Sonic Frontiers feels like a hedgehog’s midlife crisis

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. It’s fun seeing Mario jump around in a field full of crepuscular rays or Link tiptoe around in a ray-traced Minecraft house. It’s fun because it’s so absurd, though; nobody actually wants the next Mario game to be a gaudy UE5 tech demo. 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. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, it is not a good video game.

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. 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. Random old-school Sonic bumpers and grind rails are sprinkled across the map, only making the clash of ideas even messier.

Some open-world games use the freeroaming environment as an excuse to guide you from one scripted story mission to another, but in my time with Sonic Frontiers, the gameplay loop was much more organic and unguided. Bosses are scattered across the map, and you’ll run, jump and grind your way around to find them, navigating like you would in any other 3D Sonic game. The movement feels fine, but surprisingly enough the game is loaded with an exhaustive list of options that let you fine-tune the hedgehog’s movement characteristics – Starting Speed, Turning Speed, Boost Speed, Top Speed, Steering Resistance, Acceleration, and Bump Jump height. It’s a weirdly exhaustive list of options for a game that rarely asks you to do more than jump up a couple hills or homing-attack some basic enemies.

Once you locate a boss, each battle plays out pretty differently. One boss, Ninja, was a standard enemy battle with a bit more health than expected. 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. 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.

A 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. Beat a boss, and you earn portal gears. 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.

Roaming the open-world, you’ll either hear melancholic piano music or nothing but the sound of a gentle breeze. 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.

It’s all rather drab and lifeless, but there are still glimmers of hope to cling onto. 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. The other glimmer? Well… we can’t tell you about that just yet.

It’s certainly not Sonic’s new Skill Tree, full of about a dozen new abilities from projectile blasts to combo-extending kicks and more, but which do little to expand the interactivity of the world. The most unique Skill, a Cyberloop ability that lets you run Tron light-cycle trails around enemies or empty spaces to deal damage and find hidden items, is a minor treat.

Sonic Frontiers is a massive shift in scope and style for the franchise, and from what we’ve seen and played, it’s not likely to stick the landing. It’s one thing to shift gears into a wildly untraditional open-world experience, but it’s another thing to have it feel so unfinished and half-baked. Very few Sonic fans seem to have been asking for a game like this, and if this demo was any indicator, they won’t be swayed by it anytime soon.