Sonic Frontiers
Sonic Frontiers makes its open-world debut with grace. However, there are some old habits that remain.
Sonic Frontiers has the Sonic Adventure 3 game you’ve been waiting for. Frontiers, the first fresh breath in the series in years, is a celebration and tribute to Sonic’s spirit and soul.
Frontiers, with its lush environments and tight 3D platforming and distinctive Sonic charm, is Sega’s bravest step into a new era. Sega should not look back. Frontiers’ new design philosophy is hampered by its inability to look forward. It cannot escape Sonic’s needless dependence on 2D stages.
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Sonic Frontiers feels modern-day Dreamcast when it’s at its best. It’s hard to describe. It’s nostalgia mixed with innovation. It’s the excitement of Shenmue, but also the safety of returning to Sonic Adventure.
It’s a Dreamcast-style game. What it lacks in polish it makes up in ambition. Frontiers opens with Sonic, Amy and Tails landing on a mysterious, partially digitalized island. It’s up you to unravel the mystery. We know as much as Sonic does and have nothing but open fields to explore, for the first time in Sonic games. It’s a wonderful world, if you’re okay with a lot of texture pop-ins from last-gen.
There is very little information to guide you. After completing a brief tutorial and a minimap, you can access the entire island. You can unlock different sections of the map by solving the puzzles scattered around the globe. However, you can just run around and play with the new mechanics that the game encourages.
You’ll then run into your first miniboss and get your sex kicked. Then, get it kicked yet again. These minibosses can be used to give you extra loot that you can find elsewhere. They’re also extremely fun and provide some of the most memorable Starfall Islands experiences. You won’t be able to tell them how to get down them. Instead, the game will just give you tools and leave you to solve it. You can either brute force your way through them right away, or you can run off to level up, but taking them down will be so satisfying, you’ll forget that they’re there mainly to grind for loot. When you are climbing up a robot 200ft high to find its weak points, it’s difficult to pay attention to how many keys it takes to unlock the Chaos Emerald.
This is where the RPG-style skill tree shines. You can do everything, including exploring the map and pulling off tricks in air. Also, taking down enemies will give you points which you can use for unlocking and upgrading new combat moves. These are completely outlandish and always fun to do in battle. It’s amazing how easy it is to run around the island.
Frontiers isn’t feeling fresh and coherent despite all of this. The Cyber Space levels are a frustrating relic from older Sonic games. They are a boring, unimaginative and predictable derivative of older Sonic games. The best stages are short and feel like quick-time events. The longest stages are approximately three minutes long and require precision that Cyber Space controls are incapable of. Cyber Space is a place where you can try new strategies and fail, but it makes you regret the fact that you must get an S rank to advance and complete the stage with 30-something Rings.
Cyber Space makes it clear that there are a lot of collectables in this game. All of the cutscenes, as well as collecting Emeralds and unlocking Cyber Space levels, all depend on some type of collectable. Cyber Space makes it all fun, whereas the open zone helps you forget.
The game is not safe in this area. The story is funny, heartwarming, and wonderful. The dialogue is too weak. Amy, once the life and soul of the party is now feeling dull and without much to share. I’ll take Adventure 2 cheese over any other kind of cheese – the supporting cast could use some personality. Sage, the newest addition to the cast, does a good job making up for it, but it is a worrying sign Sonic’s charming dialogue from the 2000s has been pushed aside.
Sonic Frontiers is a simple, charming company that wants to give us some playgrounds to play in. There’s not much to stop you from doing what you love, especially considering that the fishing stages can be used (mostly) to skip Cyber Space levels. You can only stop Frontiers from doing what it does best, which is going fast.
The third island is the most affected by this problem, as it is comprised of smaller islets. It was difficult to find your way from one sub-island of the map to the next because every area looked the same. My play time in this area consisted of endlessly running around looking for bridges and falling into lava pits I didn’t know existed. It was very satisfying to find a way to get to a location on other maps, especially the second island. It was frustrating and slow on the third. This is not the kind of experience you want in an open-world video game, especially when its main gimmick involves going fast.
It’s so easy to forget the worst parts of the game and move on to the fun stuff. Frontiers is a great game. After tearing my hair out trying find the last Chaos Emerald island 3, island four provided me with the best platforming experience since Sonic CD. Frontiers is an enjoyable ride, but it’s also a bumpy ride.
Sonic Frontiers is ultimately about that. It’s not Mario Galaxy or Breath of the Wild. It is its own experiment with the genre and very successful. The game has so much to offer – new combat, RPG stats and open zones, fishing, collectables and puzzles. It all works. Sonic Team should feel confident that these parts are sufficient to carry a game, not just wriggling in a poor 2D Sonic.
While there are some teething problems and a reluctance of the past being let go, it’s a fun Sonic game with a charming tale told in the most competent manner we’ve ever seen. Sonic may not yet be in the big leagues, but he is catching up. Frontiers, which is a remake of Sonic Adventure from 1999, could give the series a fresh lease of life. Sega must abandon the old ways and allow it to happen.
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