What You Need To Know About Sonic Frontiers – Sonic Frontiers – Gamereactor

As we mentioned in our previous preview, Sonic Frontiers is a tough game to master. Sometimes amazing, sometimes outrageous, at least the game stays true to the spirit of its protagonist, as it always lives on the fringes.

I’ve been playing the game for over six hours recently, and I’ve had a great opportunity to delve deeper into some of the new elements, notably its “open area” format, which completely changes the series’ usual formula.

If you’d like to learn more about open areas, progression, stories, and more, especially what’s causing our hopes and our concerns, this article provides an overview.

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open area

The main new addition to Sonic Frontier is the open area. Unlike the usual high-speed levels, these are huge open areas that you can freely explore at will. Having tried three areas now – Kronos, Ares, and Chaos – I find each area feels unique. Not only visually, but also in terms of overall atmosphere, enemy diversity and gameplay challenges. Chaos Island even pulled a big bunny out of a hat in full 2D when I least expected it.

That being said, many areas feel barren. Stumbled upon a crashed spaceship or some mysterious ruin adds some excitement, but in general, there’s definitely more to finding organically (rather than blindly chasing the dots on the map). Comparing Cronos with Rime’s world or Ares with Journey, it’s clear that the world of Sonic’s Frontier can’t compete with these indie titles. Unfortunately, the open area also suffers from dreaded pop-ups, and the action often gets a little chaotic as different events start to happen at the same time.

There’s a lot to discover in the open areas of Sonic Frontier, but it doesn’t always make sense to explore.

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series

As a semi-open world title, Sonic Frontiers places great emphasis on exploring and doing various sideline activities. To make sure you get to experience everything, and to prevent you from making a big splash in the story, the game has a lot of collectibles – some to advance the plot, others to upgrade your abilities.

Speaking of abilities, the skill tree doesn’t really work like a normal RPG, because once the game is over, you’ll likely unlock everything. Rather, it’s a way of gradually introducing you to each attack or special ability, rather than overwhelming you at the start.

Of course, all of this has a major downside, as Sonic Frontier can feel a little grinding at times. While playing through the second area, Isle of Ares, in many cases you’ll be forced to do the rather tedious activity of getting the right amount of keys, crystals, and other shiny objects, rather than exploring your own will. In this regard, the design feels rather dated.

Almost everything you do will reward you with some sort of upgrade or shiny item.

fighting

I was a little concerned when I learned that Sonic Frontier would be very combat focused, but to my surprise it actually seemed to be one of the game’s strongest aspects. First of all, Sonic’s combat abilities are a great fit for the character.his signature move Cyloop lets you run around in circles, confuse the enemy and open up to counterattack, while stampede attack Take full advantage of his jumping ability. All enemies have unique attack patterns and, most importantly, require you to use your entire skill set to defeat them. There are also bosses that sometimes – when they work best – combine platforming, puzzles and combat, resulting in very satisfying encounters.

The only small downside to combat is that some enemies are one-dimensional in design and move setup. However, as each enemy type evolves in the game, you may still encounter a few surprises, which may also help offset the low difficulty of most encounters.

With a variety of cool abilities and clever enemy designs, combat is a real highlight.

Platform and Control

Sonic Frontier’s grasp is intuitive, as Blue Hedgehog’s mobile set is much more limited than Mario’s. This makes it easy to get into the game, and the platforming challenges build up nicely in difficulty, allowing you to familiarize yourself with the controls before throwing harder obstacles at you.

Still, it’s not perfect, far from it. The Blue Hedgehog has never been a stranger to setbacks and cheap deaths, and Sonic Frontier is no exception. Maybe the Sonic team should focus more on rhythm-based automatic runners like Bit. Trip Runner and Super Meat Boy Forever, I often feel like the control issues are more of a game that doesn’t give you any hints what to do – jump, change lanes Wait – until the last move, when you’re half way off the cliff.

The controls are easy to grasp, but everyone, except the possibly tough Sonic veteran, will probably still die a lot.

story

The story has always played a big role in Sonic games, and it almost always sucks, at least in my opinion. Maybe I’m spoiled by memes and fan material that seem funnier, sometimes even more touching than actual writers can think of. Without spoiling too much – and I’m really not allowed to – this time the story at least seems to be heading in some interesting directions, with characters like Amy and Dr. Eggman being portrayed in more depth, so far, The characters have always been fairly one-dimensional.

Unfortunately, the story is poorly told. As Sonic’s friends are trapped in cyberspace, you’re gradually gathering resources that transform them from glitchy holograms into real flesh-and-blood characters. Passing a certain threshold, you’ll unlock a new cutscene that unfortunately doesn’t quite match the vibrant and vivid scenes of the earlier games. If I’m watching a ’60s French arthouse film, I’m fine, but for a major Sonic game, we should be able to expect more in terms of cinematic presentation.

Knuckles seems to spend a little to a lot of time in front of his PC.

It’s important to note that all of these impressions are based on a subset of Sonic Frontiers content only. So hopefully when the full game releases on November 8, the positives will outweigh the negatives.