As someone who grew up playing Sonic just as much as Mario, hearing of an open world Sonic game was definitely an exciting moment. SEGA and the Sonic Team have delivered Sonic Frontiers and it is pretty much everything I was hoping it to be! While there were some concerns about an open world having too much vast emptiness to it, they turned around and delivered a balanced world of parkour, enemies, challenges, and more. While this game may be a bit hard for someone who has never played a Sonic game before to break into, I would still argue that this is probably the best Sonic game since the classics on Sega Genesis.

Story

After a strange power tears the crew out of the sky, they all crash onto a strange land. When coming to, Sonic finds himself alone and sets off to find his friends who he soon learns he must save. In order to free them from a strange cyber-corruption that has them trapped in a distorted reality - or past reality rather - he will need to gather their memories.

Meanwhile, an active threat has been sent out to stop Sonic as a new character, who is unnamed until closer to the end of the game. While this little cyber girl has a lot of mystery to her, she seems to be protecting something… Nonetheless, Sonic won’t let anything stop him from saving his friends; even at the cost of absorbing some of the cyber-corruption himself. In order to fight the Titan of the map - which there is one for each map - he will need to collect all the Chaos Emeralds to become Super Sonic!

As the story goes on, you will learn more about the ancients, their technology, their goals, who and what the Koco are, who and what that cyber girl is, and so much more!

Gameplay

The very first thing you get to do is play through a standard level in the game. There are a whole bunch of classic Sonic-style levels and they come with various backgrounds while splitting between 3D-built and side-scroller-built level types. In order to reach these levels regularly, you will need to defeat mini-boss-level enemies and gather the gears they drop. You can then take these gears to the level entrances - which look like ancient thrones - and unlock the level.

Levels themselves have their own objectives, but they are always the same categories. One point for completing the level, one point for finding all 5 red coins, one point for finishing the level with a certain amount of coins, and one point for completing the level within a specified time limit. Each objective completion will award you one key and by completing all four objectives, you will be awarded extra keys. These keys are needed in order to unlock the chaos emeralds. The game will indicate when you have collected enough keys to unlock an emerald.

In the open-world or rather open-map, section of the game, you are free to go wherever you want! The reason I specify this game as more of an open map rather than an open world is because of the way they break the game up. There are five maps in total. Four of these maps will be built with activity similarities and one map will be an interesting parkour-filled challenge that changes the pace while progressing the story. Once you complete a map, it will take you straight to the next one, but you can always pick what map you are on in the map menu screen.

Here is where the bulk of the game will take place; the open map. One thing that will be learned very quickly is that this game has mandatory collect-a-thon tasks throughout. Granted, they did it in a smart way as what you are collecting are the memories of your friend you are trying to save. They put them littering the entirety of the map and you get them pretty much every time you do one of their random parkour pieces that are around the map. These can be aspects of rail grinding, speed ball dashing, rope grabbing, wall running, and so much more! They really give a wide variety of these little challenges that make it fun to go through. Plus, sometimes it takes time to look around and see how to get started with these challenges. Not to mention, the challenges themselves differ a bit by map. In the first map, random parkour layouts play out in 3D style mostly while the third map had a lot of ones pull into the side-scroller style mostly.

Another way to get memories, along with an assortment of other collectibles and even parkour challenge starters, is by finding a chest icon on the ground. One of the first skills you unlock, which is actually the first one they have you get with your skill points, is a Tron-style speed streak. You basically just have to run around something you want the move to inflict and close the circle by running through the line you’ve made. Doing this correctly causes a flash and then it will do damage to whatever is in the middle of it - or in the case of chest signs, it will provide the goodies it had within it.

Going back to the skill points, you do have a skill tree. Here you can unlock other moves to fight with. Fighting is really smooth in this game and there is an auto-lock that you can change just by moving the camera, but it is fast pace so you need to know your move set options and which are more powerful. I suggest picking one side of the skill tree to focus on before going to the other side as the big kick and the homing missile moves are by far the most powerful. Using more powerful attacks is especially useful in the boss fights as Super Sonic against the Titans.

As you are completing various parts of the map, another thing you need to be doing is actually unlocking the map itself. You do this by completing areas actually labeled as challenge spots. When you find one, it can be a number of challenges but it won’t always tell you exactly what it is or what to do. But once you figure it out and complete the challenge, which most of them aren’t super difficult, it will give you a chunk of the map. By completing more of these, they will actually spawn rails that connect to them and this makes traveling around the map so much faster and so much easier!

You are given a task-by-task quest list to complete, but you can honestly do whatever you want. Yeah, you will need to complete that current task to move forward, but if you want to go do a bunch of levels, snag all the keys, get all the chaos emeralds, and collect a ton of memories - nobody will stop you. However, the story won’t progress until you complete the active quest and it will have an in-game overlay icon showing you where to go, plus they make it very obvious when looking at the map.

As for the collectibles that are extra but will give you a personal boost, you will want to find as many of the little Koco’s as you can find and gather as many Red Seeds (which look like a heart with spikes) and Blue Seeds (which look like a blue ball with spikes). Taking the two seeds to the Elder Koco will grand you level-ups in both your defense and power. Every Blue Seed grants more defense and every Red Seed grants more power. By taking the little Koco’s to their indicated collector, they will grant you level-ups in either Ring Capacity or Speed.

Audio and Visual

Once again, the Sonic Team have done an awesome job with their music choice for the game! From what I could tell, the music has even custom queues to help it match better with the cinematic moments all while not actually breaking the flow of the song in any way making the transition from in-game to cinematic fairly seamless. Along with that, the voice acting was fairly well done and the lines used were a mixture of cheesy and actually kind of nice.

As for the visuals, I will positively state that this game looks pretty stunning, all things considered. I love how each map had a very distinct style to it, the whole cyber-space mesh background in the levels, and the flow between side-scrolling and 3D segments. However, there were plenty of clippings in the visuals and just a number of aesthetically questionable aspects that didn’t go unnoticed. On the same hand, they can be overlooked, so this is really a minor complaint that is just worth noting.

Replayability

It took me 18 hours to beat the game and I definitely didn’t complete each map. While I did manage to nearly fully complete the first map, the others weren’t even close! With how much there is to do in this game and how long it takes to beat, I’m not sure there is a real plausible replayability to it. However, when you beat the game it does unlock Arcade Mode which will let you play just the levels themselves without having to go to the open maps and run all the way to the level entrance. That was definitely a great call!

What It Could Have Done Better

Having a vast amount of mini-games in one massive game can be an easy way to overlook the controls for a segment or two. But I thought it was a bit of a letdown that some of the hard-to-control sections were areas that really should have had a great deal of effort put into them. The only example I want to give, in order to avoid a bunch of spoilers, is when you have to guide the grinding disk in one of the Titan fights. Actually getting that close to hitting him was frustrating and avoiding missiles on that thing was literally impossible… I felt like I lucked through that part of the fight.

Most of the visual clips that were bothersome to see were during scripted moments of enemies! How are you going to program a flying enemy to take a very specific path and yet that path has part of their wing clip through a mountain or worse yet, have part of the creature itself clip through the energy road they created and I am actively running on? That definitely should have been caught before considered finished.

You have two Koco’s that take some of your collectibles and turn them into power. The red and blue seed Koco can take all of them and immediately give you the full upgrade. So, why when I bring the little Koco’s to the one that upgrades either your ring capacity or speed, I can’t just put all points into one thing? I honestly only put points into my speed when I returned the little Koco’s and hated that I had to do it one level at a time.

Verdict

Sonic Frontiers is the most in-depth, well-built, and flat-out entertaining Sonic game out there now! While it is a game that may be hard for new Sonic players to get started with, it has everything you could ask for and more. Every aspect of Sonic that I can remember had a moment in this game. Should they all have had a mandatory completion to continue? That is best left to each user to decide. I personally thought it was a nice touch and an enjoyable throwback to this series’ history. I hope to see the next Sonic game to be made with this much quality as it is one I would recommend to anybody looking for a fast-paced action-adventure game and doesn’t mind a bit of a collect-a-thon while they are at it.

Sonic Frontiers is now available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. It is coming soon to PC via Epic Games Store.