At the risk of upsetting the internet, I’m gonna say it. Sonic hasn’t had a great run. I’m not just saying that as a pun about how he gets around, I’m basing it off the numerous mixed and often disappointing releases the series has had, Sonic Forces comes to mind as a recent example. SEGA undoubtedly created a worldwide icon who shaped a decent part of my and a lot of others’ childhoods, with games spanning numerous generations and consoles, but nostalgia and genuinely great games aside, they’ve also allowed unfinished, unpolished, and frankly questionable games to be released time and time again. So when I heard someone say Frontiers was the first truly great 3D sonic game in over a decade, I was excited. The open-zone free-roam look of the game was certainly a different direction to go in, and an objectively good move to make, but even if this is one of the better Sonic games released in a while, it is by no means perfect, far from it in fact.

Frontiers brings Sonic and the gang to Starfall Islands, once home to an ancient race who utilised the power of the iconic Chaos Emeralds as an energy source before disappearing entirely. With friends like Tails and Amy banished into a strange cyber-world, Sonic has to unravel the mystery of the islands, save his friends and defeat huge goliath enemies. Apart from the open-zone gameplay that makes up the majority of the game, more traditional Sonic levels are found around the map, taking place in “Cyber Space”, that play like older 3D (or unfortunately 2.5D) levels with reused assets from famous Sonic locations like Green Hill Zone and Chemical Plant. As well as this, there’s optional fishing, mandatory minigames, and upgradable stats and moves for sonic to use in combat.

I’ve played a number of 3D Sonic games, and I think the main complaint I’ve always had in the gameplay department is how unreliable Sonic’s controls are in a 3D environment. Precise movement is difficult to achieve, especially when moving at high speeds, which is why his lock-on attacks have always felt like a brilliant addition. In most games like Sonic Heroes, Lost world and my personal favourite, Sonic Rush, the level design directs the player forward, with one end goal in mind to build a level around, so my worry about Frontiers was that these open-ended maps would maybe result in a less polished, streamlined experience. Thankfully this is not the case.

When the game is simply zooming Sonic around these open playgrounds of rails, boosters, and bounce pads, it feels like the ideal Sonic experience. Choosing where to go and what to tackle, whether that be a small platforming section, mini-boss fight, or Cyber Space level is such a good way to incorporate Sonic’s fast-paced nature, that it’s kind of insane it took this many years to have him be in an open environment. The first Island works to ease you into the concept, but it’s really when you reach the second one, Ares Island, that the freedom of movement feels strongest. The time spent on Ares was highly enjoyable and sold me on the concept of this game, but it was also early enough in the game that I hadn’t yet become frustrated at some of the game’s many problems.

To progress through the story you’ll need to find and unlock the Chaos Emeralds needed for Sonic to turn super and beat the shit out of the area boss. RIGHT (brace yourself), to unlock the Emeralds you’ll need keys, to get keys you need to play the Cyber Space levels, to unlock the cyberspace levels you’ll need gears, to obtain gears you’ll need to defeat minibosses and to find the minibosses, you’ll probably want to unlock the map, by completing the lil’ challenges required to do so. You’ll also need to collect memory tokens to help and talk to your friends, who are half stuck in Cyber Space, and you’ll find these as well as tokens needed to upgrade stats scattered all around the islands, usually as a reward for completing a platforming route. There are also some stupidly easy ways to bypass this entire process that I’ll get to later.

We’ll start with the Cyber Space levels. Oh Boy. The initial selection of these small levels on Kronos island is good, utilising standard yet satisfying level design. I was a bit perplexed that areas with Green Hill Zone features didn’t have the iconic theme playing in the background, but to be fair, the tunes in these levels do, in fact, go hard, despite the lack of classic tunes. When the first 2.5D level (a term used to describe a side-scrolling section in a 3D game) appeared, I was a bit miffed. These never usually play as tightly as the better 2D classics and are often a slog to get through. As my luck would have it, these levels either make up the majority of Cyber Space or feel tedious enough to make it seem that way. Either way, they aren’t good, and next to the new gameplay style, made me forget that these levels can actually be fun, as games like Sonic Generations prove that these classic level designs still work in modern games.

The dialogue and character interactions in this game are often tone-deaf, but it wouldn’t be a true Sonic game if that wasn’t the case. Frontiers however almost sticks the landing on a rather good idea, by having these well-known and iconic characters reflect on who they are, how they fit into an often Sonic-oriented world and even reflect on key events from prior games. Tails becomes self-loathing, Knuckles compares the ancient’s brief existence to the extinction of his people, and Amy, while not as obvious, feels like a completely different character than we’re used to, and seems much more self-aware, which is refreshing to see. There are insinuations made in this game that the characters are going to better themselves from here on and that’s a pretty cool thing to see from iconic but often one-dimensional characters.

Problem is, half of the interactions you’ll have in the game are nothing but meaningless small talk, with perhaps a namedrop to a previous game’s plot point for the fans to gush over. This is especially noticeable when you have to unlock these interactions with memory tokens. The initial finding of the characters is exciting, with the guessing game of who’s gonna be the focus of a given island, but generally, the moments spent with them are, “Don’t worry I’ll get you out of Cyber Space”, “Does it feel weird being stuck”, and “These structures kind of remind me of something”. These make the deeper and more meaningful moments seem so much less deserved, especially when Sonic himself offers up advice and endless positivity while seeming the most one-dimensional of all.

The combat in Frontiers isn’t anything to write home about. You’ll notice when you start that there are a bunch of unlockable attacks, promising a large arsenal of different ways to go about defeating a given enemy, and while you do get several varied moves, they all feel very derivative of each other (apart from the ranged moves that can be an actual help). The main problem I have with the extra abilities is in the execution of them when you’re playing, they’re often accompanied by a build-up sequence, which gets a bit tedious, and I also find myself accidentally using them when I want to just jump on an enemy. Sonic Team actually gives players the option to automatically activate while you mash the attack button, which I immediately turned off when I unlocked, as I don’t want each fairly easy encounter with enemies to go on for longer than they need to.

These moves also feel redundant when you can level up your strength, alongside defence, ring count, and speed. When your strength reaches a certain point, you can attack an enemy twice instead of using fancy moves and it does the same job. Parrying is also overpowered to the point of it feeling cheap to use in anything other than boss fights. I think having all these options for Sonic to use, in turn giving the player more to work with, is a nice idea, but ends up making the assorted moves feel pointlessly unlocked.

The four upgradeable stats I just mentioned can all be raised to level 99, and while strength and defence are increased at a steady, reasonable rate, the way ring count and speed are increased is possibly the biggest oversight in the whole game. Talking to the Elder Koco (no relation to beloved character Mama Coco from Pixar’s Coco), once you’ve returned some of his lost Koco friends, lets you choose between levelling up Ring count, which never feels needed, or speed, which is a lot more appealing in a Sonic game. The problem is that you can only increase these stats one level at a time, in a frustratingly tedious and ironically slow dialogue menu. If you want to max these out, you’ll have to power through this 198 times. The frustration can’t be understood until you’re playing, but my god, what an awful choice.

The Guardian minibosses found on each island are great. The variation between the way you’ll fight them, as well as the creative designs used across the 18 different encounters, are incredibly well done. You’ll grab onto the end of a huge Shark as he swims through sand dunes, run up the legs of the towering Asura, and be launched into the air by the Caterpillar, all while utilising varying methods of traversal. Some Guardians are fairly basic in design, several martial-arts-type ones require you to simply hold parry, and the bog standard column guardians feel like regular enemies, but there is certainly enough creativity imbued within the majority of the Guardians to count them as a positive. Except for Squid, who attacks you from anywhere and isn’t very fun to fight.

See that’s the thing with this game, good is never perfect, there’s got to be some frustrating aspect to each part of the whole experience, case in point the Boss Battles. Don’t get me wrong, the presentation, music, and colossal scale of these absolute units make for very memorable segments, it’s just the gameplay that’s severely lacking. It’s another case of holding parry and then spam attacks as Super Sonic. It’s fine when the cinematic nature of boss fights is the main focus, but some individual bosses have some really annoying camera-altering, and often difficult-to-control gameplay moments, which take away from the epic scale of these segments.

Another part of the game that focuses on presentation over practicality is Fishing. Because that’s what this game needed. It’s not like I wasn’t overjoyed to see Big the Cat, I’d put him in every game if I could, what I have a problem with is the very strange way fishing ties into the rest of the game. There is an abundance of realistic and detailed fish to catch, each gaining you some tokens to exchange in Big’s shop, but the amount you get from each doesn’t reflect the absolute nothingness that is catching a fish. It’s beyond easy and incredibly dull. This also wouldn’t be too bad if you couldn’t cash these tokens in for every other component of the game, as the way to bypass the entire game that I mentioned earlier is this bloody fishing minigame.

You need tokens to fish, but you’ll always have more than you’ll ever need thanks to the unskippable slot machine that takes up a quarter of your screen during meteor showers. So having a pretty-much unlimited supply of fishing coins, using them to gain an insane amount of upgrade tokens and then gaining the highest possible stats incredibly easily makes the fishing section feel very, very cheap to use. However, the fishing does feature this chill old-school RnB-sounding background music that makes the uninteresting gameplay that bit more manageable, and this section also leads to my favourite element of the entire game.

Dr Robotnik himself, Eggman, has, for some reason, gone and given all his personal voice logs to Big the Cat, so you, as Sonic (his mortal enemy) can buy and listen to his ramblings and inner thoughts, and let me say, they are fantastic. Not only are the more coherent elements of the plot explained in his memos, but the guy has some absolutely great insights into characters, core-elements of the Sonic series, and also has the realisation that he might care for someone. His comments make him the most well-written and three-dimensional character in a game filled with attempts at self-reflection that often fall short. He touches on all the greatest aspects of Sonic’s gang, how they’ve grown, and the potential Tails and Amy have. It’s some really engaging stuff, it just happens to be hidden in the most inconvenient corner of the game.

Look, I really want to enjoy this game, and at times I have, but the more I play Frontiers, the more frustrated I become. The small details pile up, like why when you “improve” Sonic’s speed to maximum, he becomes twice as hard to control. Things like being able to run in a circle and summon items instead of earning them, enemies that trap you into a fight, and others that lock the camera while you’re running past so you fall off the map, there are too many annoying elements to this game. It’s a shame because Sonic clearly suits this kind of open environment. I like the nonchalant nature of throwing a bunch of rails and platforming sections around for you to play around on, but it often feels outweighed by things that feel very messily thrown together, uninteresting, or strangely designed. So while this may be the best Sonic game in some time, it’s not one that I actively wanted to see through to the end.