3D Sonic games have always been quite divisive among fans and critics. Unlike Sonic’s 2D adventures, the 3D titles are never sure if they want to be tight platformers or quasi-racing games with platforming elements, unable to strike the right balance between speed and exploration. This year, Sega announced Sonic Frontiers, the Sonic Team’s first attempt at an open-world format. While an exciting prospect for the future of Sonic, its rough presentation raised some questions among fans who have already been disheartened by the Blue Blur’s most recent 3D titles.

Sonic Frontiers is finally here, and on the whole, it is a success. The best parts of Sonic are front and center, featuring great exploration and speed mechanics with a relentless approach to action coupled with a slick presentation. Frontiers does occasionally fall short due to its repetitive gameplay loop and messy technical state; however, by the time the credits roll, Sonic’s first foray into the open-world genre proves that it is more than the sum of its parts and there is plenty to love for new and returning Sonic fans.

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Sonic Frontiers kicks off the story with Eggman ripping a tear in Cyber Space and getting stuck in a cyber dimension with a new character named Sage. At the same time, Sonic, Tails, Amy, and Knuckles also slip through a warp hole while tracking the Chaos Emeralds and end up in the post-apocalyptic Starfall Islands. Much like Eggman, Sonic’s friends are also stuck in Cyber Space, so it's up to the Blue Blur to figure out how to get them out and uncover the mystery surrounding the Chaos Emeralds and the bygone Ancients of Starfall. Little by little, the secrets of the Starfall Islands unfold, but it does take quite some time for the main story of Sonic Frontiers to develop. The story is uneven as it is told at a snail’s pace through the first few islands before bombarding the player with exposition in its closing acts.

Sonic Frontiers Wall Running

Sonic Frontiers is a more somber take on the traditionally upbeat blue hedgehog speeding across colorful worlds. From its setting of dreary ruins and dusty deserts to its subdued and meditative ambient soundtrack, Sonic Frontiers certainly likes to dip into the melancholic aspects of this universe more often than not. However, Sonic Frontiers isn’t always so sad and brooding. Even amid gray color palettes and a world in decay, Sonic’s upbeat nature always shines through and is one of the most enjoyable parts of the narrative, especially as his dynamic with his friends and enemies develops in such rough conditions.

Characters are the core of this Sonic storyline. Sonic Frontiers’ main story sees Sonic exploring islands containing Amy, Knuckles, Tails, and other companions as he attempts to free them from their Cyber Space shackles. This structure allows the story to hone in on each character and brings a solid emotional weight to the narrative. Each of Sonic’s friends and even his villains have a strong moment or two before the end, and those interactions regularly overshadow the broader story of the Chaos Emeralds and the Ancients. While the overall story has some pacing issues and can take a while to get going, the narrative finds its strength in its characters.

Sonic Frontiers Amy

Of course, one of the biggest appeals of Sonic Frontiers is that it is the first open-world Sonic game. The Blue Blur has often done best in side-scrolling adventures and linear 3D spaces like Sonic Adventure; however, Sonic Frontiers shakes up that formula for the better. Admittedly, Sonic Frontiers isn’t breaking any new ground with its open-world game design, but what it does, it does well. There is a lot to see, a lot to do, and a lot to collect in Sonic Frontiers, and all of it is consistently rewarding but can get a little repetitive after a certain point.

Sonic Frontiers breaks up its world and gameplay structure into four parts: open-world collecting for Memory Tokens, Guardian fights for Tower Keys, Cyber Space missions for Vault Keys, and a Titan boss when players have enough Vault Keys to collect every Chaos Emerald on the island. Sonic Frontiers’ gameplay loop is quite literally a loop through a rotating block of these four gameplay pillars, and the game hardly steers away from this formula. While the gameplay loop seems repetitive and can certainly feel that way toward the end, it’s when actually digging into each activity that Sonic Frontiers stays fresh. No two Memory Tokens are collected in the same way, and it is impressive to see the amount of platforming diversity that Sonic Frontiers delivers using simple rails, platforms, and speed boosts. The combinations seem endless.

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Moreover, the collect-a-thon that Sonic Frontiers plays out as isn’t so much of a burden as players can accrue Memory Tokens, Vault Keys, and Chaos Emeralds quite rapidly. There is always a new interesting puzzle or mini-game awaiting players at each interval of the gameplay loop, and it's a rewarding and well-paced experience every time. If there is an activity that players don’t particularly like, it's over quickly, and players can immediately move on to the next objective. Sonic Frontiers’ mission statement is to have players on “go” from the start, and it never lets up on that philosophy.

Sonic Frontiers Tricks

But the game isn’t entirely open-world exploration and collecting. One of the best aspects of Sonic Frontiers is its Cyber Space missions. These play like the standard 3D linear Sonic levels of past games and keep the focus on speed, coin collecting, and time challenges. The back-and-forth structure of open-world exploration in the Starfall Islands leading to the semi-racing game design of the Cyber Space levels finally hits the balance that 3D Sonic games have always struggled to achieve. There is something here for every type of Sonic fan.

It can be easy to decry the open world crafted in Sonic Frontiers as ugly and disjointed as it often is. However, there is a sense of order in the chaos of the Starfall Islands that only emerges when players engage with the world. The twisting rails dispersed around each island often connect and transfer Sonic from one place to another and never let up on that sense of speed and style that makes these games so fun. In some instances, the open world becomes a puzzle as players stop questioning why everything looks so strange and begin asking themselves what the best way to reach the next Chaos Emerald or Memory Token is. While largely a seamless experience, there are some issues with the game’s rollercoaster ride approach to rail-based traversal, as backtracking does become needlessly tedious at times, especially after traveling the same path multiple times.

Sonic Frontiers Chaos Island Rails

Combat in Sonic Frontiers is simple, initially requiring only one face button to attack and then building on top of that with more skills that need more inputs. There is even a skill that condenses the multi-button attacks into an auto-attack but at lower damage values. Sonic Frontiers prioritizes rapid, flashy combat over a more dynamic system. The Sonic Team clearly wanted combat to be mechanically easy, with as few hurdles in the way of the player’s momentum as possible.

However, in the pursuit of simplicity, Sonic Frontiers falls victim to some clunky mechanics. Combat relies on an auto-targeting system that players have little say over, and it often targets the wrong enemy or object at the wrong time. In the heat of speed and combat, the auto-lock struggles to target what the player needs it to and makes combat with multiple enemies, or even Guardian fights, frustrating and unintuitive. Guardian fights already have varying degrees of quality, and some can be very uninteresting to engage with, so when the auto-targeting can’t do its job right, the whole experience feels unfinished.

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Overall, Sonic Frontiers' worst qualities all come out in its technical elements. The pop-in in Sonic’s first open-world adventure is some of the worst seen in a game release this year. Walls and rails regularly do not show up until the last second, making the act of world traversal visually jarring and tough to plan for. Players cannot look out over Sonic Frontiers’ rolling hills and vast plains to map out a route from point A to point B because the most critical parts of traversal are absent until players get close. This leads to a heavy reliance on opening the map just to know where everything is and tends to hurt the game's pace.

Sonic Frontiers Cyber Space

However, despite the technical mishaps, Sonic Frontiers still delivers an enjoyable experience. The coveted and rewarding break-neck speeds that Sonic games traditionally reserve for those who have mastered the game are here by default, and it never lets up. The platforming and exploration elements that Sonic games struggle to find balance with are integrated into the open world and are consistently rewarding. Sonic Frontiers delivers a simple, sometimes buggy, but incredibly fun experience that gets what Sonic is best at right.

There is a satisfying quality to seeing Sonic blitz through rings in a Cyber Space mission while thumping dubstep or crunchy post-hardcore riffs blast throughout the level. Watching Sonic take down a Titan ten times his size in anime-like cutscenes at the end of a boss fight is always a spectacle. There is always something cool and worth the effort to see or do in this game, which is why Sonic Frontiers works well despite being very repetitive in nature. Those who can fall into its groove will find plenty to enjoy in Sonic’s latest adventure, and as a blueprint for the franchise going forward, Sonic could not be in a better place.

Sonic Frontiers releases November 8 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Game Rant was provided a PS5 code for the purposes of this review.

sonic frontiers
Sonic Frontiers

Sonic Frontiers is an open world, 3D action platformer game developed by Sonic Team and Published by Sega. Players explore Starfall Islands to collect Chaos Emeralds and find Sonic's lost friends. Players will be solving puzzles, fighting robot enemies, and traversing the land with grind rails to discover how and why Sonic's group was separated through a wormhole.

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