We are at a new turning point in Sonic’s 30-year history. The adored favorite toy mascot is once again a major attraction, surpassing Sony’s Uncharted at the box office and giving birth to a new Netflix line. And after jumping from the side-scrolling platformer to the 3D soap opera, the series is now making its way into its most ambitious entry to date with Sonic Frontiers. But the recent trailers have worried the fans and after 30 minutes of presenting the game in a practical way, it left me speechless. I played the game while watching the Summer Game Fest last week in Los Angeles and while I’m not ready to delete it yet, I remain incredibly skeptical about what Sonic Team leader Takashi Iizuka and his crew are doing. The demo opened with Sonic, separated from his furry companions Tails and Amy Rose, falling from a wormhole into a bucolic archipelago called Starfall Islands and recruited by a mysterious AI to find the Chaos Emeralds. From there I started exploring puzzles, grinding on rails and fighting the occasional boss. The time I spent was occasionally fun, often messy and usually quite rough. I have postponed writing these impressions in part because there was not a single tone to do in the show. We took a panoramic shot of recently unveiled footage with Sonic Frontiers looking like a sleek Unreal Engine project. The game looked better personally, especially when the skies opened and the sun began to set (the islands follow the typical short day and night cycle of the open world), but it was still mostly empty. Enemy pockets here and there could be demolished through a new battle system that includes a series of automatic punches and kicks, defensive avoidances, and even a timed engineer. I solved light spatial puzzles, such as stepping on pressure plates or navigating launch pads to unlock collectibles. And occasionally an open treadmill with speed increases lets me pick up hoops while rushing up a short obstacle course on the mountain trail. I quickly got bored. G / O Media may receive a commission I was not immediately drawn to how Sonic feels in control. He felt something. It never seemed to build momentum satisfactorily and the intricate and uneven topography made it difficult to go very fast for very long periods of time (of all the Sonic Frontiers seem to fall from Breath of the Wild, the green endurance ring icon exhausted when amplifying is almost one to one). Battlefield and lane crossing rely on a sophisticated targeting system to make sure Sonic is aiming its rotational attacks in the right direction. Towards the end of the demo I encountered a giant boss called The Tower and for a moment I felt like I was in Shadow of the Colossus. It was a moment for a while that was cut short by fighting both the camera and Sonic’s tumultuous movement as I tried to hit the weak points of the enemy without constantly falling from the side. When the camera, aiming and movement are aligned, Sonic Frontiers comes close to finding an occult but satisfying way to navigate a huge map. The rest of the year I felt like an annoyance in navigation. If I sound harsh, it’s because the demo did not do a good job of showing how Sonic Frontiers’ open world elements will unlock new possibilities for the long run. I felt rough and unfinished, and he stuck no small thing I could then point to and say “It was fun – let me do it for a whole game!” In fact, the graphics and the innocent artistic direction were like the smallest problems of the 2022 holiday game. To be clear, I think there is a version of Sonic Frontiers, based on what they showed me, that can be combined and is great . I’m just not sure, based on my limited time with the demo, that the Sonic Team will get there soon enough. Despite the fact that some fans are gathering around the hashtag #DelaySonicFrontiers, Takashi Iizuka told VGC that there were no plans to do so at the moment and that the team is actually very happy with the results and insider comments so far. It is also not clear how old the construction was played by me and other journalists, with IGN stating that its initial preview was based on a much older one. Otherwise, Iizuka and the rest of Sonic’s team are still tired of them. Sonic Frontiers will be released on Xbox, PlayStation, PC and Switch before the end of the year.
