‘Sonic Frontiers’ Looks Beautiful And Empty

Sonic Frontiers

Credit: Sega

It’s time to come clean: I’m a bit of a fair-weather Sonic fan.

I thought the Genesis games looked great but played terribly, especially Sonic Pinball. I was obsessed with Sonic Adventure on the Sega Dreamcast and, to this day, cherish it like the ultimate janky treasure that it is. Sonic Adventure 2 lost some of the magic, I thought, though Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing and Sonic Colors won me back a bit later on.

Beyond that, Sega’s iconic franchise continues to be very hit-or-miss for me and I’ve regrettably gone years without playing any of the newer installments. I’ve long felt that Sonic has needed another Sonic Adventure-esque shake-up, so imagine my surprise when a teaser trailer for the upcoming open-world — or “open-zone” as it’s officially been referred to — Sonic Frontiers dropped yesterday.

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Until today, not much was known about the project, which is slated for a release sometime in the next year.

Surprisingly, another trailer, this one focused on over seven minutes of actual Sonic Frontiers gameplay, was just published over on IGN. The segment shows our blue hero racing around a “mysterious island that Sonic suddenly finds himself stranded on at the beginning of the game”.

There’s a lot of what you might expect from an open world Sonic game here: Lush environments, copious bounce pads, trails of rings, sick rail-grinding and everyone’s favorite classic loops.

Also, the ancient ruins that Sonic traverses in the preview showcase a lot of really nice verticality. The dizzying heights feature alongside some seriously stunning views of distant ocean waves, rushing waterfalls, majestic rivers and endless green, hyper-realistic fields.

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If you’re watching new Sonic footage, he’s ‘gotta go fast’, and the overall speed feels spot-on. So does the fluidity of control, for that matter, at least as far as I can tell without an actual gamepad in my hands. The serene piano and orchestral music don’t hurt the meditative vibe, either. That said, the whole world feels sort of…abandoned?

It’s essentially a giant obstacle course, filled only with different flavors of traditional Sonic throughways and basic puzzles. I don’t think I saw a single enemy during the entire video, or another character, for that matter. Toward the end, a handful of little stone creatures show up, but that’s it.

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Perhaps this is an intentional isolated aesthetic for the starting hours of the game, as IGN does hint at Sonic “finding himself” on this strange island, perhaps alone. Enemies will exist in Sonic Frontiers, no doubt, but I’ll admit it’s a bizarre first impression for such a huge (and very much anticipated) entry in Sega’s touchstone series.

Like I previously mentioned, I’m a huge Sonic Adventure fan, and I do think the upcoming iteration has the potential to rekindle some of that ridiculous fire. However, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s looking like Frontiers is a lot of flash but not much soul. Still, it is early, this is an early build, and the game isn’t scheduled to come out for quite some time. So basically, I’d love to be proved wrong.

Since I first met the blue wonder back in the radical ‘90s, I’ve always thought that Sonic was tailormade for an open world experience. It’s probably why I never cared much for those early 2D games, because everything felt too boxed in and confined, restrictive in an almost unplayable way. Sonic needs to run around in the great wide open, and I sincerely hope Sega can overcome these initial stumbling blocks and deliver an excellent “open-zone” title.

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IGN apparently has a lot more Sonic Frontiers coverage happening during June, so I’ll be glued to all the developments just like the rest of you. Let’s just hope this desolate map fills out in a big way as more is revealed. Plenty of potential here, I think.