Sonic must hunt down and defeat these bosses in order to collect portal gears, which open up portals that lead to bite-sized linear stages, done in the style of previous Sonic games, giving Sonic Frontiers a nice mix of both old and new styles. Some of the later skills you can get are just unbelievably cool (though I won’t spoil them here), and it’s super satisfying to see Sonic Team experiment with different ways that Sonic can attack enemies beyond just spins, jumps, and bumps. To increase that window, you can either parry the blades and knock them away right before they hit you, or you can even use Sonic’s Cyloop to encircle the enemy, which will cause the shell to go flying upwards.ĭefeating these enemies will reward you with EXP that you can use to purchase new skills from a skill tree, which gives Sonic Frontiers a really nice feeling of power progression, even in just the relatively short amount of time that I played. One way to deal with him is to just carefully time your homing attacks so you don’t get hit by blades but the window to damage him is small. One enemy has an impenetrable shell that he can expand into spinning blades and throw at you. One of the things that I really appreciated about the combat from what I played is that there are usually multiple ways to deal with specific enemies. His homing attack also feels much more powerful, landing with a ton of impact, and keeping Sonic stuck to his enemy, allowing for a flurry of follow-up strikes. Sonic is able to quickly dodge using the bumper buttons on the gamepad, and by pressing them together, he can even parry attacks with the right timing. It’s not all style and no substance though. That changes in Sonic Frontiers’, which now has you fighting all sorts of wandering enemies and minibosses using an all-new array of incredibly flashy attacks. There are some exceptions, but combat in traditional Sonic games generally isn’t a thing that goes much deeper than jumping, rolling, or using a homing attack into enemies at the right time. The openness of Frontiers’ level design makes straightforward races like these a ton of fun, because you have to try and improvise a path to the end that might not be immediately obvious. The best ones though are races against the clock where you have to get from point A to point B in a limited amount of time. Most of these are very simple, requiring you to orient a statue the correct way, quickly hop back and forth between colored tiles, or use Sonic’s new Cyloop ability to draw circles around certain objects in the environment to interact with them. Of course, it’s worth emphasizing that this gameplay and the version I played were from an early build, but this is definitely an area that I’d hope to see improvement in the final version.īeyond that, there are also a wide variety of puzzles and challenges that are littered throughout the zone, and completing them is how you uncover sections of your map. Meaning that rails, platforms, boost rings, and so on are just… inexplicably floating in the air all around, which isn’t totally unusual for a Sonic game, but it feels especially jarring in Frontiers in particular, because of the frequent and sudden pop-in of these objects and the otherwise very naturalistic art style. One thing that has to be noted is that very few of these elements are built into the environmental design. Essentially, they’ve taken that core appeal of every Sonic level having multiple paths that eventually loop back around to the main one, and applied that to these giant non-linear open zones. Every few feet there’s a bumper spring that bounces you like a pinball between five other bumpers before putting you on one of the many grindable rail tracks or a speed ramp that sets you on a completely different path leading to some other collectible or reward or a line of rings that you can light speed dash into. Sonic Frontiers’ open zone design is very different from any other open world I’ve ever played - it’s a giant playground. Having played Sonic Frontiers for about four hours, it’s easy to see what Iizuka-san means. What sets Sonic Frontiers apart is this different approach to an open game world.”. Our basic idea was to have that take place in an open space. “For Sonic, the core here is a 3D action game. “Open world games like Zelda or other AAA games fundamentally have RPG or adventure worlds,” said Iizuka-san.

Sonic frontiers website