I actually have 3 other reviews that I’m writing right now, taking my time on them. In the meantime, I started playing this thing and… well, this impressions post needs to take precedence.

I had no expectations for Sonic Frontiers because the marketing has been crap but some things looked okay. But I was worried when it looked like it was going for an open world angle. Because basically every open world game is shit. But I still wanted to give this a chance because, despite most post-Genesis Sonic games being bad games, I always give him a chance. I always hold hope that, one day, Sonic will be back to his former glory. Spoilers: he’s not.

After almost 6 hours of playing this game, I think I’m done. This is not a game I want to finish playing. But I still want to talk about it, so let’s do this!

This is NOT a review, since I’m not done with the game. But I won’t be done with it, so this is the most I’m putting out about this game.

What works?

Sonic controls mostly really smoothly. There’s a bit of jank still because Sonic Team have no idea how to get Sonic to turn while running fast in semi-straightaways in cyberspace levels, but when in the open world he turns fine which is weird.

Some of the cyberspace levels have been okay, partly due to Sonic controlling well. But there’s pretty big problems with them.

Some of the music’s okay. But there’s some problems with it.

The combat is okay, if really limited since most enemies have, like, one attack that insta-kills them, but it basically works. Weird to say for a Sonic game, but I at least won’t complain about the fact that the combat is here. I can complain about WHY it’s here though.

That’s it.

What doesn’t work?

You get to the title screen and things fall apart, which is a pretty fun bit of foreshadowing. It’s just a boring shot of the sky with nothing interesting happening. Sign of things to come.

First off, the voice acting is shit. Not sure what happened here, if it’s a director issue or an actor issue, but holy crap. On the first island, at least, this was no good. Sonic doesn’t sound at all like Sonic, first of all. Amy sounded fucking bored every line. There’s a couple lines I think she was supposed to shout (based on the animation) but didn’t. This ain’t good.

I very quickly mentioned that some of the music was okay. Well, there’s a bit of a problem with that, that being that most of the game takes place in the big empty open worlds (more on that shit later), which features understated environmental piano shit. It’s fine technically, but it’s not particularly exciting. As you may recall, Breath of the Wild did this, and ended up not having a particularly memorable OST while you’re playing. It doesn’t SOUND like a Sonic game for most of it. When you get into a cyberspace level or boss battle, the Sonic feel almost comes back, but those are short, stupid moments.

The cyberspace levels are the few times where the game almost starts feeling like Sonic. The problem, of course, is that they’re short, easy, under-designed (a lot of them just copying designs from older games) and they end up feeling kinda pointless. Like, yeah you need to do them and do some of the objectives (finishing the level, finishing the level fast, finishing the level with a certain number of rings and finding all the red rings)… but once you’re done after 2-3 attempts total to get all the objectives (sometimes I’d skip the time-related one), there’s no reason to go back, and there’s not enough of them, and they’re too fucking short. Most are done in under a minute, so far. It’s really a shame that these levels feel like nothing. There’s not really obstacles, the enemies don’t do shit against you, so the closest you get to challenge is missing a red ring. Even the time limits for each level is bullshit, every level I could easily fuck around a bit and still get the S rank time limit.

But the “meh” of the cyberspace levels are a high point compared to the “holy shit I want to die” design of the shitty stupid open world concept. Basically, they made several Ubisoft open worlds, plopped Sonic in there, and didn’t really build anything worth doing. There’s these “challenges” strewn about the world that are so pointless and easy they might as well not be there. Like “oh there’s this little loop thing, run in it for a few seconds”. That’s not a challenge. Neither is “there’s 3 buttons, press them in any order”, or “sidestep a few times”. That’s not content. But you get rewarded for doing it.

At least in Mario Odyssey when a star was really simple to get, it was still a puzzle to figure out (before you unlocked the hint system, if you even realize that was a thing). Here, no. The CORE GAMEPLAY of Sonic Frontiers is bafflingly stupid. The core gameplay is opening up your map, choosing an icon to go to, then running to that icon to get the item related to that icon. That’s what you’re doing here, ad nauseum. Collectibles are required to get more collectibles, but if the collectibles aren’t fun to get, there’s a problem.

For collectibles you see on the map, there’s hearts/medals/whatever Tails wants (I didn’t get to Tails), they’re extremely common, and also useless in the PC version (or in my install of it, at least… more about that later). There’s cyberspace levels, they give you keys. You access cyberspace levels from gears you get from fighting enemies or just finding them in the environment. There’s chaos emeralds, you need keys to get those.  Then for actual plot progression other than the emeralds, there’s spots where Amy/Knuckles/Tails are waiting for you to give them their desired item to get cutscenes, and similar spots with the game’s villain or whatever she is. There’s a fishing spot. Big the Cat is there. It might be the most boring fishing minigame ever made. There’s fight icons where minibosses are waiting for you, they’re not interesting to fight. There’s missions, which are these spots that unlock more of the maps visually so you can see more icons when you open the map. These have a “challenge”, which is usually not actually challenging. The best ones are probably the ones that have you race against time to get to another spot, but they give so much time you won’t fail unless you really try to fail.

For collectibles you don’t see on the map, there’s this little rock people things, you give them to a bigger version of those for speed and ring capacity powerups. Ring capacity is a stupid upgrade because you get a power up when your rings are maxed out, so having to get more rings for that is dumb. Some of the other icons on the screen give out seeds that you give to another one of these rock people. Red seeds increase your attack power, blue seeds increase your defense power (mildly reduces rings lost). Oh and there’s purple coins. You give those to Big the Cat to play the stupid fishing minigame, and you can use your rewards from fishing to get shit you don’t need. That’s kinda about it. Not really a “doesn’t work” thing, but it’s an extension of the core gameplay being shit.

Even the combat is just a means to, without challenge, get more stuff. There’s a pointless stupid skill tree, you get skill points from killing enemies but you get most of the moves by the end of the first island so… whatever? You also get hearts/medals/whatevers from them, and sometimes gears to unlock cyberspace levels. An enemy you kill disappears for a while, though randomly sometimes you get a meteor shower thing, which gives you plenty of purple coins but also revives all the enemies you already previously beat.

The one boss I fought was just beaten by button mashing because fuck designing bosses I guess. Heck, I assume most of the bosses are fought as Super Sonic, who is invincible, so there’s just no challenge (and I assume that because you need to get all but one of the chaos emeralds before being allowed to get to the boss fights, the boss carries the last one). There’s one of the new moves in this game that makes you to draw a line as you run, if draw a circle it spawns rings (and other collectibles because fuck sensible game design). So Super Sonic has a time limit, but if you max out your rings before fighting the boss, you have nothing to worry about. No idea why you’d make bosses you can’t lose against.

So you have a game where the devs forgot to make gameplay. It’s a game where a lot of elements LOOK good, visually, but if you actually look at how the game functions, it’s basically a big pile of nothing. The whole of the gameplay is just looking at a map to select a point to go to, then going to that point, then being rewarded for going to that point without having to put in any effort, to eventually fight a boss that you win by mashing buttons. I beat the first boss, got partway through the second open world area, and I just had to give up because it literally felt like my soul was being sucked out of my body as I was playing. This game is pointless. It’s not just that it’s easy, but rather that they forgot to put any kind of challenge at all.

I will note PC performance… Namely, the entire PC version is a fucking mess. Some graphical problems happen a lot (the game really has trouble rendering the world behind Sonic’s fishing rod, for some reason), though some of them I wonder if they’re on purpose. There’s a good amount of pop-in even on PC, but the other versions are worse. The PC version limits framerate to 60… that’s fucking stupid, people already found ways to uncap framerate and it just works so it’s arbitrary. At least it was a completely smooth 60, but there’s no reason to limit it. I had issues the first time playing it where every window and my desktop background went dark while playing this, so, when tabbing out, I had to resize my windows to make them appear correctly. No idea why this happened.

But there a BIG bug on the PC version…. You’re meant to get these hearts for Amy and medals for Knuckles and such (as I mentioned a few times), which allows you to unlock cutscenes and progress the story… well, I don’t know if something funky happened with my install or if it happens to everyone on the PC version, but I didn’t actually have to do that. Going to any spot for cutscenes, it says how many hearts/medals/whatever you need to unlock that cutscene… that number was always zero. The animation would show Sonic giving the collectible, but my count didn’t change. So the most common non-ring collectible you see all over the map does nothing, in the PC version. I’m sure this will be fixed, but talk about a stupid thing to not fucking test. I still got all the hearts in the first island despite them doing nothing, because… I like to pretend the game is working correctly, you know. Didn’t make me feel any better about how lame the gameplay is.

Overall

This game is soulless garbage.

It’s really a shame, because at first I thought this would actually work, but, as I unlocked more of the first island’s map I found exactly how this game works, it lost all possible appeal. It’s boring. One of the most boring games I’ve ever played, in fact. There’s no challenge to anything, you just go to spots on the map and get the thing that’s at the spot. It’s not that it’s easy, that would be fine. It’s that literally you don’t even have to try to succeed, that’s the opposite of a good game. Even a Kirby game, which are easy, requires to not be shit at it to progress. Here, the only thing stopping you from progressing is if you actively decide not to. It’s pretty ridiculous how awful this “gameplay” loop is.

Sonic Team did the most baffling thing ever. They made a game that, as far as control and such, functions very well… but they built fucking nothing around it. What’s the point of making a game that plays well if you don’t put anything actually worth doing in it? There’s no gameplay here.

I do not recommend this game. At all. Unless you really like being bored. This game just put me to sleep as I was playing. A Sonic game shouldn’t put you to sleep.

I don’t even know where I’d really rank this in the grand scheme of the Sonic franchise. It’s probably the most boring of the bunch, but it’s not the least functional of the bunch so that… something?