Sonic Frontiers

My first hour with Sonic Frontiers felt like watching someone try to reinvent a formula they never quite nailed in 3D to begin with - and somehow, mostly getting away with it. This is Sonic Team's biggest structural risk to date: ditch the linear boost stages as the primary mode and instead hand the blue hedgehog five large open-zone islands to tear across at full speed. On that specific promise, the game delivers. Momentum-based traversal across the Starfall Islands - threading rails, chaining boost pads, and using the Cyloop ability to draw shapes that interact with the environment - is the closest Sonic has felt to genuinely fun in 3D for a very long time. At full sprint, Sonic can cross an entire island in under five minutes, and that sense of scale and speed is real. The game layers a surprising number of systems on top of that foundation. There is a skill tree to expand Sonic's combat repertoire, a combo meter that builds into finishing moves against robotic enemies scattered across the map, and a collectathon structure that gates story progress behind hundreds of small puzzle challenges and map reveals per island. That last part is where patience gets tested. The grind to unlock Chaos Emeralds involves clearing Cyberspace stages - short, linear boost levels that feel lifted from earlier titles, complete with occasionally floaty controls that clash with how Sonic handles in the open world. The tonal whiplash between the two modes is real, and it compounds with persistent asset pop-in that critics and players alike flagged as impossible to ignore. The open zones themselves, while fun to sprint through, can feel sparse: neon rails and boost pads floating against realistic-looking terrain, with the visual mismatch giving everything a prototype quality. Where the game earns its reputation is the Titan boss fights. Collecting all Chaos Emeralds on each island triggers a Super Sonic transformation for a large-scale boss battle against massive robotic Titans, backed by heavy rock tracks that absolutely commit to the spectacle. These sequences - think anime giant-robot energy with a golden hedgehog doing the punching - are the best argument for why Frontiers exists. The soundtrack across the whole game is consistently strong, arguably the series' best, moving between atmospheric lo-fi exploration music and intense battle themes without missing a step. The story, unexpectedly, has more weight than the franchise's recent output; character moments with Tails, Knuckles, and Amy land with more sincerity than anyone who survived the Sonic Forces era could have anticipated. The honest read on Frontiers is that it sits somewhere between promising prototype and finished game. Critics landed around a 73 average on OpenCritic, with the PC and PS4 versions faring better than others; user scores ran considerably higher, reflecting a fanbase that genuinely responded to the ambition even while acknowledging the roughness. The fishing minigame with Big the Cat, of all things, turned out to be a beloved distraction that rewards persistence with upgrade materials. Combat against standard enemies is repetitive button-mashing that even fans who love the game tend to concede is a weak point. And the collect-everything approach to progression can feel like wading through busywork between the genuinely exciting moments. If you want a tight, polished open-world action game, this is not it. If you want to see where a long-struggling series finally found a direction worth pursuing - and spend several hours just running very fast across melancholy ancient ruins while a great soundtrack plays - Frontiers earns that time honestly.

Alex · Scout Team

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