Sonic Frontiers Reviews

This is definitely the best Sonic game I ever played. First it started with my curiousity, but longer I player, more I was skinking into it. Fantastic atmosphere, fantastic music, exploration is a pleasure and I thought Sonic won't work well with open/semi open world, but they did it and it's awesome! I took my time to do other stuff because I really didn't want to finish this game XD But, I have some issues with main story. Crazy how they kept attention to include details about previous games, wrote new stuff, yet some parts left me with questions and no answers. To complete the story and fulfill plot holes came out The Final Horizon update. This ending really gave me what I needed and basically changed everything. Even if previous one had good parts. But this update also makes the game very difficult. For the first time I had to switch to Easy level because of towers. Strangely climbing on towers turns into "Getting over it" kind of game. It's very challenging and slows Sonic down. As the character, he supposed to be fast and look cool so I don't think it fits the game but could have been kept in additional challenges outside of the story. Also this isn't only one example of unbalanced difficulty. To get S result on Stage 1-2 you basically become speedrunner, when it's relatively easy to get S rank. This is strange. So in conclusion, it's 9/10 game in my opinion. Updated ending is blessing and if only difficulty would be balanced then it would be 10/10 game. Still, it's best Sonic game I've ever played and I truly love it :)

Its really fun and the definition of more than the sum of its parts, just mod the kinks out and its a top 10 sonic game. Makes me excited for the future of the franchise!

I first played "Sonic Frontiers" on Switch a little over a year ago. At the time, I thought it was an okay game. When I revisited the game on Steam Deck this year, I was shocked by how badly it has aged in such a short span of time. It doesn't help that "Shadow Generations" released last year and absolutely put "Frontiers" to shame in every possible way from level design to game mechanics to play control. This game is like an iPhone that had its support dropped by Apple years ago. It's like Walter Donovan, and replaying it made me feel like Elsa Schneider watching him rapidly age into dust after he drank from the wrong cup. "Frontiers" is best described as more of a proof-of-concept for an openworld Sonic game rather than a cohesive and fully realized game in its own right. The game mechanics are best summed up by the classic phrase from "Whose Line Is It Anyway?": the rules are made up and the points don't matter. The game design is filled with redundancies. There are "Memory Tokens" scattered across the map by hand that the player needs to collect to progress through the game, but you don't need to find them. Sometimes Memory Tokens are randomly dropped by enemies, sometimes they are found as loot when you destroy something, and if you're not so lucky then you can just buy them using reward tokens from the fishing minigame. It's like this with EVERY resource you need to collect. You're supposed to beat bosses to earn Portal Gears, but you don't need to. You're supposed to beat Cyberspace Levels to earn keys, but you don't need to. This "one size fits all" approach to its design makes the game feel very timid and low stakes. Since it's easy to end up with way more Memory Tokens than you need to finish a part of the game, you really have to force yourself to try and collect all the Tokens that the map designers hid by hand. It doesn't help that solving the Rube Goldberg puzzles to earn these Tokens is often an exercise in frustration. The game's seemingly arbitrary draw distance makes it difficult to make sense of where the series of gimmicks that lead you to a Token are supposed to start. I would often just try to figure out a way to break the design of a puzzle, which is usually more fun than doing it via the intended method. Sonic Team is like John Hammond taking his guests on a tour of his cloning facility, and I often found myself like Ian Malcolm raising the handle bar and ditching the lame scripted tour. Sometimes blazing across the giant open map at Sonic speed is exhilirating. And sometimes you run into a gimmick you didn't see and get thrown way off course by scripted BS. "Sonic Adventure" scripted gimmicks and openworld exploration just don't mix. As you get further into the game, you also start to encounter gimmicks that lock you into a 2D sidescrolling view. At this point, you need to develop a knack for breaking out of unwelcome sidescrolling sections. Often times, I found myself fighting the game rather than enjoying it. Who thought it was a good idea to disable the map screen in the middle of combat? In an openworld game? For a game that wants the player to feel liberated, "Frontiers" sure installs A LOT of roadblocks in the player's path. There's nothing I love more in an openworld game than aggroing a random enemy I didn't see and having to sit through a long scripted attack sequence before I can regain control and continue exploring the world the developers created. To say that this game was poorly planned out would be an understatement. Is there a single person on the planet who felt that Sonic needed an EXP system and attack combos? In "Frontiers" our favorite blue hedgehog boasts an entire "Skill Tree" worth of attacks, but I found myself spamming a handful of them and getting through the game just fine. I would have gladly sacrificed the "attack button" to have the Homing Attack be a one-button doubletap move like in EVERY OTHER 3D SONIC GAME EVER. Did we learn nothing from "Sonic Heroes"? Keep combat in Sonic games simple. I just want to ram into enemies at high speed and be on my merry way. This is SONIC, not Zelda. You know what else I don't need in my Sonic games? A weirdly morose story and lots of trite and stilted dialog. Even Shadow never took himself this seriously. A scene where Knuckles flashes back to "Sonic 3", complete with vintage pixel art, got a really bad laugh from me. There is too much sincerity in Ian Flynn's localized script. Amy Rose is also ridiculously out-of-character, as if a feminist drone was looming over Ian's shoulder as he typed out her dialog. Amy's like a reverse Stepford Wife in this game, but still robotic. Whatever you do, don't play the Final Horizon DLC. It makes the core game look like "Sonic Adventure 2" by comparison. I am not exaggerating when I say this is the worst Sonic content since 2006. You know you're in for a bad time when the DLC starts you out controlling Amy Rose. It doesn't get better. You ever heard of "microaggressions"? When you play this content, you'll get the impression Sonic Team doesn't like you, and specifically you. You'll ask yourself what you did to ever deserve this. It's that bad. "Sonic Frontiers" fails to achieve 60 FPS on Steam Deck, and I'm not sure why. The graphics aren't very impressive, and there doesn't seem to be anything sophisticated going on under the hood. Whatever the game is using hardware resources on, it's not adding anything to the experience. Best you can hope for is a solid capped 30 FPS most of the time. This game looks ugly and it feels ugly. You know things are bad when the BARREN DESERT LEVEL looks more colorful and vibrant than the verdant island that preceded it. There's a lot of ground I haven't covered in this review. The soundtrack, a curious mix of minimalistic piano music and bad EDM, deserves a good roast. I haven't even explained what a Portal Gear is, despite mentioning it in the second paragraph. Doesn't matter. In the end, all you really need to know is that this game is a Skinner Box. It's not deeply fun. You want that, play "Shadow Generations". That game is the result of Sonic Team studying the guinea pigs who played "Sonic Frontiers".

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☑ Good ☐ Decent ☐ Bad ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☑ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☑ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☐ Adults ☐ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☐ Potato ☐ Decent ☑ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☐ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☑ Big ☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☑ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☑ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☐ No Story ☐ Some lore ☑ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☑ Average ☐ Long ☐ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☐ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☑ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☐ Minor bugs ☑ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---SCORE { ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☑ 5 ☐ 6 ☐ 7 ☐ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10 (I gave this game another chance on PS5 and put in around 20 hours, that's why my playtime is so low on Steam.) I've played Roblox games better than this garbage. Spend your money on Helldivers 2 or Deep Rock Galactic or smth worth your time or money. Sega, this was a disappointment.

Open world is a bit tedious even to look at after a while, the story if it can even be called that lacks a lot of effort and the game itself feels lacking. I expected more from saga, this feels like a cash out. I spent 20 hours trying to enjoy the game as i love sonic and most other sonic games, however it jut feels like a kids game stabbing at nostalgia and poorly at that. Skill tree is nice to see they tried but is lacking a lot and it is almost like they did not expect someone to clear everything as they went. Within the first few hours i had maxed out combat stat and was half way on speed, leaving me in a position of always win unless your not touching the controls on hard :( There is a lot more to say but there is no point me complaining all day, final straw for me was my own stupidity. I was going around completing the islands 100% and accidentally loaded an old save. I did a fight to warm up and the game auto saved (CAN ONLY HAVE 1 AUTO SAVE) deleting hours of gameplay i had not saved. (I know i shot myself in the foot but is 2-5 auto saves in a game that spams saves like the pope spams kids too much to ask?)

game runs poorly on my pc but its a good game methinks, dont know why i bought this again since i already own it on my playstation

this game is peak. it's a brand new style for sonic and opened up a ton of doors, for example the physics engine gave way for shadow generations. it's fun and great and the modding scene is super cool, although you'll need to downgrade to 1.41 to mod the game cuz DENOVO

I'm continuosly blown away by how good the game's music and visuals are. With the addition of the spindash, this game is so much more fun to traverse and also adds so many opportunities for the cyberspace levels. Just when I thought I was growing tired of Frontiers I unlock the spindash and suddenly I unlock so many opportunities that just weren't possible before. The story, just like the game, isn't perfect but I do think Final Horizon made the ending significantly better. Final Horizon, also providing a plethora of new content that adds many hours of you try to 100% it. Speaking of 100%ing, I love all the extra content. While the Battle Rushes don't demand perfection, they do encourage you to give it your all to not only get that S rank but to constantly improve your times. The Cyberspace rush also add some interesting challenges. Do you play it like Arcade mode and go for the fastest route and take the most risks, or do you play it safe as to not exhaust yourself from starting your run over 5 minutes in 5 different times because you keep messing a skip up. Tldr; this game has a ton of content and the gameplay is engaging enough that any completionist will be kept entirely entertained throughout. The game also looks beautiful and the music will not grow tired over the course of dozens of hours.

This game was good. sometimes it did things i didnt agree with, but then it would be ok bc i got to listen to butt rock while sonic flies around and fish and stuff, so thats cool. I would say this is the best 3D sonic game since Sonic Adventure. If you are like me and have a brain problem where you think sonic is cool, this is a game you will probably like.

This is really hard for me to say but this is such a middle of the road sonic game. To start with the positives: - Game has stunning graphics - Game has great music - The game play is fine - The boss fights are great! That is about it for me on positives because the rest of this game kinda blows. This game becomes very tedious very quickly with all of the memory token collecting. I know this is like the main part of the whole game but its so time consuming and just becomes boring. This is mainly because there just not that creatively placed and in such bland locations! Another part of this game that drags is the story. Its just hella boring and not needed! I would rather play a sonic game with a simple story over some drawn out boring one. The main levels that are played in this are absolutely whack. There not badly designed its mainly just the physics because for some reason you feel a lot slower and heavier than you do in the main over world which I really don't understand???? It makes the actual level portion an absolute pain in the arse to get through because with these physics it just makes getting through levels harder than it needs to be. The over world portion of the game is fine but can get a bit boring to explore as once you've been through about two islands it just becomes the same and begins to get very stale. Overall I liked this game and can still recommend it. But, only if your not gonna get bored by aids physics and collectathon game play that gets stale very fast.