply finding them on grind rails and in the air. 

Where this gets frustrating is you often will end one such interaction with one of them and your next objective, and even the one after that, is to literally talk to them again, but this time on the other side of the map. While you’ll eventually unlock fast travel markers and special grind rails that aid in traversing the map quicker, Sonic’s speed when exploring these open areas on foot is painfully slow, even when you are doing everything you can to boost him faster. 

As you explore each of these locations, you’ll encounter small creatures called Kocos. By taking these lost creatures to an Elder Koco, he will grant you the ability to level up Sonic’s speed as well as his ring capacity. These Kocos are everywhere but due to them often being the same color as most locations, they are sometimes incredibly hard to make out from the environment. Still, leveling up Sonic’s speed never felt like I was making any progress. I went from level 28 to 56 all at once, due to taking in a half-hour of fishing, and if I was even a pixel faster I wouldn’t know as it didn’t feel like anything had changed. For as fast as Sonic should be, exploring this open world with him feels uncharacteristically sluggish. 

The use of Sonic’s speed is also inconsistent. When zipping around camera-locked spirals or being propelled by a spring pad, Sonic will often run a short distance and then stop. The game expects you to keep running in these instances, but you are rarely given the instruction that you should. Hell, most of the time you cannot even see what is ahead of you due to the camera not facing where you’d want it to go or that most platform assets haven’t even loaded in. The pop-in in this game is astronomical. 

To help get around and navigate each zone, Sonic will track down special markers that help reveal parts of the map. You’ll do this by performing small bite-size challenges such as performing a game of skip-rope, to spin dashing a ball into a few goals, to assembling a Tetris puzzle in a certain order. Your mileage will vary on your enjoyment of these, but it sure beats having to climb some sort of tower to reveal more of a map. And, with how the game handles the towers it does have, consider yourself very lucky. 

While much of your exploration will be fully 3D, there are moments where the camera will shift to a 2.5D locked camera or it will lock onto something that it thinks you want to explore and it is always an awkward transition, which is why automatically running blindly doesn’t always pay off. It’s fine if it's via a spring pad or a grind rail as it will aid in leaving that perspective just fine, but it still feels off every time the game did it. Another annoyance is uncovering a speed booster by accident and it sends you on a path in the wrong direction, or a grind rail that you think is where you need to go but then it too places you farther away from your intended goal. This happens so often and usually against your will. I would often assume the grind rail that is heading in the direction I wanted to go would somehow prank me at the end and honestly, there are a few times it totally did just that. 

While most of this wouldn’t be too much of an issue, Sonic feels horrible to control. His jump and air dash feel floaty and you never feel confident in landing on a platform, especially as the camera angle you often have can make judging your distance to be much harder than it needs to be. This also doesn’t help that some platforms will see the camera shift around automatically on its own as you land on it, ruining any momentum you had and causing you to often fall. 

The open world is littered with grind rails, spring pads, platform loops, speed boosters, and more. Honestly, it feels like a cargo plane holding all of the game’s assets had to jettison its contents and dropped it all randomly across each map. Nothing feels like it should be there. It all feels like random nonsense meant to keep you occupied than feeling carefully planned and hand-crafted. There can be some enjoyment here, but more often than not, the way in which most of this is all set up feels hollow and unimpressive. 

When it comes to what does feel especially hand-crafted are the cyberspace levels that Sonic can explore as you discover them. However, there is a catch. While each cyberspace level has entirely rebuilt visuals, most of them have a design that is almost directly lifted from previous games in Sonic Unleased, Sonic Generations, Sonic Adventure 2, and more. These levels are great and are some of the best content the game has, but that is largely because much of their design worked in vastly better games before. 

Despite their influences, these stages are short, fun, and filled with various objectives to complete, such as how long it took to finish and whether or not you found all of the red coins. And, should you fail, restarting these stages takes almost no time at all. Completing these cyberspace distractions grants keys which in turn help unlock the Chaos Emeralds all around the map. It’s also worth pointing out that fishing can offer these keys as well. 

Once you have tracked down all the Chaos Emeralds, then Sonic can go all Super-Sonic on that stage’s boss. Now, while you are invincible, Sonic’s time as Super-Sonic is based on how many rings you have, so while you can level up Sonic’s Speed, you also want to invest in his ring capacity as well. These fights are all great and frankly, I wish there were more of them. The boss with the sword might be my favorite, but apart from some horrible checkpointing and a few QTE’s that can catch you off guard and feel drastically cheap, I still looked forward to each of these encounters as they are the best parts of the game by a mile. 

Apart from these massive bosses, you also have a wide assortment of mini-bosses that fill the map. Defeating these will reward you with gears, which is the currency needed to access the cyberspace stages. If you find these encounters too challenging, you can also earn gears from fishing, which can be taken advantage of should you track down the cyberspace portal that leads you to that activity and this is where you’ll spend the purple coins that you’ll find everywhere. Fishing is drastically easy and the rewards for doing so are so important that you can often earn more currency here for leveling up Sonic than what the activities in the open world grant you. 

These mini-bosses are called Guardians and they range dramatically in scale and abilities. Some leave a digital path for Sonic to race behind them, to a sand serpent that Sonic will hold on to for dear life as you attempt to defeat it. There is one that has Sonic grinding rails to eventually creating a platform for Sonic to bash into it that was pretty damn enjoyable. While not all of these are winners, I did enjoy quite a few of them as they were often short but sweet encounters where I wasn’t cursing at the camera or the awful controls. 

The map also plays host to a variety of standard bad guys, but apart from a select few, these often feel disappointing, especially a group of enemies that create a barrier around you, shadow-slicing Sonic from each side until you die. I also detested the giant blob that swallows you as you are rarely given any time to figure out how to actually defeat it before you suffocate. While the bosses and mini-bosses are all fantastic, I can’t think of a single standard foe that I enjoyed taking on. 

Now, combatting all these threats will vary on what skills you have unlocked and it’s incredibly easy to unlock everything by the time you wrap credits. As you perform attacks and defeat enemies, or find special green canisters around the map, Sonic will earn a skill currency that helps him unlock moves. These range from a rapid series of speed slashes that are incredibly useful, to a few projectiles or a speed kick that can come in handy. However, the biggest tool that Sonic has in his arsenal is the cyloop. 

The cyloop is something that you’ll be doing constantly. And, much like a few other attacks, you can eventually unlock a combo attack where this move is done with a single button. The cyloop has Sonic creating a loop around something. If you do this around an enemy, it damages them. If you do this just anywhere, rings will erupt from the ground. This is also how you’ll interact with a host of glowing spots on the map to just simply cylooping around everything you encounter. The cyloop is as simple as holding down a button and running around it. You can often damage multiple foes if the loop is big enough, but it does have a limit to how big it can be. 

While there are can be a ton of frustration here, especially the entirety of the whole fourth zone, there are some moments where I was grinning from ear to ear. Upon completion of the third zone, Sonic and Tails discover a special game type that returns to Sonic after some time. It’s a shame you only get to do this once, that I know of, but it was honestly something I wish had been present far more often. Hell, I’d take it as something you could select from the menu after beating the game, but that doesn’t seem to be an option. 

When Sonic Frontiers was first shown off, many were not too taken with the game’s visuals, and honestly, they are incredibly disappointing, to a point. The cyberspace levels are absolutely perfect and it’s a shame the open world wasn’t a combination of those styles. Hell, I dream of a Sonic Frontiers sequel that has a Genshin Impact art style, as the more realistic take here simply doesn’t cut it, especially with the vast amount of pop-in and texture load-in. The character models themselves are beyond basic and while the bosses themselves all look great, the game as a whole is just vastly bland and uninteresting. 

It’s easy to see the potential here for an open-world Sonic game, but so much of what is here feels like nothing more than a test bed, a generic open playground to gauge interest in ideas and features of what comes next. Nothing here feels like a finished game in almost any context. The story eventually delivers, and so do its few boss encounters, but these are just small moments in a very bland and very big world. I’ve really wanted Sonic to have his moment, the Mario Odyssey of Sonic games, but Frontiers merely gives us a glimpse of what that may be because as it is right now, this just doesn’t deliver.

Developer - Sonic Team. Publisher - SEGA. Released - November 8th, 2022. Available On - Xbox One/Series X/S, PS4/PS5, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows. Rated - (E 10+) Fantasy Violence. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - Sonic Frontiers was purchased for review.