Sonic Frontiers Review: A brave new frontier that needs time to grow

Sonic the Hedgehog is a curious series. One moment it’s at the top of its game crafting some of the finest fast paced platform games ever made. The next it’s an outright joke, a text-book definition of a series well past its prime with some of the buggiest ill designed games ever published.

For every Generations, a Sonic 06. For every Sonic 2, a Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric. While it used to be that picking up a Sonic game was a guaranteed good time, now it’s a total crap shot of whether the game will be great or a total train wreck.

But if there is one thing about Sonic you have to give him credit for, it’s his ability to reinvent himself. When games started going 3D, we got the Adventure games. When the Adventure games started to go downhill, we got the Boost formula games. And with the Boost formula games beginning to stagnate with Sonic Forces, we now have yet another reinvention with Sonic Frontiers.

Promised to be the next chapter of the series, Sonic Frontiers takes the series in a new direction by being the very first open world Sonic game. Ditching the linear hallway levels of the Boost games in favour of large open levels rife with exploration. Well, sort of but we’ll get to that.

But given the series track record it’s hard to say whether it will be any good or not. I mean the Sonic Boom games were also a new direction for the series and we all know how well those turned out.

The initial marketing for Frontiers didn’t exactly boost confidence for it either. The initial reveal was bad. Really, really bad. It made the game look so boring and empty, and the technical issues didn’t help matters either. Later trailers and showcases would be much better though and did help the game look a great deal better, but the initial skepticism of the first reveal still remains.

But that was then, and this is now. The game is out, I've played it and can now judge it for myself. And I can safely say that the game is good. Not great, it has some serious drawbacks that hold it back, but I still came away enjoying it and I do think it is a step up from recent 3D outings.

The most immediate improvement is with the writing. Hiring Ian Flynn, the guy who’s been writing for Sonic the Hedgehog comic books since 2006, was the best decision sonic Team could have made. While Flynn is far from flawless, he knows this world and its characters well.

This becomes apparent when playing the game as Sonic Frontiers references and builds off past events. The story doesn’t just exist in a vacuum where everything returns to normal at the end, characters change and actually develop as the game progresses. Resulting in much richer character writing as a result.

The actual plot involves Sonic and co traveling to the Star Fall Islands after the Chaos Emeralds are drawn to them. The Islands were home to the Ancients, a mysterious race that vanished thousands of years ago with the Islands being dotted with ruins of their lost civilization. Upon arriving Sonics friends are trapped in Cyber Space and Sonic must rescue them by defeating the Islands guardians, the Titans.

I like the mystery that’s built up with the islands and the ancients. And while the reveal of the truth behind it does lead to some retcons that create plot holes for the series continuity, I do appreciate the attempt to expand on the series lore.

Another addition I liked was the character, Sage. I know, Sonic has too many characters already, but Sage is one of the best additions to the series since Blaze the Cat. She’s an artificial intelligence made by Eggman who starts out as an emotionless robot, well sort of but it’s close enough, and she slowly develops emotions as she watches Sonic on his adventure.

A tried and tested story, but it’s done well. I especially like the father daughter relationship she develops with Eggman, it gave both a lot more depth. My only issue is that a lot of the development is found in optional Memo’s that can only be gotten through a side activity. They could have shown more in the main story.

I never thought I’d say this about a modern Sonic game, but I liked the story here. It does still fall into the same traps as previous games though. While it has decent emotional moments, they do feel a little too cliché and melodramatic. I like that they’re taking the plot more seriously, but they haven’t found that sweet spot between being too serious and too comical yet.

A lot of the call-backs to past games can also come off as a bit fan servicey. Some of it feels like it’s brought up just for the sake of it and others only highlight the contradictions to the lore that Frontiers creates.

My biggest issue is with the main villain. It’s one of the lamest in the entire series. I won’t spoil exactly what it is, but they try to do a Kirby thing with it and I don’t think it’s handled particularly well. They did something similar with Dark Gaia in Unleashed but at least he was built up properly and had some interesting lore behind him. The villain here comes out of nowhere and they don’t explain what its deal is.

I still enjoyed the story overall. At the very least it puts these characters in a more interesting position and doesn’t reset everything to the status quo at the end. I’m interested in seeing where they can take them in the future.

Moving on to the gameplay, I said Sonic Frontiers was an open world game, but that’s not entirely accurate. Most open world games I’ve played usually take place in a singular location. One massive map broken into sub areas that you're free to explore. Sonic Frontiers meanwhile is broken up into 4 different islands that act as its own map.

You can’t travel Island to Island without picking them from a menu. I’ve heard people compare the game to Breath of the Wild, but I don’t agree with that comparison. Artistically both are similar, but in terms of structure it’s much closer to Super Mario Odyssey.

Like Mario Odyssey it’s broken into different levels, but each level is massive and open to exploration. You’re still free to run around each island at your own pace finding collectables along the way, but there is a linear progression to finishing each island by talking to characters and completing missions.

The main goal in each island is to find all the Chaos Emeralds and defeat the island’s Guardian. In order to get the Chaos Emeralds, you’ll need to find the vaults containing them. But the vaults need to be unlocked with keys. You get the keys by completing cyber space levels, which are more traditionally designed Sonic stages. But to unlock those levels you need to find gears which drop from defeated sub bosses.

So you beat the sub bosses to get the gears, you use the gears to unlock cyber space levels, you beat those to get the keys to unlock the vaults to get the Emeralds. I know that sounds like a lot, but it never feels that way. Everything flows very neatly into one another. You’ll usually run into one of these while exploring the island, anyway, meaning you’ll very rarely if ever need to hunt for them.

Mind you, this only covers some of the Emeralds. The rest you’ll get as part of the story by talking to Sonic’s friends. Sometimes it’s just a conversation to advance the story, other times you’ll have to do a brief mission or minigame which is what rewards you with the Emerald.

The missions aren’t too difficult. The only one I had an issue with was the sky diving over the bridge mission due to how tight the time limit was. I wouldn’t say these missions were great, but they weren’t too long and at least offered some variation to the gameplay.

Talking to Sonic’s friends isn’t as simple as going up to them. Since they’re trapped in cyber space, you’ll need to find memory tokens in order to speak to them. These memory tokens are scattered all over the islands, each one being collected by doing a brief platforming challenge puzzle.

You’ll also need these to access the side stories. These aren’t mandatory, but they give a little bit more information on the island and show more character interactions. You’ll want to go for these if you want to get the most out of the story.

In between collecting the memory tokens and everything else you need to collect you’ll find things that can upgrade Sonics abilities. You can find these called Koco’s that are randomly scattered around which can help boost Sonics max speed and ring count, as well as special berries to boost Sonics strength and defence.

You need to take these to Elder Koco’s to get the upgrades. There are 2 of them which boost different stats, but I don’t know why they had 2 of these. Just have the one elder that does everything. Just seems more convenient that way.

Aside from finding collectables, you can also do these challenges dotted around each level. Doing these will fill out your map, making navigation much easier. I don’t really like having to unlock the map in games, I think that should be available from the start, but I get why they do this. It’s to emphasize exploration and to prevent the game from feeling like you're just running from navigation point to navigation point.

That’s basically how the game goes. You run around levels, finding collectibles for upgrades or progression, talk to your friends while doing challenges, platforming sections and battling enemies and sub bosses along the way.

The gameplay loop can get a little repetitive, but there’s enough variety in everything you do that offset this. It helps that everything moves along at a brisk pace. I mean it’s Sonic the Hedgehog I wouldn’t expect anything less. You don’t spend too much time on any given task. At worst, you’ll spend 2 minutes on a sub-boss or platforming challenge. Nothing drags which helps keep the action going.

Things flow very nicely into one another. You’ll grab a collectible then find a challenge a short while later then grab another collectable. There’s never a dull moment.

It helps that the game gives you enough wiggle room with the collectables. You’ll sometimes find buried treasure which can contain memory tokens, keys or gears. You can also get a bunch of keys by completing different objectives in the cyber space levels, meaning you don’t need to beat them all to get enough keys.

I’m glad the game gives some wiggle room for these, though I do find that finding these in the wild can make certain elements feel unnecessary. Why bother with the sub bosses when you can just find them as treasure? Even regular enemies drop them sometimes. I like the extra flexibility; I just wish it was a little more balanced.

You don’t even need to get everything you need in normal gameplay. You can find portals that take you to a fishing minigame with Big where you can get everything you need. Yes, you can beat the game by fishing if you so wish. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or the best thing about the game.

The kicker, the fishing is actually fun. It's super simple, but it makes for a nice break from the action. You need tokens to play it, but those are everywhere so you shouldn’t need to worry about that. The game will even just give you them through a Starfall event, which is a night-time thing where you pick up star bits and play a slot machine, this part of the game was weird. I didn’t get it.

Also, this is where you get the Egg memos. Which means that if want the most out of the story you need to fish. It's like Sonic Adventure, except the fishing doesn’t suck.

The main gameplay, the stuff you’ll be doing for the bulk of the game, is done very well. Sonic has a decent sense of speed in his movements and the control is solid enough to make platforming enjoyable. Exploration is consistently rewarding with tons of collectables to find and secrets to uncover.

Even the combat was fun. I never thought I would enjoy the combat in a Sonic game. It does devolve into a lot of button mashing, but it’s also very flashy and there’s a lot of fun moves to unlock.

The best fights are easily the sub-bosses. Some of them aren’t too great, The Shark is basically just one long quick time event, but for the most part I found them to be one of the best parts of the game. Testing your combat skills as well as your platforming ones, as a lot of them will require some platforming/rail grinding to get a hit in.

I get a lot of Shadow of the Colossus vibes from some of these guys. Very big and imposing. There’s a healthy variety of them too, even if some get repeated late game.

Normal enemy encounters are pretty repetitive though. There’s not a lot of variety in them at all, and the only thing that makes later fights more challenging is that they take more hits to kill. Thankfully these are easy to ignore. I ended up running past most of these.

In terms of move set, Sonic has what you would expect at this point. You have the homing attack, which is now on a separate button so you don’t use it accidentally, a double jump and the boost. All stuff he’s had in the previous games, but Frontiers adds a bunch of new moves.

The biggest one is the cy-loop. This lets Sonic leave a trail of energy behind him when he runs, and by creating a circle with it he can create bursts of wind to stun enemies, dig up rings or activate ancient tech. You’ll be using this a lot throughout the game, and it makes for a nice addition to Sonic’s arsenal. Pro-tip, try making an infinity symbol with it as it gives you an infinite boost for a time.

You also have a good number of combat maneuvers you can use, though you will need to unlock these through the skill tree. Personally, I don’t see the point in the skill tree. None of the moves you get are particularly powerful so there’s no sense of progression, and you’ll likely unlock everything by the end of the second island anyway so what’s the point. I’d rather they just be unlocked from the start.

So the core gameplay is solid. Just being able to roam around these levels was a nice breath of fresh air after years of the hallway like levels of the boost formula. It’s a level of freedom we haven’t seen from this series yet. In a way it reminds me a lot of the hub areas from Sonic Adventure just greatly expanded upon.

That said I do have an issue with the level designs lack of cohesion. While there are plenty of platforming challenges to partake in, they all take place on floating platforms above the islands themselves.

Rather than use the unique structure and design of each island to craft unique and interesting platforming challenges, instead most of it is comprised of random floating platforms and rails scattered around with little rhyme or purpose.

It makes the islands themselves feel superfluous. You could switch the platforms around and nobody would notice. It makes the level design feel haphazardly put together.

You do get the occasional platforming challenges on old temple ruins or an Eggman base or something that make them feel more connected to the levels, but these are infrequent and still rely on a lot of the same floating platforms you normally see.

The islands themselves are already lacking in terms of personality, but the disconnected platforming challenges don’t help. Compare this to Super Mario Odyssey which used the unique designs of each world to make each platforming challenge and level feel distinct, and it doesn’t compare. I still remember the levels in Odyssey even after not playing it in years. I just beat Frontiers and I couldn’t tell you a thing about them.

But that isn’t to say the platforming challenges are bad because they aren’t. I just wish they took more advantage of the level settings and design. That more open design is still rife with exploration. You’ll find collectables and secrets all over the place. It feels like every time you look round a corner there’s something new to find. Making exploration consistently rewarding.

But if you clamour for more traditional Sonic gameplay, the cyber space levels are you. Unfortunately, these are also the worst part of the game.

It isn’t so much the levels themselves, it’s more so with how Sonic controls. The jumping somehow manages to feel too slippery and too stiff at the same time. Combine that with movement that is a little too precise and you have a game that doesn't feel the best to play.

While this is noticeable in the open world sections, it isn’t anything you can’t adjust to and the open nature of the levels does mitigate it somewhat. In the cyber space levels the controls are simply far too precise for the more constrained level design. It never feels like I have complete control during these sections.

The cyber space levels were clearly not designed for these controls. I know this, because I’ve played them all before several years ago. See, the thing with the cyber space levels is they aren’t brand new. They are, in fact, reskinned versions of classic Sonic stages from the Boost and Adventure era with very slight changes to the layouts.

Now if you haven’t played these stages you probably won’t notice. But I have, multiple times, and I could recognize it right away. You can reskin Metal Harbour into Chemical Plant, but I still know it’s Metal Harbour. I have played that level dozens of times, I know it when I see it.

It honestly just feels lazy. They try to justify it by saying the levels are recreated from Sonic’s memories, which fair play to them for attempting an explanation, but that’s still no excuse. Generations also remade levels, but they still changed or added stuff.

And if you’re going to go this route, why even try to hide that the levels are repeats. Don’t bother with the reskins, just recreate the levels. At least then I wouldn’t have to keep looking at Green Hill, Chemical Plant, Sky Sanctuary and Speed Highway all the time. I was already getting sick of Green Hill, now I never want to see it again.

But ignoring the laziness of rehashing old levels, the biggest problem is that you’re playing these old stages with controls and physics that were not designed for them. Sonic is a series built on momentum-based platforming. Physics are a very important part of the series, get those wrong and the game suffers because of it.

The root cause of this is largely down to one factor. If you go back and play Sonic Adventure 2 and then play Unleashed, you’ll notice neither play like the other. They both had a different game feel that was crafted specifically to work within that game's level design.

The problem with Frontiers is that by choosing to use levels from both, they had to then jerry rig a control style that worked for both. Even though both eras design philosophies were vastly different. The Adventure levels weren’t designed to be boosted through, the Boost levels were never designed with Adventure’s more loose controls. By trying to make a control style that worked for both, it created one that worked for neither.

And this really gets into one of the core maladies of Sonic Frontiers. It is being billed as a new era of the franchise, and it certainly is to some degree. The new writers and more open design are indicators that they are trying something new. But they’re also so afraid of losing newer fans that they included design elements that go against what they’re trying to do.

Why does this game need a boost? Sure it lets me get to my destination faster, but it’s such an inelegant way of doing it. The older Sonic games were never about going super-fast all the time, it was all about momentum and earning that speed. It was about learning the ins and outs of the levels to get through them as fast as possible.

It wasn’t just about memorizing the level layouts either. It was about learning when the best time was to use a spin dash, how to use ramps and hills to not only build up speed but also using that speed to reach new areas in the levels.

There’s no sense of building up speed through momentum or the games physics engine, you’re either boosting through everything or slowly going through platforming sequences. The boost acts as a cudgel, a way to have speed without having a good physics engine or level design that allows you to build up that speed with skillful gameplay like the older games.

This approach may have worked with the more constricted design of the boost games, but it does not work here. It stymies any kind of player expression the game could have had otherwise. For as fun as the game is, there is a feeling while playing it that it could have been so much better if they weren’t shackled to the boost formula.

Take the switch to 2D for example. This was something the boost games did a lot, for God’s sake Generations based the entire game around it, and it worked there because of the hyper linear level design. In a 3D open world game like this, the switch to 2D just feels out of place.

In my opinion, Sonic Frontiers needed to be more like the Adventure games. Those games had a feel that was more fitting to what they’re trying to do here. They weren’t perfect, but that’s why you build on the formula, to improve on it.

But even if it did adhere more to Adventure’s style of gameplay, Frontiers still suffers from a lot of deep seated issues that have plagued 3D Sonic since the beginning. Namely the overabundance of on rails sequences where you have no control.

In an open world game like Frontiers, these sequences where you lose controls are counter-intuitive to the core design. You’ll be running through the level free as a bird one minute, then you’ll hit a dash pad and be forced into a scripted on-rail sequence that just feels there to show off. It’s spectacle over substance.

Speaking of spectacle, let’s talk about those titan boss fights. It’s an expectation that in 3D Sonic game has to end with a big flashy boss fight where you play as Super Sonic. Sonic Frontiers bucks this trend by having 4 of them.

And judging purely on a presentation level these are great. The music, the visuals, these boss fights go all out on making them as big and flashy as possible. It’s the closest thing the series has come to feeling like a Shonen Anime.

Mechanically though, these fights are just kind of there. They aren’t awful, but outside of the spectacle they aren’t all that different from regular combat. They’re just flashier and have a lot more quick-time events.

But for the most part I don’t mind the Titans, except the final boss. Where the game decides, for some reason, that it is now Ikaruga. Frontiers has a few sections where it changes genre, and they all suck. They’re either aggressively bland or just outright shit. The pinball section might be the worst pinball game in any Sonic game ever, yes even worse than Heroes. I did not think they could out bad Heroes pinball but here we are.

What makes the final boss so bad, aside from it being a completely different gameplay style, is you don’t even get to fight the bloody thing unless you play on hard difficulty. If you play on normal difficulty all you get is a quick time event. It’s a complete anti-climax.

I don’t even know why they bothered with this. You can switch difficulties at any point in the menu, so there’s no stopping you from playing the game on normal, getting to the finale and switching the difficulty to hard. What’s the point of locking the final boss to difficulty? It makes no sense.

And then there are the technical aspects of the game. This is the part of the game most of us were worried about, and while it isn’t as bad as we feared, it’s also not great either. The amount of pop-in you will encounter in this game is astounding. It is no exaggeration to say that you will encounter pop-in every 2 minutes while playing it.

Now I can handle a little pop-in, but what makes it so bad in Frontiers is that it directly affects gameplay. In a game all about exploration, it makes it way harder to explore when you can’t see anything until you are right next to it.

To be fair, this only affected the platforms and grind rails. The actual island geometry did not suffer from pop-in issues. But considering the platforms are where the majority of the collectibles are located, it makes collecting everything a bigger hassle than it should be.

Then there are the weird moments where the physics bug out. There were more than a few moments where I went flying after boost for seemingly no reason. I honestly didn’t mind this much though. I just thought it was funny.

At the very least the framerate was stable. The pop-in may be obnoxious but at least everything ran smoothly. At least on the Xbox version, which is the one I played. I can’t speak for the other versions, though I have heard the Switch version is not great. I can’t speak about it personally since I haven’t played it myself, but to be safe I wouldn’t recommend that one.

Sonic Frontiers is a tricky game to recommend in the first place. I had fun with the game, but I also acknowledged that it is a deeply flawed experience. I like the game more for its potential and what it could be rather than what it is. I love the idea of an open world Sonic game, and this is a good first attempt, but it’s a concept that needs more time to properly develop.

There are still things worth commending the game for. The writing is the best it’s been in a very long time, exploration was fun and consistently rewarding, and the boss fights may be pure spectacle, but it is good spectacle at least.

Oh, and the music is pheromonal. No surprise given the series pedigree. No joke, I played through the cyber space levels just because the music in them is so good. And don’t get me started on the boss themes, easily among the best vocal tracks in the series.

Sonic Frontiers isn’t a grand return to form, but I think it’s a solid game that proves the series still has a lot of potential. And they are looking to improve on it. As I was writing this review, they announced some DLC content like more levels, story, and even new playable characters.

The game will get better over time, but as it stands now, I wouldn’t recommend it at full price. It’s a good game, but I say you’re better off waiting for a sale before picking it up.

But if this is the new Frontier Sonic is heading in, I’m excited. I’ve always wanted a game that emulated the intro to Sonic CD. I always felt that was the best visual representation of Sonic as a character, more so than any other media since. If they can make a game that emulates that movement, we could have the best Sonic game of all time.

But until then, Sonic Frontiers is a decent step in the right direction. I only hope Sega expands upon the concept and doesn’t abandon it like they did with Lost World, or Boom, or the storybook games, or Sonic R, or Battle. Sega does this a lot, let’s hope against hope this time they don’t.