Ever since theinitial reveal of Sonic Frontiers, fans and critics alike have voiced doubts about the new direction it’s going in. On one hand, the Starfall Islands seen in that first trailer seemed odd and arbitrary, clashing heavily with the design of Sonic himself. On the other hand, the “cyberspace” levels looked like what most expect a Sonic game to be at this point in the series. Is it as bad as it looks? Well there is a demo here at Tokyo Game Show 2022 and let’s just say that things aren’t looking all that great at the moment.
Starting with how Sonic Frontiers looks, in a word: it’s passable. The demo was played on PC hardware and it still didn’t exactly look like a cutting-edge game. Framerate-wise, it was somewhere between thirty and sixty during normal gameplay. It’s hard to say for sure without an actual measurement, but the overall feeling was of a game running closer to thirty more often than not. As for sound, voice and music, it was all just okay; there wasn’t anything that stood out as special during this demo.
As for the art style issues, they’re still here. Sonic still looks out of place in the Starfall Islands and the same goes for all the random rings, rails, platforms and springs floating around them. It feels like Sonic Team is trying to go for a realistic world with classic Sonic level features, but it’s just not working without some kind of story justification. It feels like all this stuff is there just because and it was honestly distracting. The thought: “why is this here, and what’s the point of interacting with it?” just wouldn’t go away.
Thankfully, this does not apply to “cyberspace.” Areas in this realm all have consistent art direction, seem to be part of larger worlds and are clearly marked as “levels” mechanically. So, they serve as a nice break from the overworld confusion. There’s a slight issue plaguing them at the moment though: the controls.
There’s something off about Sonic’s controls, and perhaps the best way to describe what’s wrong with them is to say that they just don’t function as expected. Sonic has moves; he has a lot of moves. He has moves to help him speed through the world, moves to help him trip up enemies and moves to outright destroy them. They should all be accessible too since they’re tied to simple button-presses, but that’s not quite the case.
His signature homing attack is mapped to its own dedicated button now, but it only works if a prompt is onscreen. That prompt doesn’t always pop up fast enough either, so Sonic is just left floating for an awkward split-second before he can continue. Light Speed Dash is similarly affected thanks to being tied to the left stick; you know, the one usually used for general movement.
Hitting the timing right means executing the dash, but it’s very easy to miss and just collect the rings instead. The boost feature is back too, but it makes Sonic much more floaty and difficult to control. It was thusly difficult to find a good time to use it. Similar things can be said about fighting, dodging and blocking. Put another way, there’s no signature Sonic flow in this game at the moment. It all works, and one could in theoretically get used to it, but should that be necessary?.Past Sonic gameswere pretty pick-up-and-play in terms of their controls and entering that flow state. So what’s up with this one?
So yes, the meat here was indeed in “cyberspace,” and that was in fact where most of the fun of this demo was found. That fun was not easy to dig out though thanks to wonkiness involved with controlling Sega’s blue hedgehog though, so hopefully there’ll be some improvements by the time it releases this November. Altogether, this demo painted a picture of a game that was almost there despite looking decidedly average. If the control issues in Sonic Frontiers are dealt with, then Sonic fans might have something decent to look forward to over the next couple of months.
