![]() The other glimmer? Well… we can’t tell you about that just yet. For one thing, this is still an early build of the game where all the pieces haven’t been slotted together just yet, adding weight to the early tech demo feeling even if the end product still has those platforming elements floating around in the sky the whole time. It’s all rather drab and lifeless, but there are still glimmers of hope to cling onto. The dull blue sky and generic greenery do nothing to excite you, and the random interactive objects scattered about feel less like natural curiosities and more like random checklist tasks. Roaming the open-world, you’ll either hear melancholic piano music or nothing but the sound of a gentle breeze. Use these gears to unlock special one-off linear levels that you’ll need to conquer in order to collect the keys needed to secure Chaos Emeralds scattered around the island. Exciting in theory, but awful in reality – Sonic can only run up a specific part of his arm at a specific moment, and slippery momentum combined with the odd forcefields the boss fires at you make it a headache to reach the summit.Ī third boss turns into a grind rail chase sequence – they fly through the sky and leave a huge purple path behind them, which you hop onto to start speeding across the path to reach their weak point. Another boss towers on the horizon, and upon reaching it, turns into a Shadow of the Colossus style encounter where you run up its massive arms to reach the weak-spots on its head. One boss, Ninja, was a standard enemy battle with a bit more health than expected. ![]() Once you locate a boss, each battle plays out pretty differently. Random old-school Sonic bumpers and grind rails are sprinkled across the map, only making the clash of ideas even messier. Stripped of the unique iconography and interactions that make those other game worlds feel so natural, and without Sonic’s own iconic worlds designs being included, the open landscape of Sonic Frontiers feels barren and bizarre. The world of Sonic Frontiers isn’t an amalgamation of recognizable Sonic levels or an expanded take on the city environments of Sonic 06, it’s a copyright non-infringing version of the grassy mountains and open fields you saw in Breath of the Wild, Genshin Impact or Xenoblade Chronicles. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, it is not a good video game. SEGA clearly didn’t get the memo or the irony in the “hire this man!” tweets, because Sonic Frontiers takes the AI-generated thesis of “Sonic in Breath of the Wild with XP and Skill Trees” and turns it into a real video game. It’s fun because it’s so absurd, though nobody actually wants the next Mario game to be a gaudy UE5 tech demo. It’s fun seeing Mario jump around in a field full of crepuscular rays or Link tiptoe around in a ray-traced Minecraft house. There’s a silly novelty to seeing those Twitter clips of old-school video game characters running around in hyper-realistic Unreal Engine maps or in impressively constructed Dreams levels.
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