Sonic Frontiers Reviews
Sonic Frontiers could have been a great chance to bring fresh ideas and mechanics into Sonic (open) world, but, unfortunately, the result it's an unbalanced experience. The open world is quite shallow and empty, while technicallywise the game is unpolished. Anyway, the frantic Sonic experience is still there and the classic stages are blessed.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Even if you’ve set high expectations for Sonic Frontiers, I feel like the game should have no trouble meeting them. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Sonic Frontiers serves as one of the most refreshing entries the franchise has seen in years. If you’re on the fence, let this serve as an encouragement to check out the game. It’s well worth it, and then some.
It may not be the most solid game out there, but it sure is a daring bet that works better than many had expected. It gives Sonic lore a new scope.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
After decades of miserable failure, Sonic Team has finally made a good 3D Sonic the Hedgehog game, and it's one of the best open world platformers ever seen.
While not outright broken like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) or Sonic Boom, Sonic Frontiers is a heavily misguided game that muffles good ideas with questionable narrative, technical, and gameplay design decisions.
Sonic Frontiers is a strange, yet fun time. The individual levels showcase Sonic at his fast-paced, ring-hoarding best, and some of the overworlds sport rewarding exploration mechanics. The insistence by Sonic Team to jam in minigames that block progress to the story is frustrating to say the least, and some of the larger maps’ designs feel a little haphazard. Overall, though, the weirdness of the story will keep some going just to see, well, where the hell it’s all going. It’s weird how much this doesn’t feel like a Sonic game outside of the individual levels, but this is an interesting direction that Sonic Team has taken their blue blur, and hopefully we will see a continued evolution that coalesces into something great.
Sonic Frontiers is broken beyond belief with mechanics that barely work and a camera so disastrous it’s literally sickening. The “Open Zones” are disjointed, unpopulated wastelands that do less than nothing to justify their depressing existence. An unpleasant mess, looking and feeling like a mishmash of disparate assets duct taped together, and that’s before we consider the damning amount of recycled content. It’s honestly embarrassing that any professional studio could have made something so cheap, so sad, and so thoroughly incompetent. Even by Sonic Team’s low standards, this is pathetic.
Sonic Frontiers really picks up the slack where this franchise started to falter. It's still a Sonic game at its core and makes sure to stay true to the name even when branching out into other areas unfamiliar to the series.
Overall, Sonic Frontiers is an above-average 3D Sonic game with potentially intriguing ideas, but the positives are constantly at odds with the negatives. While it may have an engaging combat system, classic Sonic platforming levels, and awesome boss fights, they do not make up for bland open-world locales and an overabundance of dull mini-games that break the game’s pacing.
Sonic Frontiers is a fascinating game, mostly because of how little it actually feels like the rest of the series. The game’s marketing has called it an “evolution” of the Sonic formula, and that’s certainly accurate, but it’s still hampered by some growing pains. Sublime exploration and intuitive mechanics constantly clash with Sonic Frontiers’ insistence on introducing mandatory mini-games and one-off gimmicks, many of which simply aren’t engaging.
The open-world adventure is brilliant in terms of input and response at the expense of any discernible logic
It may have had a mixed reception earlier this year, but Sonic Frontiers' final form is a brilliantly refreshing adventure that gives the series a much-needed shake-up. The occasional control and camera 'quirks' still pop their head up, but they appear far less frequently than Sonic fans will be used to, making for a much less frustrating experience overall. We would absolutely welcome more of this.
When the blue hedgehog again runs on our television screen, it is with mixed results. For every part we genuinely like, there are elements that do their best to hack apart the joy of gaming. That's a shame, because this is in several ways the best Sonic game in three dimensions. If you're a big Sonic fan, Sonic Frontiers is still worth a look, despite all the problems.
Review in Swedish | Read full review
Ultimately, that’s the feeling I leave Sonic Frontiers with. It’s not perfect and it could never be perfect with the chances it takes but ultimately the chances are generally the best parts of the game. I have not been this excited to talk about a Sonic game since Generations which was over a decade ago. Sonic is fun, and I think a lot of people will have fun with it. I hope the team expands upon what they built here because I genuinely believe the next game built off this framework could be amazing.
Sonic Frontiers takes many steps in the right direction for Sonic games. Still, its biggest fault is that it tries to do so much, with how well it accomplishes everything varying greatly between interesting and frustrating. Longtime Sonic comics writer Ian Flynn penned parts of the story, and its narrative and music are some of the game's highlights worth mentioning. The moments that work in Sonic Frontiers can be fun and captivating, but as soon as players start to feel a groove, they're thrown into something different, changing what they're doing and creating a choppy flow to progression. The foundation for a consistent experience in the next 3D Sonic game is here, but Sonic Frontiers feels more like a test than a proper renaissance for the series quite yet.
Sonic Frontiers can't offer any outstanding visuals, but some of the levels give a strong nostalgic vibes, while open world segments are filled with some great boss fights and nice puzzles. Frontiers is definitely better than anything Sonic Team has done in the past 10 years time, so it is a step in the right direction at the very least.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Whatever this game is, it should provide a solid framework for the developers at Sonic Team to take and improve upon in the next Sonic game, whatever that may be.
Sonic Frontiers may not be the best Sonic the Hedgehog ever made, but it's definitely in the upper echelon of the franchise. The new open-world formula works surprisingly well even with its issues, and Cyber Space stages and combat are well-designed, engaging and, most of all, fun. With some tweaks, the Sonic Frontiers formula could be the basis for the franchise moving forward, potentially bringing it back to its glory days.
Sonic Frontiers begs, steals, and borrows to create a better 3D Sonic title than we've seen in quite some time. There's absolutely still room to grow, but this is a largely positive step forward for the franchise outside its 2D roots.