Sonic Frontiers

Genre: Open-World Action-RPG / 3D Platformer

Players: 1

.

Review:

Sonic Frontiers, released in 2022 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is probably the most ambitious game in the Sonic franchise since Sonic took his first major steps into 3D in Sonic Adventure. For the first time, Sonic finds himself in a true Open-World game (Sega calls it “open-zone”, but I say “to-may-to, to-mah-to”). So of course the question everyone wanted to know the answer to is… “is it good?”

Yeah, Sonic’s 3D adventures do not have the greatest track record, and while this may be one of the most ambitious games to star the blue hedgehog, all that ambition means there’s a lot more room for this game to make terrible, devastating mistakes. And even before launch, players worried about multiple elements of this game’s design. Was Sonic Frontiers inspired a little too much by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (there’s no denying the influence here)? Would the game be too monotonous? Would the game give players interesting things to do in this Open World? And then of course, how well will this game actually perform on Nintendo Switch?

.

Blast Processing?

Let’s start with that last question. On Nintendo Switch, Sonic Frontiers works, though I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it works well. The game has a big world with some decent reflection effects, and the framerate stays at a pretty stable 30FPS, with a resolution sticking to 720p in docked mode and 480p in handheld mode. Clearly this falls well below what we see on other platforms, but it is mostly sufficient. However, even with these reduced specs, Sonic Frontiers on Nintendo Switch has greatly reduced environmental detail and some absolutely nasty pop-in. Definitely a mixed bag.

Stylistically, I don’t think the visuals are all that comparable to Breath of the Wild at all despite many fearing this is the case because… it’s an Open-World game with a lot of grassy areas, I guess? However, these areas are also accented by metallic alien-looking technology that, while not exactly looking distinct and memorable, at least keeps this game from looking too much like any other Open-World games.

Unfortunately, one area where this game does suffer is how samey everything looks. While there certainly are small self-contained areas that look significantly different from the Open-World area, the Open-World itself lacks variation, making any place in one of the game’s Open-World areas (it’s separated into multiple large islands, each with their own biome) seem far too similar to other places in the same area.

The one area where it’s clear that this game was inspired by Breath of the Wild is its soundtrack, with players exploring the game’s world to a silent, somber piano theme that doesn’t exactly seem fitting for a Sonic game. However, players can collect tunes from throughout the Sonic franchise, and can change things up at any time by swapping to whatever Sonic theme they think is most appropriate, so long as they’ve collected that song in the game’s campaign.

.

Knuckling Down or Chasing its Own Tails?

When it comes to the gameplay, I’m of two minds on Sonic Frontiers

My initial impression of this game was that I simply hated it. Sonic has always been built for speed, not for exploration and certainly not for precision platforming, and this game had Sonic doing far more of those two things. There’s just a horrendous lack of polish in the platforming mechanics here. Sometimes you’ll be trying to do a jump close to a structure and Sonic will get stuck on the scenery, sometimes you’ll be trying to make a small adjustment in how Sonic is moving and he’ll either ignore it or veer wildly in the direction you’re aiming.

At one point while I was playing, the game placed a destructible item right near a treadmill and a targetable springboard, and it was damn near impossible to break the object without either stepping on the treadmill and getting rocketed away or targeting the springboard instead and getting rocketed away. And good luck trying to hit precision targets like rings and platforms in mid-air when those targets don’t make use of the game’s auto-targeting system.

Add to this that the game tries to work in a combo-crazy combat system and… well, let’s just say that the Sonic Frontiers’ developers have no idea how to make the nuances of Spectacle Fighter combat work – the game will act like players should be able to gracefully dodge like Bayonetta, but this game’s Sonic has all the grace of a caffeine-addled toddler. And don’t even get me started on this game’s absolutely atrocious camera…

And yet, despite how often this game feels outright broken… it still kinda’ works, and the more I played it, the more I found myself wanting to keep playing it. This game pulls a neat trick with its progression, in that the more of the game’s tasks you perform, the easier everything becomes, despite that it never quite stops feeling busted. Completing some tasks will add new grind rails to the environment to make for easier traversal, others reveal more of the map to make players less reliant on trying to pick out landmarks, and other tasks give players resources to upgrade their abilities, which never makes combat actually better, but gives them the power to defeat enemies more quickly and the added capacity for Sonic’s rings so that taking a hit won’t be quite as catastrophic.

And the more you gain abilities to breeze through the game’s massive environments, the more enjoyable it becomes, looking on the map for your next target, speeding there, trying to figure out what you need to do to progress, and so on. And that’s in addition to some really excellent moments this game keeps throwing at you.

One form these moments take are massive enemy encounters that bring to mind the game Shadow of the Colossus, because for many of these enemies you’ll be speeding on these massive enemies while trying to reach their weak spot. The design of these enemies is pretty clever too, which had me smiling when fighting an enemy who leaves a trail in the sky for me to run on, or another that you must climb to the top of its massive figure to hit its weak points. Frequently these moments led to the aforementioned broken game design, where Sonic’s movements didn’t quite seem to match where his feet were on these massive enemies, sending him careening off. But there were enough great moments to offset these bad ones.

.

Running Roughshod

Is Sonic Frontiers a good game? Ultimately, I think that in spite of itself, it is, yes. It does not arrive at being a good game cleanly, without serious issues and caveats. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Sonic Frontiers has some massive problems, and I certainly can’t blame those players who find that they’re turned off by those problems – I very nearly was too. This is absolutely not Sonic’s “Breath of the Wild moment”, nor even its “Super Mario Odyssey moment”. This is Sonic doing one of his usual epic faceplants and yet somehow still managing to find himself in a truly enjoyable game. Is it Sonic’s best 3D Platformer? I dunno, there’s still something to be said for the Sonic Adventure games. However, Sonic Frontiers is decent enough that it at least won’t embarrass itself by trying to enter that conversation, even if it embarasses itself in plenty of other ways.

tl;dr – Sonic Frontiers is one of the most ambitious games in the long-running Sonic franchise, bringing Sonic’s 3D Platforming adventures into the realm of Open World gameplay. Despite all sorts of graphical problems, gameplay issues, and an overall lack of polish, this game manages to be surprisingly enjoyable despite itself. Make no mistake, this is an extremely extremely flawed game, but it’s a fun and compelling game despite those flaws.

Grade: B+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Ben, Andy Miller, Exlene, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Talissa, Eli Goodman, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Ilya Zverev, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}