Sonic Frontiers: A Sense Of Direction

Sega has spent the better part of the last two decades trying to figure out what to do with Sonic. Sure, there have been successes here and there, with games like Sonic Generations, Sonic Mania, and some of the GBA and DS games bucking trends, but there have been many more failures than successes, particularly in 3D. Some of that is due to simply making bad games, but a lot of it comes down to the nature of Sonic himself. Sonic’s whole thing is that he goes fast. That’s fine in concept, but his games are also platformers, and it turns out that trying to mix precise platforming with extreme speed is really hard. Even the 2D Sonic games struggled with this, and in 3D, it’s never quite worked.

I wish I could say Sonic Frontiers solves this, but it really doesn’t. While far from the worst offender in the series, Sonic far too frequently feels floaty and hard to control. You’ll find yourself running into things in the environment, going the wrong direction, and having a hard time simply getting your character where he wants to go. He doesn’t feel awful, but he still doesn’t feel very good. It’s a fundamental flaw which limits how good this game can be. If you can overlook a merely okay feeling game, though, Sonic Frontiers does a ton right and puts Sonic on an interesting path forward. There are some other flaws as well, but for the first time in a long time, it feels like Sega may be onto something with the blue blur.

A New Course

Things get started when Sonic and his friends are out searching for the Chaos Emeralds once again, and their plane goes down. After a crash, Sonic finds himself alone on a massive island needing to find his friends. It turns out, they’re around, but trapped between the real world and Cyberspace, in need of Sonic’s help to break free. While the story here won’t grab anyone who isn’t already a Sonic fan, it’s serviceable, though I found a few of the voices jarring. Roger Craig Smith, in particular, is back in the role of Sonic but sounds quite different, almost more mature in a way that I don’t think suits the character particularly well. I got used to it, but it’s still not my preferred way for Sonic to sound.

Once you start exploring the Starfall Islands, though, you’ll find an adventure that feels quite different from any other Sonic games. While not fully connected, you’ll spend Sonic Frontiers exploring five massive islands filled with various challenges to unlock and explore. These function like somewhat small open worlds with everything connected within them.

While Sonic Frontiers changes things up a bit in later islands, the formula for the first few is pretty much the same. You’ll show up on an island and find one of your friends trapped. You’ll then have to seek out memory shards to help them remember who they are. These memories are littered around the island, mostly at the end of various grind rails and ramps though you’ll also get them by defeating enemies, using a new Cyloop move that allows you to encircle an enemy or area with energy, doing minor puzzles to uncover the map, and fighting mini-bosses.

Finding Your Way

As you explore each island, you’ll eventually find a variety of smaller levels you can venture into. These levels are essentially more traditional Sonic levels. Some are in 2D while others are in 3D, but each challenges you to get to the end, but also provides other challenges you can work towards, like hitting a great time, or finding five red coins hidden throughout the level. For each goal, you accomplish, you’ll get a key, and with enough of these keys, you can unlock a Chaos Emerald. Get all the Chaos Emeralds on an island, and you can challenge the boss.

Once you get used to Sonic not feeling great, the loop here actually becomes quite engaging. Practically everywhere you look, there’s something to do, and some of the individual levels are really well-designed. I found myself replaying them again and again, trying to accomplish every goal. That you can restart them in a matter of seconds helps because it doesn’t make failure feel too punishing. In just a couple of minutes, you can try four or five different things, and a lot of it is actually pretty interesting. Combat, in particular, is a strength here, with the mini-bosses offering interesting variety and Sonic’s arsenal being far deeper than it has been in recent years. You’ll unlock a variety of new moves around the way, and while some of them feel a bit too similar to each other, many of them actually are a lot of fun to use.

Still Work To Be Done

As time goes on, though, more and more issues do pop up. Some of the islands are a lot less interesting to navigate than others, and they’re all super generic without much in the way of personality. Some of the individual levels help make up for this, but you only spend a few minutes at a time there. You spend much longer on the islands.

While fine most of the time, you’ll regularly run into areas where the camera shifts from 2D to 3D or locks onto something because it thinks you’ll want to engage with it. If you don’t, however, this just makes getting back to what you wanted to do frustrating. I also eventually found these islands being so filled with things to do less engaging than I did in the early going. While exploring can be a lot of fun, it’s also way too easy to step on an unintended speed booster because they’re everywhere. This can send you flying off wildly in the wrong direction, and it isn’t always easy to get back. Even when you go where you’re trying to, Sonic Frontiers also struggles to keep up with its ambition. The huge areas here feature a ton of pop-ins, meaning distant rails and platforms often simply aren’t visible until you get far closer to them than you should need to. For a next-gen game, it’s hard to forgive that, especially as it makes navigation a chore.

Combat itself is mostly good, but that shifts when you get to Sonic Frontiers’ bosses. You’ll start each of them by having to traverse an enormous area or climb a huge creature to get the last Chaos Emerald. From there, you’ll turn into Super Sonic. While that sounds fun, it means most bosses are spent flying around wildly through the air, having to defeat the boss before your supply of coins runs out. If it does, you’ll have to restart the whole thing, with it often taking several minutes just to get back to the fight. Make sure to use your cyloop move to fill your coins before even heading toward a boss. Even if you can maintain your coins, though, these fights aren’t fun. While impressive in their scale, and often featuring excellent music, they’re consistently repetitive and filled with QTEs, which a single miss of can again send you back to the start of the battle. The camera in these sections is often awful as well, getting stuck on the huge enemies and leaving you at times not even knowing where you are on screen. These fights are quite simply a mess.

Conclusion

A lot of Sonic Frontiers is still a mess, actually, and Sonic himself still doesn’t feel great. Those two things alone will keep a lot of players away, and I can’t blame them. Still, there’s something about Frontiers that no recent Sonic game can match. It’s ambitious, and its core gameplay loop actually works. It’s downright engaging. I spent a lot of my time with Sonic Frontiers having a ton of fun, even if there were just as many moments where I was frustrated and ready to be done with it. This isn’t a great game, but it’s one that should satisfy Sonic fans desperate for an interesting game starring their favorite blue blur, and for the first time in a long time, it feels like the series may have a sense of direction. There’s still work to be done to make it more than that, but this is a big step in the right direction.

Final Verdict: 3/5

Available on: Xbox Series X(Reviewed), Xbox Series S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Switch, PC; Publisher: Sega; Developer: Sonic Team; Players: 1; Released: November 7th, 2022; ESRB: E10+ for Everyone 10+; MSRP: $59.99

Full disclosure: This review is based on a retail copy of Sonic Frontiers.