Sonic Frontiers Review

ign.com:

Sonic Frontiers doesn’t limit you to a small, carefully curated prix fixe menu of things to try. Instead, it takes the all-you-can-eat buffet approach, throwing new ideas at you from start to finish, without really seeming to care if they’re fresh and appetizing or looking wilted and limp under the heat lamp. When I jumped off the starting line of this sprint across Sonic’s first open-world game I certainly didn’t expect to play jump rope, duke it out with a giant robot, watch a dramatic origin story for an extinct race of beings, or do a heck of a lot of fishing, but Frontiers kept me guessing even late into the campaign with what it would try next. Even when some of those ideas didn’t work, I was almost always glad that Sega gave it the old college try, and as a result I rarely found myself bored. I did find myself feeling blue because of the absurd amount of pop-in that happens every time this famously fast character does his thing, but Sonic Frontiers is, for the most part, a promising first attempt at blazing a new trail for the series.

While you’re working your way through Frontiers’ chain of five Starfall Islands over the course of about 20 hours total, you’ll uncover the dark and extremely predictable backstory of a long-extinct race while hanging out with Sonic-family favorites like Amy and Knuckles. You’ll also meet a strange new enemy named Sage and learn what her deal is in the most agonizingly slow way possible, since her main hobbies appear to be dodging pointed questions and speaking exclusively in vagaries.

With all of the different plot threads Frontiers juggles, they do end up feeling oddly disconnected from each other and none of them offer a ton of surprises between their ungodly number of cliches