Sonic Frontiers is currently $35 in an Amazon Black Friday sale. As an experiment, though? Sonic Frontiers is much better than it has to be, and it successfully carves a path forward for the beloved blue hedgehog. But the attempt is undeniably admirable.Īs a full-fledged game, Sonic Frontiers has its ups and downs. It’s not perfect by any means, and many gamers may be put off by the visuals alone. Like that game, Sonic Frontiers swings for the fences, and lands on an uneven-but-necessary experiment, which could push the franchise forward. Playing the game though, I thought much more about another Nintendo Switch game, and that’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Some of the comparisons are fair, and it would be silly to deny that Sonic Team has taken some inspiration from Zelda. While writing this Sonic Frontiers review, I thought about the relentless comparisons to Breath of the Wild that the game has endured since Sega first revealed it. The game could have benefited from a bit more development time, primarily to cut out some of the fat. For every fresh element that works, there’s another one that negates it. You'll encounter everything from tower defense to pinball throughout Sonic Frontiers’ almost-20-hour runtime. There are many new ideas that don’t quite stick the landing. Running from point to point, collecting keys/medals/cogs and emeralds is a loop that largely pays off, and encourages player exploration and experimentation.ĭespite the overall formula largely being a success, it’s evident that Sonic Frontiers is the result of a studio stretching itself too thin. It’s a bold new direction, which highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of design approach. Sonic Frontiers is a collectathon, and feels more like a PlayStation 2/Dreamcast game than anything from 2022. While Sonic has been allowed to roam in large areas before, he’s never quite had this level of freedom. Ultimately, Sonic Frontiers is new territory for the series. Many players may not give Sonic Frontiers a second look. It’s a shame, because the scattershot visuals create a sheer barrier to entry. The cartoonish Sonic stands in stark contrast to the realistic environments, feeling like he’s dropped in from a different game entirely. Art direction in general is all over the place, with Cyberspace levels bearing no resemblance to the open world. Graphics aren’t the only visual shortcoming in Sonic Frontiers. I generally don’t care what Sonic and his pals are up to in other games, but Sonic Frontiers offers perhaps the deepest and most heartfelt study of them in over a decade. You might be wondering why you'd care about the story in Sonic Frontiers, but I’m here to tell you to give it a chance. But what’s there works brilliantly most of the time. It’s a lot to take in at first, and perhaps Sonic Frontiers could have benefitted from more streamlined traversal and combat. The Cyloop ability allows you to paint a line on the ground as you run, then close it as a circle to deal damage and set enemies up for combos. Combat plays out like a hack-and-slash game, as you pull off flashy combos and parries, and run rings around your enemies (literally). Sonic has never felt better to control, with a genuinely huge repertoire of abilities, movement skills and combat options. Regardless of what you’re doing, Sonic Frontiers does a great job at mixing high-speed platforming with exploration.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |