Sonic Frontiers Review

Official cover image of Sonic Frontiers from SEGA

With every new Sonic The Hedgehog game, the public shows skepticism toward the franchise, since many other entries in the series have received negativity. However, Sonic Frontiers is the first Sonic game in a while to defy the skepticism from its predecessors. Everything from the controls, the writing, the open-world, the CyberSpace levels; it’s giving people a hard time critiquing it. The story follows Sonic, Tails, and Amy seeking out the Chaos Emeralds, mystical emeralds that are imbued with the power of chaos energy. Unfortunately for our heroes, the evil Dr. Eggman has done something with CyberSpace and has trapped Amy, Tails, and even Knuckles as well. Sonic is the only one that can move freely in and out of CyberSpace and in doing so he must free his friends, but it’s not an easy challenge. Sonic must fight against robotic-like enemies and eventually battle a titan he encounters on each island he goes on.

This is the first open-world Sonic game and a majority of the game will have the player make use of Sonic’s movement in the open-world. This is also the second Sonic game to have a combat system. Although it is very basic, it does what it needs to do considering it’s Sonic, a franchise marketed towards children. Everything looks outstanding too, this is one of those Sonic games to have little to no glitches, although there may be a little bug at some times this doesn’t make the game unplayable. The biggest issue for the game is that some structures are induced by a pop in effect, some may have trouble with this as some structures will not properly load until Sonic collides with said structures, others have not had issues with the effect and can clearly see objects from a distance. Otherwise, this game is extremely consistent, even the soundtrack is phenomenal. Every piece of music fits so well, from the regular open-world songs to the intense boss battles. Every character feels different from previous entries in a good way and feel like each of these characters have grown and are committed to their change.

 For my final verdict, I will give this game a 9/10 as it does what it tries to do very well and only is held back slightly due to some minor technical issues. Sonic Frontiers is currently available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC.