Before we get started, you all should know that I have been an avid SEGA and Sonic fan since the late 80s (SEGA) and early 90s (Sonic). I have shared many cool moments with Sonic, he unknowingly got the 16-year-old version of me through a parental divorce with Sonic 2, and I was there when Sonic went 3D on the Dreamcast. In other words, SEGA and Sonic have a history with me, and mostly a pleasant one (outside of the whole Dreamcast was the last system thing – why couldn’t you have just installed a DVD player in the thing???).
I take you through that brief, yet personal journey so that you may know my intentions are well-placed. I came into reviewing Sonic Frontiers with the hope that Sonic Team had nailed this time around but have come away feeling a little mixed about it. On one hand, the game does some brilliant moves that make it feel very Sonic-like. But it also loses some important parts in the process.
Anyway, let’s get into this.
Starting with the positive – because that is where you should always start
If you’re looking for SEGA’s apology for the 2006 Sonic game, then you have it with Sonic Frontiers. That early version of 3D world Sonic was a disaster from the moment I saw it at E3 until the day it was released. You could see SEGA really wanted to bring our blue buddy into the 3D fold and allow him to go adventuring again, but for whatever reason just couldn’t do it with that game. The controls were the crux of the problem, at least for me, as was the directionless gameplay design. They literally tried to put Sonic on rails in a 3D world but had loosey-goosey controls to make it an annoying stop-and-go affair. At least they seemed to walk away from that experience knowing what the girth of Sonic’s 3D world should be like.
Sonic Frontiers has far more focus on its controls and is a lot more refined in its gameplay function and design. Sonic Team translated the moves and quickness of Sonic from a 2D platform perfectly into a 3D world. For once, this open-world adventure met its intentions and was executed brilliantly. You run around and move quickly in the same vein as the original Sonic back in the early 90s. His movements feel good, they work well, and they capture the speed of the fake blast processing from the Genesis days. And that is the motif of our blue friend, he is supposed to be fast, furious, and carrying an attitude. The controls and movement feel like that, even when the game complicates him with sometimes rigid attack moves and multi-hit combos. Nothing ever feels off or out of control, which is a huge upgrade from the 2006 game.
To help with the control scheme, the level designs are fun. Imagine you’re looking for a reason to get Sonic on rails, climbing up giant structures, or battling huge bosses. Well, imagine no more, that’s what most of the levels in Sonic Frontiers consist of, as it truly puts you on tracks and allows you to go from place to place as you see fit…within reason (coming later). The world in this game is big, from top to bottom. You will find random encounters with bosses and enemies, fast-moving puzzles that you must figure out how to solve, and giant structures that you need to climb-climb-climb and climb quickly. There is so much to do and the game offers everything up as a buffet, where you can pick and choose where to go at your discretion (within reason – seriously, later). The design is meant to be fast and furious, and it complements the controls very well. This is a fun game to explore and control, which is a huge plus considering the 2006 game was afraid to let you do both.
Equally as interesting is the backend of the game. Sonic has RPG-like upgrades in Sonic Frontiers, where you can collect objects and XP, open skills that expand his arsenal and upgrade attributes such as speed and coin retainage. There’s so much here that expands the gameplay design of the typical Sonic game that it works well with the already-established controls and level design. I think that Sonic Team truly nailed all these attributes to make a functional and fantastic game that has all the earmarks of an open-world adventure. The structure is there, all they had to do was fill in the blanks with the flow and narrative.
And that is where this game takes a hard left turn.
Left at Albuquerque
There are two interesting problems with Sonic Frontiers. The first issue is that the game seems a bit directionless with its story. The second issue is that the game doesn’t flow at all well. One balances the other, and when both don’t balance, well, you need to work on that a bit.
Starting with the former, Sonic Frontiers is confusing. The official synopsis describes the story as Sonic and friends falling through a random wormhole onto Starfall Islands. They must recover Chaos Emeralds (shocking) and figure out what exactly is going on. Along the way, the characters face adversity, giant bosses, new personalities, and everything Dr. Robotnik. The story certainly lays itself out at the beginning but gets muddled with new characters that seem to give random tasks and directionless story cues that never quite recover from the initial start. I can’t tell you how many times I pumped the brakes on this game and tried to figure out why I needed to go where it was pointing me to go. Sometimes, it would point me to go into areas that it was restricting me from accessing. There was a very confusing direction when it came to keeping track of the story, tasks, and what the hell I was doing in the game. As I have always said in past reviews, the story is vital for games to be memorable, and Sonic Frontiers really didn’t do a good job of keeping the player in the loop with almost anything.
Now, having said that, it took about 4-5 hours to finally understand my tasks at hand. And this was through my own logical deduction. When you start the game, you must gather keys to open emeralds that are trapped by Robotnik’s forcefields. To get the keys, you must complete tasks that are outlined by giant towers. The tasks are simply goals you must meet (getting all red coins in a running event, completing an event in said amount of time, and other goals that are typical to a completionist’s menu). While the levels you run on are exciting, beautiful, and sometimes nostalgic, they seem like time fillers rather than meaningful pieces of the game. Besides this, in the beginning, you also must hunt down pieces of a fuzzy Amy, who is scattered throughout the initial first part of Starfall. As you gather her together, literally, you start to gain access to more and more parts of the world. That is clearly understood at the beginning of the adventure, but not in a straightforward way.
To distract you from not connecting with the overall story, the game is also filled full of beings that need your help in a variety of ways. Some need you to collect their children, others need you to get from point A to point B, and still, others need some love and care. They are side quests that are fun in structure and execution but pull from the overall narrative and keep the gamer from connecting. In other words, there is a lot to do and not all of it is cohesive. To get a gamer to connect to your game, you must get them hooked to the story. When the story is all over the place and too many things are delivered at once, you get no connection out of it. Make fun of the opening of Skyrim all you want, but it lays out several narrative elements from a prisoner horse carriage ride to a destructive dragon landing and trying to kill everyone – all in the first 5-10 minutes of gameplay. All those Skyrim elements set the tone and narrative for the rest of the game, and more importantly hook the player. Sonic Frontiers does not do this.
Anyway, all the above just interrupts the flow of Sonic. And it doesn’t help that the loading screens between major events, sans the boss fights, are training grounds that are more confusing than helpful. A large part of me was confused by training grounds because I thought they were part of the story, which would have been weird in hindsight, but I’m open-minded. The training grounds are an endless combination of how to control Sonic and how to use him in various ways. They crop up during loading screens and you can pop out of them nearly as fast as you were put into them. They’re there to teach you and challenge you, but I can’t see any other purpose they serve beyond just time filler. Adding them to the mix means that more gameplay is disrupted and disconnected. It’s comparable to stop-and-go traffic at rush hour, where you just want to GO! And you’ll wish that from time to time with Sonic Frontiers. It’s just honestly annoying in its flow and pacing. It just seems to lose focus because it wants to be too many things and feels just disorganized.
Perspective
Pulling back from dissecting the tiny bits and pieces of this game, at the end of the day this is the direction SEGA needs to take Sonic. They have finally perfected the controls, given a fun environment to bounce around on, and have truly given an open world to a series that desperately needed some refreshing and modernization. Now, all they must do is work on the story, flow, and connecting the gamer to a series that needs more attention brought to it. They’re almost to where they need to be with their flagship character, and I can bet that the next iteration of our blue buddy is going to finally get to where we all want him to go.
Right now, it’s still a work in progress. But it is progressing. So, is the game worth it? I think it’s worth checking out. While it is a narrative mess, if you can figure out the pieces and parts and do your best to stay on track with the story, you’ll find a lot of nice things done to the Sonic world with Sonic Frontiers. It hits some great notes but just is out of tune with some others.
On that note, let’s conclude.
Conclusion
Sonic Frontiers from Sonic Team has all the right moves with controls, level design, looks, feel, and structure. What it needs to work on is making the game more pointed in its narrative and flowing without interruption. This game has a great skeleton, now all it requires is some solid content to fill some of that narrative disconnect. It contains some great elements, but it’s far from perfect.
