First Sonic Frontiers Gameplay Showcases its Open World

After a brief tease yesterday, we finally have the first full gameplay trailer for Sonic Frontiers.

The trailer comes as part of an IGN First cover story, and covers about seven minutes of how the series is making the jump to an open-world structure. In Sonic Frontiers, our speedy hero is stranded on a mostly abandoned island, but is free to run around it to his heart’s content. The environments and music are just begging everyone to make Breath of the Wild comparisons. But it seems like they’re trying to weave in elements of more standard 3D Sonic games into an open space, and a lot of that looks pretty rad. Much of the issue with 3D Sonic games is when the level design feels at odds with Sonic’s speed. So just making the space you’re running around in bigger seems more conducive to longer bursts of speed and momentum, rather than the stop and start of more confined games.

But despite all of that, it looks like Sonic Frontiers will have segments that require the player to slow down. The footage also spends some time showing Sonic solving different puzzles in the environment, from moving statues to certain positions to open up a new path and stepping on lit up spaces on platform. It feels a bit at odds with the speed of a typical Sonic game, but we’ll have to see how all of these elements make up the whole of the game when it launches later this year.

Check out the video here:

Sonic Frontiers is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch this year. If you’re itching for some Sonic now, the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 movie is available on digital platforms.