Sonic Frontiers: The Final Preview

ign.com:

Back in May when I played Sonic Frontiers for my first preview, I came away with an overall positive first impression, but also a feeling that there was still a good bit of work to be done. The game felt buggy, the performance didn’t feel optimized, and there was a ton of distracting pop-in of objects and obstacles floating around in the sky.

Here we are five months later, and I got a chance to go hands-on again with a PC build of Sonic Frontiers, this time for a full six hours to check out the first three islands in their entirety, and while a lot of those same issues that I experienced the first time I played are still present — the pop-in and a handful of minor bugs — it is clear that a lot of work has gone into tightening up Sonic Frontiers’ performance and polishing its visuals. It’s still an uneven experience, both visually and mechanically, but when my time was up and all I thought about was the disappointment of not being able to play more, that seemed like a good sign that Sonic Frontiers is in a pretty healthy spot heading into its imminent November 8 release.

The big thing I got to experience this time around versus my first play session was the full sense of progression through each island. I’ve talked previously about how you need to collect portal keys to open up Cyber Space levels, beat Cyber Space levels to get vault keys, and use vault keys to unlock chaos emeralds, but there’s another important element to the game flow as well: memory tokens. Each of the three islands was home to one of Sonic's friends who were trapped in Cyber Space, and in order to try and free them, I needed to collect a ton of memory tokens. Typically, these are rewards for exploration in the open world, and they’re the main reason