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We are at a new turning point in the 30-year history of Sonic. The cult favorite gaming mascot is again an attraction on the central stage, surpassing Sony’s Uncharted in the box office and creating a new series on Netflix. And after making the leap from side-scrolling platforming to 3D soap opera, the series is already coming out into the open in its most ambitious entry to date with Sonic Frontiers. But the latest trailers worried the fans and after 30 minutes of demonstration of the game practical work left me unimpressed.
I played the game while attending the Summer Game Fest last week in Los Angeles, and although I’m not ready to write it off yet, I’m still incredibly skeptical of what Sonic Team leader Takashi Izuka and his crew are trying to do. The demo began with Sonic, separated from hairy comrades Tales and Amy Rose, who fell from a wormhole in a bucolic archipelago called the Starfall Islands, and was lured by a mysterious AI to find the emeralds of Chaos. From there I go to explore puzzles, cut on rails and fight with the occasional boss. My time spent from time to time was fun, often messy, and usually looked pretty rough.
I postponed writing these impressions in part because there wasn’t much to do in the demo. We looked at the recently revealed footage of Sonic Frontiers as looking like a soft project by Unreal Engine. The game looked better in person, especially when the sky cleared and the sun began to set (the islands follow your standard shortened day and night cycle of the open world), but it was still mostly empty.
Pockets of enemies here and there can be destroyed by a new combat system that includes a series of automatic strikes and kicks, defensive evasions and even time-saving mechanics. I solved light spatial puzzles such as stepping on pressure plates or navigating launch pads to unlock collectibles. And sometimes an open track with speed boosters allows me to collect rings as I run up a small mountain trail with obstacles. I quickly got bored.
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I wasn’t immediately drawn to how Sonic felt in control. Something was felt. It never seemed to gain momentum satisfactorily, and the complex and uneven topography made it difficult to move really fast for really long periods of time (from everything that Sonic Frontiers looks fragile from Breath of the Wild, the green endurance icon of the ring, which is depleted by amplification, is almost one to one). Combat and air passage rely on a sophisticated targeting system to ensure that Sonic directs its rotating attacks in the right direction.
Towards the end of the demonstration, I faced a giant boss called The Tower, and for a moment I thought I was in Shadow of the Colossus. It was a brief, spectacular moment, interrupted by Sonic’s camera struggle and nervousness as I struggled to hit the enemy’s weaknesses without constantly falling to the side. As the camera, aiming and movement align, Sonic Frontiers comes close to creating an esoteric but rewarding way to navigate a vast map. The rest of the time I felt uncomfortable navigating.
If I sound rude, it’s because the demo didn’t do a great job of showing how the elements of Sonic Frontiers with an open world will unlock new potential for the long series. It felt rough and incomplete, and he didn’t nail a single little thing that I could then point out and say, “That was fun – let me do it for the whole game!” In fact, the graphics and the weak artistic direction felt like the smallest from the problems of the holiday game for 2022. To be clear, I think there is a version of Sonic Frontiers based on what I was shown that can come together and be great. I’m just not convinced, based on my limited time with the demo, that Sonic Team will get there soon enough.
Although some fans are gathering around the hashtag #DelaySonicFrontiers, Takashi Izuka told VGC that there are no plans to do so at the moment and that the team is actually quite happy with the results and the internal feedback so far. It is also unclear how old the build I and other journalists played was, with IGN saying its initial visualization was based on a much earlier one. Otherwise, Iizuka and the rest of Team Sonic still have work to do. Sonic Frontiers is expected to launch on Xbox, PlayStation, PC and Switch before the end of the year.
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