Sonic Frontiers
Year: 2022
Rating: E10+
Time Played: 19.62 hours
One of the big transformational shifts in video games lately has been the adaptation of longstanding franchises to make “open-world” versions of their IPs. While Breath of the Wild started this transition, it has been somewhat hit-or-miss for certain franchises. Super Mario Odyssey handled it well, but Pokémon Violet suffered from graphical limitations. Then there’s Sonic Frontiers, which did relatively well with making Sonic’s speed feel fun, but struggled with larger issues that crop up from moving to an open-world format. At the very least, the plot and cutscenes were well-written enough to drive the story forward.
Just like when games shifted from 2D platforming to 3D space, there are a lot of different things to consider that might be overlooked because it’s a fundamental change to the core gameplay. Most Sonic games, even the 3D ones, have been fairly linear in their gameplay, so moving to open world needed lots of areas to give Sonic space to move fast. Frontiers solves this problem with lots of little “mini-game” areas of rail grinds, spring jumps, and speed pads that are pretty fun to play since it emulates that core Sonic experience.
Where the game suffers is in its open-world aspects. Too many times, I had to traverse all the way across a world because I hadn’t unlocked the teleportation mechanic. Then, I found myself banging my head against a wall for how to get to a specific area of a world because I couldn’t just “go there” like I could in Breath of the Wild or Odyssey. I get that to maintain the linear story format I needed to unlock things in order, but that’s why open-world isn’t necessarily ideal for every franchise. At any rate, I had a lot of fun with this and hope the next open-world Sonic game learns from their first foray into the genre here.
A good start for the first open-world Sonic game, I give Sonic Frontiers 4.0 stars out of 5.
