This one hurts.
Nearly a quarter-century after Sonic Adventure graced the Sega Dreamcast (and five years after the terrible Sonic Forces), everyone’s favorite blue hedgehog is back to break our hearts once again in Sonic Frontiers. Yes, Sonic's taken some time off for a bit to become a big-time movie star, but he hasn't forgotten his gaming roots.
With Frontiers, Sega and developer Sonic Team set out to make the 3D Sonic the Hedgehog game people have dreamt about for years. It’s a freeform, open-world adventure about the joys of running extremely fast across a vast field without a care in the world. That part is fine! The rest? Eh, not so much.
Sonic exists to be lovably frustrating and Frontiers is no exception to that rule. The game, which launches on Nov. 8, is not without merit in its storytelling and soundtrack, but unwieldy controls, bang-your-head-against-the-wall boss encounters, and a spirit of dull repetition mean it might be back to the drawing board once again for our hedgehog friend.
Sonic Frontiers finds our titular hero and his friends Tails, Knuckles, and Amy traveling to the mysterious Starfall Islands in search of the seven Chaos Emeralds. The initial premise is familiar, but what follows is, to Sega’s credit, pretty novel for the long-running series.
Long story short, Sonic becomes separated from his friends and is forced to explore the Starfall Islands to save them. After a short tutorial, the game opens up, allowing Sonic to freely explore each of the five islands (in linear, sequential order). Each one acts as a miniature open world with dozens of small activities to complete and very few restrictions on where you can go.
These activities range from miniboss encounters to small puzzles that uncover portions of the map as you complete them. The loop here is to kill minibosses to collect gears which let you access portals around each map. Those portals lead to linear, traditional Sonic levels which net you vault keys that you use to acquire Chaos Emeralds. You’ll also have to collect dozens (if not hundreds) of little “memory tokens” scattered around each map to speak to certain characters and advance the plot.
This made an incredible first impression on me. I’m a sucker for any game that drops me in a big expanse and gives me a fun way to traverse it. And, at first, that’s what Sonic Frontiers delivers. Speedily maneuvering Sonic across the Starfall Islands’ terrain is a basic, cheap thrill, but it works. The aforementioned tasks are standard video game fare, but zooming around each map and completing them was a zen-like activity for me at times. It’s especially awesome when you collect the maximum number of rings you can hold, as Sonic gets an enormous speed boost at that point which makes traversal a breeze.
Unfortunately, that’s about where the fun ends when it comes to controlling Sonic.
You eventually need to engage in precision platforming (either in the open world or in the linear levels) and this is often more frustrating than fun. 3D Sonic games have always had this problem where you can never tell if you’re supposed to be in control or not. Sonic will run through a big loop or grind a long rail without your input before you’re suddenly back in control. If you press a button at any point during these unspecified and unmarked moments, you may accidentally jump out of bounds, losing progress or even dying.
Sonic’s movement is just too loosey-goosey for many of these sequences. It’s not a good thing when the most fun parts of a platformer are the ones where the game rips control away so you can watch Sonic run really fast for a few seconds.
In Frontiers, Sonic has four base stats (attack, defense, max speed, and ring capacity) that you level up throughout the course of the game with items you get for simply doing stuff in the open world. The net effect, however, is that Sonic feels weak at the start the game. Basic combat abilities that make the game tolerable to play are locked behind a skill tree that can take the entirety of the main story (and then some) to complete.
It takes a few hours to get Sonic to a point where combat is manageable and, even then, every fight quickly becomes laborious drudgery. You have a basic attack button to mash out combos, which can be interrupted for a variety of special skills that do a lot of damage and are really the key to victory in later fights. Sonic can do a big spinning kick, shoot multiple kinds of energy blasts, and zip through the air to unleash massive blows to the enemy robots’ faces.
It certainly looks cool at times, but it’s never fun. It’s button-mashing gruel with very little depth or technique, and you have to do so much of it that I truly grew to hate the combat by the time the credits rolled.
This is exacerbated by painful boss fights, both in the open world and in scripted story sequences. Miniboss fights on the islands repeat several times and can last anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes, depending on how much the controls feel like cooperating with you. Sometimes, you’ll take damage from an offscreen projectile and be knocked down to ground level during a fight in the sky, or simply clip through the ground and die.
I won’t spoil the specifics of the big set-piece boss fights throughout the main story, but these are somehow even worse. Sonic’s moveset is inexplicably limited by the design needs of each fight and achieving success seems like a roll of the dice in some of them. I spent each one of these fights feeling like I wasn’t truly in control. It’s not a good time.
To be clear, there are things I like about Sonic Frontiers.
With rare exceptions, each 3D Sonic game usually has something going for it. That’s why being a fan of this series is so frustrating: You can see a good game hidden inside each bad one, trying and failing to break out.
In this case, the likable bits come in the form of cutscenes and music. Again, no spoilers, but this game features a lot of surprisingly intimate, sincere conversations between Sonic and his friends about their relationships to one another. It’s charmingly self-aware, with characters explicitly referencing levels and even design staples from past Sonic games. But that self-awareness never takes precedence over its sincerity.
And heck, there’s even some real-deal lore to flesh out the world of Sonic in here. It may be a maddening game to play at times, but there’s a carrot at the end of the stick for big-time Sonic fans, at least.
Oh, and the music is great. Whether it’s melancholy piano notes out in the open world or delightfully cheesy metal songs with vocals during boss fights, the soundtrack did what it could to spice up the moment-to-moment action.
That doesn’t change the fact that Sonic Frontiers is not a particularly good game. The wonders of the first hour quickly give way to about 12 more hours that range between “kinda boring” and “I want to tear my hair out.”
It doesn’t bring me any joy or pleasure to tell you this.
Listen, I grew up a Sonic fan and have desperately wanted a game with this open-world setup for a long time. Sadly, it just doesn’t work. At least Big the Cat shows up with a fishing minigame. That's... something. It's always good to see the big homie. (He should get his own game, Sega.)
Sonic Frontiers zooms its way onto PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC on Nov. 8.
