Sonic Frontiers Review – IGN

Sprinting around large areas of the open world is, as you’d hope, one of the best parts of this open world adventure. The islands you skim across are large playgrounds suitable for you to test the limits of your running ability, as long as you don’t fall into the water or lava that kills you instantly. However, my personal favorite new trick is Cyloop – it allows you to draw a circle while launching a trail to create a deadly tornado that affects everything caught in it. This ability can be used and abused to deal damage in combat, puzzle solving and even ring farm as it produces a few at a time. Plus, literally, running around your enemies is just a super Sonic thing to do, which is why I practically never stopped doing it throughout my gameplay. And since it allows you to turn running into a deadly weapon, it makes speeding around the map more fun.

The only thing that gets you a bit frustrated running around is that, unless you get the speed boost that comes with maxing out laps, you’re not going to run quite as fast as expected. That could be improved slightly by leveling up your speed stat throughout the campaign, but I would still like the default starting speed to be Roadrunner a bit more and the hedgehog a little less hungry.

What becomes clear after a few laps around the first island is that Sonic Frontiers is an action-adventure game that joins a growing group of old-school series looking to re-imagine themselves as sandboxes. open world – and in this particular case it mostly worked. Like Pokémon Legend: Arceus and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Before that, Frontiers kept a lot of the things that made the Sonic series so beloved and unique (including some fun homages) but also threw in huge areas to explore and filled them with loads of side distractions and mostly interesting new ideas. Not all of those activities are created equal, but it works overall just for the sake of sheer variety. A moment you are juggling the robot like you are playing Baby’s First Devil May Cry, the next time you’re trying to pass the time test in the 2D platforming stage, and one minute later you’re playing marbles inside an active volcano. You will grind some really epic tracks, solve super simple puzzles, do some puzzle games and of course, catch some fish – because if you can’t fish, it’s even Also count as an open world game?

There are moments where I see glimpses of genius in this strange sequence of activities. Sections called Cyber ​​levels intelligently disrupt the open world by teleporting you to traditional, bite-sized linear Sonic levels where you’re racing the clock and collecting coins. Collect loops as you make a quick dash to the target line. On the other hand, one of the big things that Frontiers tries not to do well is combat. You just need to grind buttons to perform simple combos and knock out faceless robot enemies. I appreciate taking the occasional break from the podium, but since it never proves to be a challenge and throws you into nearly identical fights over and over again, I soon resent it when was pulled out of his lightning speed race only to take down another bunch of idiots who looked like toasters. It’s especially frustrating when it comes to the miniboss roaming the open world, which often drags me into unmissable combat that isn’t particularly challenging or enjoyable, especially when I’ve run into them multiple times. . Unable to hold back a frustrated groan at the prospect of repeating the same encounter a third or fourth time.

The bigger goal of each zone is to collect Chaos Emeralds to power you up for a massive, epic boss battle, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. To find all those delicious gems, you’ll first have to collect the world portal gears, use those gears to open portals to the Cyberspace levels, where you can collect Collect the vault keys, then finally use those keys to unlock the emerald. If that sounds confusing to you, that’s because it can certainly happen – but by the time I’ve completed my first island or two, I’m completely comfortable with it all. various exotic currencies and collectibles on his checklist. The big boss fight at the end of each island is also a bit better than regular combat, especially when you go full Sonic Saiyan and go up against a giant, evil cyborg. They’re a bit awkward at times because of the repetitive animations and weird camera issues where the boss kicks you out in the arena and shoves you into a nasty perspective, but flies around like a gnawing god. Sip invincible and perform sweet butt kicks that make collecting all the Chaos Emeralds worth the effort.

I also really like how the perspective automatically switches between 2D and 3D when you’re out in the open world, depending on the activity you’re engaged in. If I’m grinding rails and step into an area where a platform is needed, it switches me to a 2D perspective so I can rotate like it was in 1991, but when I enter a fight a little while later, it switches back into three-dimensional space so I can literally run circles around enemies. The only problem is that sometimes I accidentally step on springs or rails while running around the island and find myself stuck in 2D, sometimes hard to get out. It’s a bit like you’re in a board game, then you have to complete a full level of Chutes and Ladders before going back to your business.

There are other things that Frontiers has to do, such as solving very easy puzzles, ranging from fun mini-games to purely chores, or dipping your toes into RPG mechanics by collecting puzzles. collection to raise your stats. These aren’t terrible additions, but they don’t feel like they’re completely cut out either. The upgrades in particular are a bit odd because they do things like allow you to carry more rings or increase your attack and defense stats by such a small amount that they barely affect gameplay. It’s almost like the developers shrugged and said “Sure, why not?” and threw an unfinished first draft of every idea they could think of into the mix just for the heck of it.

It’s crazy how much progress can be made through fishing minigames, especially since it’s only mildly enjoyable for a few minutes before it starts to feel like a chore. But I can’t argue that it’s not worth it for me; without even trying, I quickly discovered that it can be bred for large amounts of resources that are much harder to get in the open world. On an island, I fished with my boy Big the Cat for half an hour and obtained a ton of portal gears, vault keys, and memory tokens that I could have chosen to ignore a certain amount of. Massive platform activities, exploration and combat. I was also able to level up my character 60+ times in just a few minutes using this method, which just feels… wrong. It would be one thing if Sonic loved seafood or something, but this is ridiculous.

However, the biggest shortcoming with this new open-world design has nothing to do with the buffet of mostly fun activities – Frontiers simply can’t keep up with Sonic’s godly pace at level technical level. My immersion breaks down about every five seconds when large objects, like part of a floating loop or a huge tree, appear right in front of me. Yes, that’s funny sometimes but it’s always jarring and just plain ugly. Most of the time it’s a railing or platform that appears a few feet away from you, but sometimes it’s an entire area of ​​the world. For all its amazingly fast loading capabilities, the PS5 just can’t seem to handle the hilariously fast Frontiers let me go. Whether I’m playing in 4K resolution at 30fps or the much more desirable 60fps mode (seriously, what are we even doing here to play a game so fast?), pop-ups are always a problem. In one case, I even ran so fast that the ground hadn’t loaded yet and I crashed through the map. That’s not a problem unique to an open world game, but Frontiers not being able to load in time is such a common thing that it leaves things flimsy and unpolished.