Theres a good chunk of my friend circle who either have passing interests in sonoc and havent played in years or just dont care for sonic that I convinced to give frontiers a try, or were already interested. Seeing a buncha folks who dont keep up or play modern sonic games all have a great time with frontiers has been pretty encouraging, and I think it indicates sega have done a good job attempting to pull in new folks with this game. Even some of my pals who just dislike sonic all around are seeing footage and our friends playing and they genuinely think the game looks good and wanna pick it up on sale. Despite its shortcomings, i think the game does a pretty good job
I want to see everyone’s opinions and review scores change once that first patch releases which will permanently eliminate the pop-in Almost every review I’ve seen or read mentions this so hopefully this is Sonic Team’s first priority with post release patching but honestly who knows It may even be a technical thing with the engine itself that may prevent it from being fixed.
I've never seen major outlets re-review a game after the first round of patches, unless those patches take the game from "generally agreed to be unplayable" to "playable, I guess".
Wow, 4-2 is just. Wow. That intro. The music. The level design. Sonic Team fucking popped off holy shit.
I picked up the game yesterday. It's been enjoyable for me so far. Definitly a step in the right direction in my opinion. I wish they'd go more Mario esq though with the environments. I don't need my hedgehogs to be ultra realistic.
In the end I accepted the large array of returning stages, but yeah. 30 new bite-sized stages like 4-2 would have been something nice. That one really worked for me especially.
Honestly I think most of the original stages in the final island are pretty nice, not all winners and that one drifting stage is abysmal, but the rest were quite fun
Cyber stages are fun. Even when they reuse layouts - it felt more like a mini game figuring out what zone I really was playing. So while not giving a pass (cause it was done to make it quicker to add more small stages) it was kinda fun replaying some layouts like Sky Rail
Aside from the fact that rail switching is reliable in the modern games unlike in SA2, all of the reused stage layouts were significant downgrades over their originals. Sky Rail without the intense speed and natural flow of SA2's physics for example was simply not fun. After so many years of reused assets and nostalgia pandering, there's no way I can let the cyberspace levels pass without scathing remarks. Even if they played as well as the open zone or something like Generations, they'd still be wholly unwelcome in my books. But they don't. And it's not a good look (literally) when you'll have seen literally half of the cyberspace level themes during the mandatory tutorial and the other half within one further hour of playing. I just can't stress that enough. The only cyberspace levels that I'm remotely okay with are the original layouts in the city theme. And ngl but even some of the assets within them, such as the overhead street signs, are too similar to/obviously based upon the same street signs from Unleashed's Skyscraper Scamper that were later used in Generations' Speed Highway. I'd be more tolerant of them in a vacuum, but not alongside yet more Green Hill, Chemical Plant and Sky Sanctuary. The cyberspace levels take a gameplay style that I already dislike and make them function worse than ever, recycled a bunch of literal layouts I've played in past, whilst also sapping out any potential visual distinctiveness and creativity. I think they're bad. No excuses just because they're supposedly side-content (they're not but whatever) or because there's are so many of them. They get zero points. Nothing. I can't even tell you which ones had the best music, because it's all one genre of very good albeit samey tracks played over the same four backgrounds. At least Forces had like, what, 7 unique themes? Only two of which were directly recycled, and a further two more loosely recycled. And it has almost as many music tracks as cyberspace (30 stages minus boss fights). Good lord. I'm actually looking at Forces' piddly amount of content and variety favorably to Frontiers' offerings regarding cyberspace. Never thought I'd see the day.
Haven’t played the game yet but I compared your list with Sonic News Network. There are a few discrepancies between the two lists. This isn’t a correction, I’m just curious if u agree with News Network’s classifications: Spoiler They say 1-3 and 2-3 are original layouts They say 2-2 is Dragon Road Act 3, 3-2 is Savanna Citadel Daytime Act 1 (2D Sections), 4-2 is Speed Highway Act 2 from Sonic Generations (3D Sections), 4-9 is City Escape Act 2 From Generations + Ice Cap Snowboarding from Sonic Adventure
I finished the game yesterday and have some thoughts. I'll try and keep it short since I agree with most of what @Azookara, @Laura and @Sonic5993 have said I think I mostly enjoyed my time with Frontiers but it's a looong ways off from being the ideal open-world/zone/whatever Sonic game. I enjoyed messing around in the map, the character interactions were fun, some combat encounters were fun, the OST was great and the SuperSonic fights were pretty hype (seriously wish there was a boss rush or some way to replay them). This game is less 'Breath of the Wild' and more 'Mario 64/Banjo-Kazooie'-esque collectathon and I think that's okay. I enjoyed the first two islands but by the time I got to Chaos Island my enjoyment started to waver and both Rhea and Ouranos didn't really win me over again. By this point you've seen everything Frontiers has to offer. The flat landscape quickly becomes boring to traverse, the puzzles are a bit mindless and combat ends up feeling like a chore so I ended up ignoring most of the late game combat encounters. One other thing I noticed is that Sonic interacts with terrain in the strangest way, it almost reminds me of '06. I feel like his tendency to stick to the ground can lead to moments like this I thought it would be fun to launch myself of the ramp without using the dash pads, (and it works sometimes!), but most times Sonic just falls straight down like this and it was pretty disappointing! The game is clearly not made with that sort of stuff in mind. It's an open free-roaming game but I don't really feel like I'm given freedom I also really want to know the development story behind Rhea Island. Why is this map so large yet so barren and empty? There must have been bigger plans for this area but the final result really does feel like Sonic was thrown into an Unreal Engine 4 test map. I know that's a cliché to say at this point but I can't think of a more accurate way to describe it. If the dead and lifeless maps were an intentional choice to match the game's story and mood then maybe the next game should be about Sonic discovering a new civilization that's actually still alive and thriving lol. After finishing Frontiers I decided to go back and play some of Adventure 1 & 2 just for the sake of comparison. Frontiers controls pretty good and Sonic has a nice turning circle (as he should since running in circles is the main mechanic of the game!). I still think Adventure 2 has the best sense of "weight" mostly due to how Sonic is animated in that game. I don't exactly know the best way to describe it but the way Sonic is animated in SA2 just feels so real In Frontiers Sonic feels like he's sort of just gliding around. It's not bad, just different I guess. Moving Sonic around in mid-air in Frontiers doesn't feel very good. In SA2 Sonic had full 360 degree movement in mid-air which was useful if you jumped in the wrong direction or something. Don't get me wrong I don't think SA2 was a masterpiece but that game had some extremely forwards thinking design on Sonic Team's part. Seriously, it took Nintendo until Mario 3D Land to start doing this. From Mario 64 to Mario Galaxy 2 if you jumped you were locked into that plane of motion but Sonic Team figured this shit out in 2001! and then somehow forgot! At times Sonic Team's game design feels antiquated and outdated. If Frontiers released in 2002 I'm sure it would've gotten critical acclaim, but there's a lot of tough competition right now. I'm not entirely confident that the next game will be any different but I hope they're willing to take a step back and tackle this open-zone thing from a fresh direction after Frontiers. I think it would be nice if they let someone else direct the next game instead of Kishimoto again. Even if that person is worse at least it will be a change up. There are a lot of fans who are satisfied with Frontiers and that's cool. I just hope they're listening to feedback from all sides (because lord knows they sure as hell aren't reading page 405 of the Sonic Frontiers thread on sonicretro.org) Spoiler sorry for the text and gif dump. I literally said I was going to keep it short but I guess I was wrong lol.
Amy's Sonic obsession had the best balance in SA2, after she made her pass she stopped and stuck to the task.
this I haven't minded in the overworld (it's quite useful when you're in the middle of some scary platform in the sky segment and you want to get your bearings) but it is absolutely annoying in the cyber levels, especially when it kicks in at the very beginning and now I have to retry the stage again already and rrrrrghhh-- So I've 100% Ares Island yesterday, started Chaos Island, not a fan of the increased 2D segments because what I like about the game is being able to approach things however I want and this just kinda...stops that, but still enjoying myself. Rails got less scary when I saw a loading screen tooltip saying that you can switch rails just by nudging the joystick as opposed to jumping, and now I've had very few Heroes-esque moments with them. By the way, how does the game clock progression? When I say I 100% an area, I mean that I cleared all the portals with all four missions done, did all the side stories, and also got every single marked memory token on the map too. Spoiler The end of the Wyvern fight tho!! Sonic forcing open its mouth and then using the missiles it fired at him to mess it up!! I feel like I'm 12 again! Also shout out to that reference to Super Knuckles, it's canon, A+ 10/10
oooh I disagree with this hard, but I'm also biased because I despise the "the cast's only female character exists to chase down male lead character and get kidnapped when she's not doing that" trope and I really hated how, after ending SA1 vowing to stop doing that, they just dropped it and it was back to Business As Usual in SA2. She feels like a person now? And tbh lots of people are "they're friends and that's it"...
Honestly part of the reason I enjoyed it besides low expectations seems to have been knowing the gist of what "open zone" was going to mean, I guess. It's not an open world game, it's a giant series of stages within stages with a collectathon. Doesn't justify the gratuitous amounts of railroading mini-challenge sections that constantly take control away, especially on Chaos Island, but having the mindset of "this is Boost without the rails, and having some Lost World-isms that don't suck as much" helped me I guess.
The 2D sections drag a bit but my god, the music is fucking gorgeous on Chaos Island. Had to get that out. I'm on the last island now. And well, my impressions are beginning to turn into opinions. Lol
Beat the 4th island today. Like others have said, it's very "Sega Hire This Man". Also a bummer that the last two islands look exactly like the first island. They should've just copy and pasted more Generations assets for a new theme lol.
More than that, again, there's already all the assets to make a fall-themed space already in the game: Spoiler (This is Kronos and not Ouranos, but you get my point) It's just wacky that they used these for a tiny side area when it would've spiced up the aesthetic in a major way. Ditto with Spoiler removing the Kronos map pieces from Rhea, if it's even supposed to be a different island at all...which I'm still not clear on.
In regards to the post above, Spoiler It's not. Besides the visible Kronos map shared in the map screen, and being able to see Kronos areas from Rhea, even the game data shares the map between the two and just changes their objects/scripts. It doesn't help that Ouranos is also something removed from Kronos, turned into its own isle.. when Eggman's memos cited that there were only three islands to Starfall. Guess they forgot to redo that line. It's kind of a mess how that last stretch of the game got slapped together.
