Sonic Frontiers

Sonic Frontiers tried so hard to bring new elements to the game that it ended up forgetting to put more of the personality of its own franchise. However, they managed to create a dynamic, captivating and fast game - as good as any other in the Sonic franchise. It's the kind of game where time passes like lightning, blue lightning.

Sonic takes Nintendo Switch to the limit with a strange open world in its own way, very funny and entertaining to play. It draws inspiration from some of the best open world games to please all kinds of gamers.

Sonic Frontiers has a lot of little flaws, but its strengths are great enough that it's hard to harp on them too much. The game's Open Zones are fun to explore, the Cyber Space levels are well-crafted, and the audio is excellent. Sonic Team has clearly put a lot of thought and care into crafting this new direction for the series, and the results are impressive. I truly hope Sega takes the elements that work in Sonic Frontiers and fine-tunes them for the next entry in the series. The somewhat repetitive gameplay loop is Frontiers' biggest issue, but most Sonic fans will probably be able to overlook it thanks to everything the game does right. Sonic the Hedgehog was in desperate need of a game like this, and it feels great to say that Sonic Team (mostly) pulled it off. The franchise's future is looking brighter than it has in a long time.

This game has a lot of rough edges and things that on paper shouldn’t work, but it completely sucked me in anyway. Its flaws mean I could understand anyone who bounces off of it, but I think even for those who don’t get into it the way I did, you have to at least respect the effort here. It tries something very new for the series, and if this is how good the first attempt at this style went, I can’t wait to see what comes next. What a weird thing to feel about 3D Sonic.

The fun new "open-zone" exploration and throwbacks to retro Sonic games make this the best Sonic game in a long time. However, there are some bad visuals on Switch and gameplay can get repetitive.

“Sonic Frontiers” is an amalgamation of the franchise’s past iconic mechanics that tries to reinvent itself in a new direction. It’s an admirable attempt, but I’m not entirely sure what it wants to be. However, longtime Sonic fans may want check out “Frontiers,” despite its bizarre features, to recapture some zen nostalgia.

Sonic Frontiers on Switch is visually downgraded compared to other platforms, but I can still recommend it to anyone looking to experience Sonic's newest outing on the go. Having now played through it on PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Steam Deck, Sonic Frontiers remains one of the most fun games of the year with a superlative soundtrack. 

The story is surprisingly engaging for long time fans even if the writing is incredibly awkward at times. Combat especially with larger enemies is engaging even if it could use some basic quality of life changes. Sonic Frontiers has a lot of issues that it is constantly tripping over, but I cannot emphasize enough that I hope the series continues in this direction. For all its rough edges, this is still probably the most fun I’ve had playing 3D Sonic since 1999.

Sonic Frontiers is a brave experiment that struggles to express its intentions while still committing many of its series' 3D sins. But if you're able to commit to learning its idiosyncrasies, you'll discover a fun, addictive journey unlike any in Sonic's past. [Issue #64 – March/April 2023, p. 71]

Sonic Frontiers is a bold new move for our favourite hedgehog. The open worlds give a sense of freedom and there is a lot to do. Unfortunately the most of it is the mandatory collecting of a lot of stuff to progress through the game. The controls feel good, but at higher speeds they won't always work and the camera is a total disaster. This makes the game way less enjoyable than it should be.

Sonic Frontiers can't offer any outstanding visuals, but some of the levels give a strong nostalgic vibes, while open world segments are filled with some great boss fights and nice puzzles. Frontiers is definitely better than anything Sonic Team has done in the past 10 years time, so it is a step in the right direction at the very least.

Sonic Frontiers takes a huge gamble on changing up its entire gameplay presentation and the open-zone approach mostly works. It’s a blast running around in these open zones discovering all there is to offer. There’s also plenty of variety in the side quests and minigames, although you won’t truly love the throwbacks unless you’re a long-time Sonic player. That said, Sonic Frontiers suffers from being glitchy, where you run into graphical issues at nearly every section. It also suffers from major pop-in issues, with noticeably fuzzy visuals and downgraded graphics from other hardware counterparts. It’s also a weird game, even by Sonic standards. There’s still a lot of fun to be had in Sonic Frontiers and I recommend checking it out.

Sonic is back in a mixed bag of mixed bags, though the positives outweigh the negatives for the most part. Combat can be engaging, depending on the enemy, and zooming across open zones takes a while to get old. Still, if you’re looking for infallible performance, the Switch version might not be the best port of call.

The Sonic the Hedgehog series has never been one too timid to try out something new and while those experiments have varied wildly in quality over the years between the excellence of Generations and Colours to the miserable Sonic ’06 and Boom, you can chalk Sonic Frontiers up in the former group. Rough around the edges and disappointing in more than one area but an exciting new direction for SEGA’s blue mascot nonetheless, one that Sonic Team would be smart to stick with and refine and explore further.

Sonic Frontiers manages to blend the speedster’s gameplay with an open-world setting, but it does so in a rather unrefined way. There’s fun to be found in Frontiers’ most exciting moments, but the overall package is lacking polish.

Sonic Frontiers takes many steps in the right direction for Sonic games. Still, its biggest fault is that it tries to do so much, with how well it accomplishes everything varying greatly between interesting and frustrating. Longtime Sonic comics writer Ian Flynn penned parts of the story, and its narrative and music are some of the game's highlights worth mentioning. The moments that work in Sonic Frontiers can be fun and captivating, but as soon as players start to feel a groove, they're thrown into something different, changing what they're doing and creating a choppy flow to progression. The foundation for a consistent experience in the next 3D Sonic game is here, but Sonic Frontiers feels more like a test than a proper renaissance for the series quite yet.

Sonic Frontiers is a game that is made up of a thousand different interesting ideas, all threaded together in a way that should create something good. But for all it manages to accomplish and for all the great ideas that lurch just beyond the horizon, Sonic Frontiers skids to a halt as it sprints to the finish line. The result is a fragmented and sometimes disjointed mess. Paired with its performance issues, it makes this a tough game to recommend, even if it has pockets of truly enjoyable gameplay that make me excited to see what the developers will come up with next.

Sonic Frontiers is such a difficult game to judge, and that challenge is only compounded when you add in the limitations of the Switch hardware. It’s a game that does so many things right and is an exciting new direction for the blue blur, but I’ve never had so many dramatic swings of my enjoyment of a game throughout its playtime. There are some ecstatic highs to be had throughout the game, but frequent minor niggles and the occasional idea that doesn’t land hold it back from greatness. Combine that with the serious drawbacks of the weaker Switch hardware which undeniably hamper the experience and you have a game that, whilst having a ton of fun to offer, will require you to overlook a heap of mitigating quibbles to get there.

Sonic Frontiers deserves credit for being a true departure from previous series installments. The open-zone structure is a great concept that frees the developers up to experiment with Sonic’s speed and abilities in new ways. Where the game comes up short is in its stale rehashing of classic stages, a control setup that could stand to be simplified, and performance woes that suck players out of the gameplay experience. With plenty of DLC and patches on the way, hopefully Frontiers can become a better version of what came out at launch. In the interim, it’s a buggy affair that entertains and frustrates in equal measures.

To be fair, during the more traditional gameplay sections, the game performs mostly fine. But seeing as you spend the vast majority of your time here wandering through a hideous open world, the performance is an issue. If you can put up with that thanks to a deep and abiding love of all things Sonic, I wouldn’t fault you – but if you take one look at this ugly mess and decide you don’t want any part of it, I wouldn’t blame you for that either.