Sonic Frontiers Needs Less Ubisoft And More Tony Hawk
I played a bit of Sonic Frontiers earlier this month, and I found it to be as promising as it is confounding. Sonic's new suite of abilities adds a lot of variety to exploration and combat, and the balance between unfettered speed and platforming precision feels spot on. Sonic feels better than ever to play, but the world he inhabits leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of creating a giant playground for Sonic to run around in, Sega has created a scattered open world filled with individual points of interest that don’t feel connected to one another at all. There’s a Ubisoft sensibility to the way Sonic Frontiers’ world has been designed, which doesn’t represent the qualities that have made Sonic such an enduringly popular series. There’s still a lot of Sonic Frontiers we haven’t seen, but I already can’t help but feel like a crucial component of Sonic’s DNA is missing here.
When I saw the Sonic Frontiers gameplay trailer, something looked off to me about the design of Starfall Islands. I wish I could say that getting my hands on it put those concerns to rest, but they proved to be entirely founded. The world of Sonic Frontiers feels like a collection of tiles, each handcrafted with their own POI in the center, then stitched together randomly without any thought or care for the bigger picture. The result is a world that is full of things to see and do, but nothing that really connects them to each other. It almost seems like this fragmented feeling is intentional based on the map-scan mechanic. Instead of revealing small regions or areas to explore, it instead fills in individual modules on the grid-based map in a random, scattershot order.
Related: Sonic Frontiers Preview: Folks, Our Blue Boy Is Back
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