Sonic Frontiers PC & Steam Deck Review
Sonic Frontiers takes place over 5 unique islands that each act as their own self-contained sandbox with most islands having their own unique collectables tokens, motifs etc. The Islands are large but not overwhelming like a true open-world game such as an assassins creed or Elden Ring where the map is completely connected as one.
Each island has its own visual identity and across your playthrough, you will visit grasslands, deserts and even a volcanic island, although the last two areas are very reminiscent of the first map.
The first three islands introduce the game’s overall gameplay loop, with each map having you unlock memories from holographic versions of Amy, Knuckles and Tails. Each character has a corresponding Memory Token that must be collected to unlock more memories and progress the story. For Amy, you’ll be collecting heart-shaped tokens, knuckles wants medal-style tokens and Tails needs you to collect wrench-shaped tokens owing to his mechanical background.
All of these tokens are collected in what I will call the ‘overworld’ by completing numerous puzzles and rail grinding sections. Puzzles are littered all over the map and completing one will unlock a small portion of the map around it. The islands are jam-packed with these challenges and you’ll often find yourself getting distracted along the way to an objective.
You’ll find a lot of collectables across the various maps in Sonic Frontiers, in fact, I found it quite bloated in that regard, You have rings, Purple coins, Kocos, Memory tokens, Keys, Portal Gears, Emeralds and Two different types of seeds to collect in each map. It felt a little overwhelming at times.
Each Island has several portals to ‘Cyberspace’ which act more like traditional Sonic levels with some being 3D and some having 2D sections. If you have ever played Sonic generations, you’ll know the kind of style these levels follow. To access the cyberspace levels you’ll need to either solve a puzzle or defeat a miniboss on the overworld, this will grant you a Portal Gear. The number of gears you need to access each Cyberspace level gradually increases as you progress.
Completing levels will award a player with a number of keys depending on performance. There’s a possible four keys to be had from each level and you can replay them if you miss any, which you most likely will on the first attempt. To get the maximum amount of keys you’ll need to. Not only finish a level but finish it under a certain amount of time, finish with a certain number of rings and collect the five red star rings in each stage. Luckily, the levels are quite short, rarely taking over two minutes to complete which makes jumping back in to collect a few missing Red Star rings easily without being overly tedious.
Keys are used to unlock Chaos Emerald vaults which are scattered around each Island. There are Six Emeralds to collect with an additional one guarded by a Titan, the end boss of each item. Sonic needs to collect all seven Chaos Emeralds and transform them into Super Sonic to defeat the Titan.
Titan fights pit Sonic against a boss of Kaiju proportions and uses the mechanic of rings counting down instead of a traditional health bar for the boss, they act as somewhat of a battle against time.
These boss battles were by far my favourite part of Sonic Frontiers, although they were a little on the easy side relying heavily on repetition to win with no real penalty for failure. The titan fights will get you pumped up with some excellent rock music, which made me feel like I was playing a true sequel to the original Sonic Adventure’s final boss.
Once the titan is defeated you are dropped at the next island and the Chaos Emeralds scatter, to be collected all over again and the cycle of finding memories -> Gears -> Cyberspace -> Keys -> Chaos Emeralds continues until the next Titan fight. It’s a system that works really well, although can feel a little tedious as the number of keys required to unlock the Emeralds increases.
While playing Sonic Frontiers, it’s hard to not compare the game to the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Each game features rolling green hills, haunting light piano music and a sense of desolation. The puzzles in frontiers are based on ancient technology much like how most of the puzzles are in Breath of the Wild. There are lost creatures you must locate called Koco, which for all intents and purposes could be the Korok’s from Breath of the Wild, you even return them to a larger Korok… I mean Koco to power up your abilities. To be fair to Sonic Frontiers, the Koco play an integral part in the story but it did make me chuckle a little when I first stumbled across them.
The fishing mini-game with Big the Cat is a lot of fun, simple and easy to understand and you’d often come across items and enemies from previous Sonic games, which brought a smile to my face. You can trade points earnt while fishing with Big to unlock many of the game’s collectables, including memory tokens and keys so, in theory, you could bypass most of the cyberspace levels provided you spent enough time fishing.
The graphical presentation of Sonic Frontiers is great, I have to admit that when I first saw the gameplay trailers I was disappointed and thought the game didn’t look too good overall. I’m glad to say my opinion has changed, I do think some of the maps are a little visually too similar but the effort put in by the team can be seen and each map is well crafted, besides possibly the third one (Too many disjointed areas).
Music is fantastic and some of it is really pumping, especially true in the Cyberspace levels and Titan fights, although I do wish they leaned a little harder into nostalgia as many of the Cyberspace levels are based on classic Sonic levels such as the Chemical Plant Zone and Green Hill Zone and it would have been nice to see some representation of their level themes musically, I guess we have Sonic Generations and Sonic Mania if we truly want to experience some nostalgia there.
Performance in Sonic Frontiers surprised me somewhat, I am used to Sonic games having a good amount of jank, but Sonic Frontiers is actually quite ‘jankless’ which is quite shocking, especially with just how many different systems are implemented into the game. Over my 18-hour playthrough, I had zero crashes and didn’t get stuck on the geometry, not even once. That said, the worst enemy in the game is by far the camera, which has a complete mind of its own. Numerous times while speeding across the map the camera would shift focus to an enemy behind me which was really annoying, the same thing would happen to a lesser degree in the cyberspace levels when switching between 3D and 2D playstyles and felt very restrictive and stiff in an otherwise fluid game.
In my eyes, the biggest flaw with Sonic Frontiers is the amount of pop in the game suffers from. This is amplified by the speed that Sonic travels, items, rails and enemies seem to appear right out of nowhere and sometimes you feel like you are taking a leap of faith as the spring, rail or enemy you need to jump to next has rendered yet. On occasion, this lead to me missing the jump and plummeting back down to the ground just because I had no direction on where to go next. As large as the maps are, there’s really not an awful lot to render on them as they are quite sparse, apart from thin floating rails, and the occasional enemy or puzzle in the distance and I’m quite surprised this was not dealt with during development. Hopefully, this is something they will be able to fix in any future instalment as it really was a bit of a letdown, to be honest.
In terms of framerates and performance, Sonic Frontiers ran like a dream on my PC at 1440p with no frame drops and also ran at a good 40 – 45fps on my Steam Deck with settings turned down. I capped the framerate at 30fps and it played great on the Steam Deck, I even finished an entire Island along with a Titan fight on Deck.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Sonic Frontiers is a great game and a good step in the right direction for 3D Sonic after numerous missteps. Over my 18-hour playthrough, I had a lot of fun, the sense of speed and freedom you get while playing is great although pop-in issues, along with some item collection monotony from later on in the game let it down slightly. I’m hopeful the inevitable sequel will be able to fix these issues and deliver us more of the core Sonic Frontiers gameplay.
8
Steam review code kindly provided by the publisher