Sonic Frontiers review – The fast and the curious

Every time a new Sonic game is announced, there’s usually a moment of panic. If a 2D game is shown off, you’re usually in for a good time loaded with speed and nostalgia, sort of like finding a rusty syringe under your bed from your warehouse rave days. If it’s a 3D game, then it’s time to start blasting CCR’s Fortunate Son on the radio as flashbacks of Sonic ’06 flood your memories.

Sonic’s 3D history is one of rare hits and many misses, as the blue blur’s journey along the third dimension has been broken up by numerous potholes along the way. Sonic Adventure was the last time that anyone considered the hedgehog’s moves to be cool, and that was all the way back in 1998. So does Sonic Frontiers measure up to that enduring gold standard? Not really, but it does chart a flawed yet fun path forward for the icon, one that shows just how good his signature need for speed can be.

Billed as an open-zone game, Sonic Frontiers wears its influences right on Sonic’s oversized white gloves. It takes liberal amounts of inspiration from the level design of Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, throws in some classic Sonic platforming, and sprinkles on a layer of Death Stranding for good measure. The end result is a game that is both haunting and magical in its loneliness, throwing you into a series of small sandboxes that are filled with puzzles and the odd antagonistic mechanised force.

Compared to other Sonic games that have a definite flow from point A to point B, Sonic Frontiers is all about exploration at your own speed of sound pace, as you race across the vast environments of the Starfall Islands. What makes each of these biomes interesting are the dozens of challenges that populate these environments – which range from snappy puzzles to scalp-scratching experiments with a dash of speed thrown in.

It’s the Breath of the Wild influence taken to the extreme, with each mystery unlocking more of the Starfall island maps, resources, and scraps of story as you bounce around from location to location, grinding off rails and dashing through hostile territory. Between each of these zones are also a few advanced automatons that serve as speed bumps along the way, allowing for Sonic to unleash some velocity-powered offense at them in the form of quick punches, unlockable skills, and a transformation that will make local Saiyans pay attention to a familiar yellow aura erupting around you.

Sonic has a new bag of tricks for these encounters, with the hedgehog’s primary new power being the delightful cyloop ability that pushes you to literally run rings around your enemies. Doing so breaks down their defenses, leaving them open for swift attacks that can demolish even the sturdiest foe as Sonic ricochets blows into them like an angry blue pinball. It gets even better when you’re introduced to unique mid-bosses on each island, which require a combination of skill, strategy, and quick-time button mashes to defeat. And, by the time you’ve thoroughly explored each zone, the main event is a cataclysmic showdown against titans that can put Power Rangers to shame.

For those of you who yearn for a more classic Sonic game, there are a handful of Cyber-Space levels that condense the massive sandboxes into more focused and linear races. These stages feel like they were pinched straight from the Megadrive games, and between a combination of snappy 2D design and 3D shifts when necessary, they’re blasts from the past that hit the sweet spot for retro goodness.

But these highs are frequently interrupted by moments of tedium when you’re thrown back onto the golden path of Sonic Frontiers. The open-zones are impressive to behold, but you’ll often find yourself doing a whole lot of nothing between zippier moments of exploration and action. It can be paradoxically cathartic though, for a game about speed to force you to slow down and take in the sights. That said, by the time you reach the fifth and final island, you can feel Sonic running out of steam as the core gameplay loop becomes obviously exhausted.

Visually, Sonic Frontiers can also be laughably bad.

A cross-gen title that’s available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, Sonic’s adventure runs (heh) fine and you won’t have to worry about any game-breaking bugs, but it does suffer from a level of pop-in that’s usually reserved for poorly-optimized games of the early 2000s. It’s not uncommon to hit terminal velocity and see objects magically teleport into view mere moments before you smash Sonic’s facial atoms into them. For a game that has a big focus on tight platforming and quick reflexes, that can be incredibly annoying to frequently encounter.

Character rendering looks fantastic, especially with all of the subtle details on Sonic and pals, but the environment suffers from ugly rain effects and distracting environment draw-in. Like the game itself, the visual presentation can be very uneven, as everything looks amazing when all the gears are turning… and then exceptionally terrible when a stray spanner is thrown in. For this review, I played on PS5 and opted for the 60 frames-per-second performance mode – because only monsters choose quality mode and 30 fps when playing a Sonic game.

And yet for all of its faults, Sonic Frontiers has reignited my excitement for this franchise and its future. Its not a masterpiece, but it is an encouraging prototype of what developer Sonic Team is capable of when its firing on all cylinders. The controls feel smooth, the myriad collection of rails, puzzles, and combat encounters feel fantastically snappy to dive into, and the Cyber-Space levels are endlessly replayable challenge stages that’ll push your reflexes to the limit.

It’s a game that can be surprisingly relaxing one moment, with zen-like moments of tranquility, before unleashing pure Super-Sonic energy via a boss fight that feels like a mix between Shin Godzilla and Dragon Ball Z. Undeniably flawed yet fun, this is the most fun that a 3D Sonic game has been since 1998. And it looks set to lay the foundation for the next two decades of high-speed hedgehog hijinks.