Sonic Frontiers For PS5

Sonic Frontiers doesn’t limit you to a small, carefully curated prix fixe menu of things to try. Instead, it takes the all-you-can-eat buffet approach, throwing new ideas at you from start to finish, without really seeming to care if they’re fresh and appetizing or looking wilted and limp under the heat lamp. When I jumped off the starting line of this sprint across Sonic’s first open-world game I certainly didn’t expect to play jump rope, duke it out with a giant robot, watch a dramatic origin story for an extinct race of beings, or do a heck of a lot of fishing, but Frontiers kept me guessing even late into the campaign with what it would try next. Even when some of those ideas didn’t work, I was almost always glad that Sega gave it the old college try, and as a result I rarely found myself bored. I did find myself feeling blue because of the absurd amount of pop-in that happens every time this famously fast character does his thing, but Sonic Frontiers is, for the most part, a promising first attempt at blazing a new trail for the series.

While you’re working your way through Frontiers’ chain of five Starfall Islands over the course of about 20 hours total, you’ll uncover the dark and extremely predictable backstory of a long-extinct race while hanging out with Sonic-family favorites like Amy and Knuckles. You’ll also meet a strange new enemy named Sage and learn what her deal is in the most agonizingly slow way possible, since her main hobbies appear to be dodging pointed questions and speaking exclusively in vagaries.

With all of the different plot threads Frontiers juggles, they do end up feeling oddly disconnected from each other and none of them offer a ton of surprises between their ungodly number of cliches concerning the power of friendship and ancient civilizations wielding advanced technology. But they do leave room for some really good moments between the furry cast of characters – in fact, Frontiers produces some of the most in-depth characterizations of the Sonic cast we’ve ever seen in a game. One part of the campaign hones in on the brotherly rivalry between Sonic and Knuckles, while another does a great job at building Tails up as more than just Sonic’s sidekick. All of that more than sated my ravenous appetite for Sonic’s usual anime-style nonsense in between all of the fancy robot kicking and rolling around at the speed of sound.

Sprinting around the sprawling open-world areas is, as you’d hope, one of the best parts of this open-world odyssey. The islands you dash about on are suitably large playgrounds for you to test the limits of your roadrunning, so long as you don’t fall into water or lava that immediately kills you. My personal favorite new trick, though, is the Cyloop – it lets you draw a circle while blazing a trail to create a tornado of death that impacts everything caught within it. This ability can be used and abused to do damage in combat, solve puzzles, and even farm rings since it generates a few every time. Plus, literally running circles around your enemies is just an incredibly Sonic thing to do, which is why I practically never stopped doing it throughout my playthrough. And since it lets you turn running into a deadly weapon, it makes speeding around the map

The only thing that’s a little disappointing about whizzing around is that, unless you’re getting the speed boost that comes with being maxed out of rings, you don’t run quite as fast as you might hope. That can be improved a fair bit by leveling up your speed stat over the course of the campaign, but I still would have preferred the default starting speed be a little more Roadrunner and a little less hungover hedgehog.

What becomes clear after a few laps around the first island is that Sonic Frontiers is an action-adventure game that joins a growing pack of old-school series looking to reimagine themselves as open-world sandboxes – and in this particular case it mostly works out. Just like Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain before it, Frontiers keeps a lot of what makes the Sonic series beloved and unique (including some fun homages) but also throws in big areas to explore and fills them with a wild assortment of side distractions and mostly interesting new ideas. Not all of those activities are created equal, but it works overall just because of the sheer variety. One moment you’re juggling robots like you’re playing Baby’s First Devil May Cry, the next you’re trying to beat a time trial in a 2D platforming stage, and a minute after that you’re playing a game of pinball inside of an active volcano. You’ll grind some truly epic rails, solve extremely simple puzzles, do some puzzle-platforming, and of course, catch some fish – because if you can’t fish, does it even count as an open-world game?