izigame.me

Sonic Team tried their best with this one, they pulled all the scripted sequences, all the 2D sections, they even dumbed down the boost formula even further, but despite their best effort to make a mediocre-at-best game like Forces was, this is one of the good ones. So Sonic Frontiers is essentially a collectathon, you wander around open levels, clear platform challenges, solve puzzles and defeat enemies to get McGuffins that allow you to face more of the aforementioned challenges, to get even more McGuffins and so on. The difference this time is that you're Sonic, so you're really fast and, because of that, said open levels have to be really big, more akin to open world (dubbed Open Zone) areas rather then levels from a platformer. The reason I'm saying that they tried their best to make a mediocre game and failed is that despite the egregious amount of scripting in a game genre about freedom of action, because of the same nature of that genre (and Sonic's insane mobility), said scripting can be easily bypassed. The result is a game that is good for the same reason some of the best 3d platformer are good (please don't read this as if I said that this game is as good as super Mario 64, that's a completely different sentence).What I'm talking about is the freedom of action and the sheer amount of cool stuff you can pull off.
You see, one of the main collectibles needed to progress the story are these "memory tokens", you can find these floating above far above your head, supposedly only reachable through really ugly platforms that are just lying around with no artistic cohesion whatsoever, giving this game its signature "SEGA hired this man" vibe. This platforming challenges are, per se, fine, but what really sets this game apart is how easy to break this are, yes, you can follow the standard path and run through loops and jump on springs, OR you can boost jump from a grind rail on the other side of the world, gain an insane amount of air and try to aim yourself to get the collectible. And the whole game is like this, you just need a ramp or an enemy and you can do whatever, not unlike super Mario 64's BLJ.
And that's the biggest strength of the game, once you complete a few missions in the map, the (again, very ugly) rails used as fast travel start collecting together, with enough finesse you can chain rails, platforms and attacks on enemies to travel the world without touching the ground, it's a similar feeling to chaining tricks in a Tony hawk game and can get really satisfying, even though it's not the main focus of the game but just a side effect.
And for these reasons my favorite open zone was the third one, despite being the worst design wise (full of 2D sections) simply because it was pushing me to find ways to go around them.I ended up collection ALL memory tokens in the game, and i can't stress enough how much is not needed to do so for finishing the game, you just need a fraction of those (and it's you don't want to get them the intended way you can still farm them for a couple of minutes in the fishing mini game (yeah there's a fishing mini game, it's pretty innocuous, you only have to play it is you want to read Eggman's diary)), you don't even need them to COMPLETE the game, you don't even get bragging rights from them, i just did it because i was having fun doing so. The story is also an improvement from most Sonic games actually but ESPECIALLY Forces, where, instead of being edgy for the sake of looking important (but ultimately feeling shallow), has a much simpler story with a deeper meaning. We actually have a THEME in the story this time. The story in Frontiers is about facing the inevitable and the game explore how every character reacts to it, most importantly Sage, the series' new entry, who is so sure about what's going to happen that doesn't even bother explaining it to Sonic and instead is openly hostile to him who instead is still hopeful and it's going to fight no matter what. The writing also helps, for the first time in way too long we have actual character development, to the point where even missteps like force have payoff.All secondary characters have their substory connected to the main events of the game. Amy for the first time in the main series menages to feel like Amy, always thinking about love, without being annoying; Knuckles and Sonic's rivalry and friendship is felt through their dialogs and Tails is trying to grow up after Forces. The rest of the game is fine: Combat system is too simplified but still allows cool combos; Some enemies are annoying but most are harmless; The puzzles are a little too simple but they still push you to further explore; Minibosses are fun most of the time; Actual bosses are very cool; Cyber space levels are probably the worst Sonic has controlled in a while but they're too short for it to be a problem.So the game is good, but what worries me is how is SEGA going to evolve the formula, despite how wonky the game physics may be, the biggest problem of the game is that they're not broken ENOUGH, hopefully for the next game Sonic won't abruptly stop every time he jumps, but how i said, since the best aspects of the game happened by accident, I can just hope. EDIT:Jesus Christ i just re-read this, it's like twice as long as I thought, why nobody told me? Goddammit editing the review made it lose the formatting and now it's unreadable, thanks steam