Sonic Frontiers

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.