Sonic Frontiers Review: Breath of the Familiar

For a game that relies on the fluidity of its mechanics, Sonic Frontiers often feels thoughtless.

Sonic Frontiers
Photo: Sega

Look past Sonic Frontiers’s uninspired level design, go-nowhere collectathon missions, and cumbersome control scheme and you may spot its genuine willingness to innovate. Instead of progressing through a series of linear courses, which has been the unifying design principle for nearly every disparate Sonic game since 1991—save for maybe the ones where Sonic goes to the Olympics—Sega’s mascot is now zipping around open-world environments. For a series that’s struggled to stay relevant within contemporary gaming culture, it’s a welcomed change of pace to finally untether Sonic from the strict limitations previously set by his last-gen console outings, even if he’s doing so by riding his industry rival’s coattails in the process.

As executed here, the move is a largely successful gameplay experiment for the franchise that proves it still has some liveliness left in it. Free-roaming from one point on the expansive map to another is a reliably electric experience, where the sheer size of these barren locations provides Sonic with the legroom needed to adequately convey his breakneck velocity.

If anything, Sonic Frontiers does a fairly decent job of doling out small thrills whenever players are able to collect a seemingly endless amount of shiny gold rings at Mach 5 speed. If players choose to completely disengage from the game’s laughable story involving interdimensional travel between real and virtual realms—and try their hardest to skip through the majority of grindy Harvest Moon-esque minigame challenges that artificially pad out an already paltry under-20-hour game—there’s a semblance of a fun time to be had here.

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Pity, then, that getting to Mach 5 speed often takes way too much input on the player’s part for the gameplay to feel instinctual. By default, Sonic moves at a sluggish pace akin to a light jog, practically requiring players to tape down their controller’s right trigger, which activates a much-needed boost, in order to build forward momentum. For a game that relies on a certain level of fluidity in its core mechanics, Sonic Frontiers often feels thoughtless in this regard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuTcBAkyNL4

For example, in order to execute a homing attack, which can perpetually move Sonic forward mid-air and serves as his primary form of combat, players must first press the jump button, and then an entirely different button after that. Sonic Adventure, which was released well over two decades ago, streamlined this process by having players press the jump button twice, rather than needlessly gum up the works with a different button command. In a further affront to efficiency, Sonic now has the ability to perform complicated attack combos, but they qualify as hoopla since spamming the X and square buttons more than always gets the same job done.

Like most products bearing Sonic’s namesake these days, Sonic Frontiers feels rushed. The five central islands that account for the game’s open world hardly register as anything more than slight variations of the same generic, blandly aestheticized wasteland. There’s also a half-assed RPG-style level-up system where, through a multitude of collectible items, players can increase Sonic’s attack, defense, speed, and, for some odd reason, the maximum number of rings he can collect at a given time, which serves little to no purpose outside of a handful of tedious button-mashing boss fights littered throughout. No matter how many rings you’re able to amass due to pointless upgrades, Sonic will still lose all of them after three or four hits.

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Even Sonic Frontiers’s big claims concerning player autonomy ultimately prove short-sighted. While there’s no set order to complete the game’s missions—you can tackle the generically named level 2-3 before 2-1, if you’re so inclined—players will quickly settle into the same Sisyphean rhythm of collecting Chaos Emeralds by whatever arbitrary means the game throws at you, beating a stock baddie in a massive Dragon Ball Z-styled fight before then moving on to the next one. No matter which level you decide to play first, the game still leads you to the same pre-destined conclusion, providing the illusion of choice in substitute of the real thing.

All that said, there’s still a solid-enough idea at the center of Sonic Frontiers that could possibly make for a great game in the future, which is more than could be said of infamous stinkers like Sonic Unleashed or Sonic Lost World. If a sequel could provide players with the same type of freedom that Sonic’s been afforded—and, perhaps, if it could stay in the incubation chamber a little longer until proper gestation—then Sega’s blue hedgehog might get to soar to new heights.

This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications on November 8.

Score: 
 Developer: Sonic Team  Publisher: Sega  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: November 8, 2022  ESRB: E10+  ESRB Descriptions: Fantasy Violence  Buy: Game

Paul Attard

Paul Attard is a New York-based lifeform who enjoys writing about experimental cinema, rap/pop music, games, and anything else that tickles their fancy. Their writing has also appeared in MUBI Notebook.

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