“In search of the missing Chaos emeralds, Sonic becomes stranded on an ancient island teeming with unusual creatures. Battle hordes of powerful enemies as you explore a breathtaking world of action, adventure, and mystery“

I’ve always been a Sonic fan. Through the traditional games, to Sonic Riders, and even the spin-offs like Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing. When Sonic Frontiers got announced, I was excited and also surprised by something: the last Sonic game I had bought was Sonic Colors on the Wii. I must have fallen off the series and never realized it. What better time to get back into it?

We all know how the initial preview of Frontiers looked. Clunky, buggy, and like a tech demo – yikes. Additional gameplay trailers were much better, proving the first trailer that was showcased was more of alpha footage than something ready for the public. With more proper footage shown over time, hype for the game increased. The game released in November 2022, although I didn’t play it until after Christmas due to it being on my wish list, as well as wanting to wait for some bugs to be squashed. More on that in a few.

What I enjoy most about Frontiers is the open zone gameplay. There are 5 different islands with challenges and missions scattered across them, and you can freely run around at Sonic speed doing all sorts of platforming. It’s like the best parts of Sonic’s linear level structure laid out for you to mess around with as much as you want. There’s also portals on each island that contain cyberspace levels. These are the traditional “get to the end as quick as possible” levels, with some challenges to complete in each such as collecting 150 rings by the end.

The music for Frontiers is also solid. It is similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s quiet piano riffs throughout Hyrule when you are doing things in the open zone, but it has more personality. Cyberspace has EDM music that’s pretty nice and different in each portal. The boss fight music in this game completely surprised me. Some were heavy metal or emo-grunge that came of nowhere, yet felt like they fit perfectly.

I owned the game on PS5 and played on performance mode in 60fps. It feels real smooth and the load times are good. Now that all the pros are covered, let’s get into the cons. The biggest elephant in the room is the story and how it’s handled. I won’t go into spoilers, but I did not walk away from this game feeling like I experienced a satisfying story. Nothing is explained all that well, and there are only a handful of real cutscenes. Most of the game’s dialogue is through 20 second mini cutscenes with 2 characters talking, and there is A LOT. I tried not to skip past these but after while you just start to roll your eyes at them. The final boss also did not make any sense to me, and you apparently have to beat the game in Hard mode to experience the “true” final boss. Adding a challenge like that is fine, expect the regular final boss shows up for maybe 20 seconds in QTE sequence. Really?

Going off that, details on what specific things in the game do or how to access them are not given properly. Fast travel is a feature once you complete all the challenges and fully unlock the map on an island. I wasn’t told that and didn’t figure it out until the third island! That’s a large amount of extra running around once you see how big some islands are. You can upgrade your power, defense, speed, and ring count at 2 different characters on each island. Power and defense will upgrade multiple levels depending on how many collectibles you have to trade in, yet speed and ring count can only be upgraded one level at a time manually. WHY?

I mentioned waiting to play until a patch was released to fix some bugs. Well aside from the very obvious pop-in (even on PS5), the game doesn’t suffer from anything serious but the bugs still around are hard not to notice. Here’s an example: I was fighting the second boss and while doing so, Sonic’s model completely clipped through the boss’s when transitioning back from an attack segment. Touching this boss when not attacking will inflict damage and send you flying back, so to see myself do this was like “oh yeah, that didn’t look right”. The game is riddled with moments like that.

There are other scenarios that made me frustrated with the game, however I’ll end on one other pro. There’s a fishing hole mini-game – it’s highly addicting and the music is super chill. I spent so much time in there seeing what fish I could catch, and there’s a rather extensive amount.

Sonic Frontiers isn’t perfect, and it has many issues. It’s not a game I would come back to play any time soon. That being said, it does a lot of things right and the ground work is there for when SEGA puts out their next game. There is a roadmap for additional DLC, including more story. I will definitely be checking it out.