Gotta Go Good.
Updated: Sep 26, 2022 9:30 am
Sonic Frontiers is being incredibly badly marketed. The initial reveal of the game showed a very rough-looking breath of the wild-esque game that simply didn’t have an identity of its own to speak of. It was poorly shown off, with pop-in just everywhere and lag a consistent factor. Each reveal after that has shown the game in a far better light, if only in very short bursts and without really explaining what the game was trying to achieve. When Sonic Frontiers Previews began to release during Gamescom 2022, there was hope though.
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That hope has paid off, as it turns out.
Gotta Go To The Past
Yet the game is an incredibly fun time, one that should satisfy long-time Sonic fans, while also trying something new. A big issue with past 3D Sonic games has been that they either play it far too safe (Sonic The Hedgehog 2006, Sonic Generations, Sonic Colors) or that they take absolutely wild swings with some disappointing pay-offs (Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Lost World, Sonic Forces). Nothing past Sonic Heroes manages to really capture that feeling progression within the series itself, at least until now. Sonic Frontiers is looking to balance out the brand new mechanics with some older elements from other games, while moving forward with what could be described as the classic Sonic Adventure formula.
Indeed in the demo that I played the first thing I saw was Green Hill Zone. You turn around in the open world and are faced with a gate that’ll take you directly to Green Hill Zone itself. Green Hill Zone isn’t just a nostalgia trip either, or there so that you are tricked into enjoying the game like several other Sonic games have used it for. It’s got a brand new music track, new optional objectives and the new running system feels utterly incredible in actual play. While the level is really only two or three minutes at most, it’s a great showcase of what Sonic Frontiers wants to be: it wants to be something you can go back to over and over again and a platform in which SEGA will create the new norm of Sonic. There are even 2D sections dotted throughout the game, though I sadly didn’t have a chance to see them for myself during my brief stint with the title.
Discovering The New World With Our Sonic Frontiers Preview
Once you leave Green Hill Zone, you’re faced with the prospect of traveling around the open world, discovering the very clearly Zelda-inspired game world and the shockingly nice-looking world. It shouldn’t work, it shouldn’t be good, it just shouldn’t work. Every other attempt at making a Sonic game even similar to this has ended up as a buggy mess that’s either very quickly forgotten about or remembered in infamy, so why does this work so well?
In part, it’s due to how well integrated your existence in this world is. You’re not just dumped into the world and expected to swallow a world that looks like ours, there’s a reason for this (that we won’t spoil). In addition to this new world, you’re given a brand new combat system that’s based on performing combos, which is really mostly the one button to do different movies, but there’s also the ability to do a Stomp move that’ll wipe out the nearby enemies.
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Sonic Frontiers has potential in spades, but there are a lot of issues that could come in. From what I saw there were still pop-in issues, and the game itself could suffer from having the classic Sonic syndrome of too much too fast and too little at the same time. We’ll see what comes later down the line and whether further reveals are much better than the initial reveal.
