It is the best worst Sonic game ever made. For reference, I haven’t played it any further than what has been seen on my streams, which compose of these two vods:
Kronos Island (4hrs, 14min)
Ares Island (4hrs, 59min)
I have been playing a little off stream, but it’s mostly to clean up and 100% the islands we’ve already seen. I never advance the story off stream. So, as of this writing, I am still at the very start of Chaos Island.
It’s a lot of the same old problems we’ve been dealing with for what feels like an entire generation of Sonic games, but it hits just enough of the right notes where, instead of feeling like total garbage, it’s charming.
A lot of people have been invoking comparisons to games like Sonic Adventure and I think that’s apt. It’s one of those games where when it’s bad, it’s the worst game ever made. But when it’s good, it shakes the pillars of creation.
Somebody at Sega overheard “what if Platinum Games made a Sonic?” and so every big boss bites off a piece of Metal Gear Rising. It’s amazing.
Everything between that… ehhh. Like I said, it’s a lot of the same problems. They micromanage Sonic’s controls on a per-level basis, they don’t really seem to understand what makes going fast feel fun, stage ranks vary wildly from being insultingly easy to infuriatingly impossible without any rhyme or reason, and there are basic elements of control that just don’t make any sense. Like how if you let go of the analog stick, Sonic stops on a dime, no matter how fast you were going. How does a decision like that make it through FOUR YEARS of focus testing and QA but nobody ever says “hey this feels like garbage”? Which is to say nothing of the drop dash, which requires so many button presses and is so pointless it may as well not even exist.
The story is taking me a while to warm up to. I appreciate the strong, clear characterization. Sonic finally emotes again! He’s not just some generic cardboard hero. He has a personality now! Everybody does! He razzes Knuckles and Knuckles razzes him back and they shoot each other a

look. That’s great.
But your introduction to the story is awful. Everything about Amy on Kronos island feels like it comes out of nowhere. There’s no context to what she’s doing or why, and Sonic never really asks, it’s just “Hey Sonic, I’m standing out in the middle of this featureless empty field, can you help me find this Koco’s true love?”
Who? What? Why? Sonic asks none of these questions. He just goes “okay, sure.”
And a lot of the storytelling feels like that. A lot of characters standing out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, nearly impossible to see, and most of it optional. Very easy to miss. Once you get to the second island, and I understood I had to hunt out these talk locations using the map, it started to gel with me a little better. It’s just everything about Amy’s feels very… non-sequitur.
But what Knuckles had was a lot better and a lot more coherent. Lots of good lore food. Some of that was I think me just figuring out the game’s overall tone and pacing, too.
I’m also not super in love with the open world maps themselves. They feel very much like somebody dropped Sonic in to somebody else’s photoscanned assets. I was telling a friend this last night, but there are entire areas in Ares Island that are devoid of any rings, enemies, or puzzles, but they let you run around there anyway, even though there are places that don’t feel like they were made for Sonic.
And as somebody who as played a lot of “we loaded Sonic in to a map from another game” fan games… it has that vibe. Loose, and jittery, and the camera can’t quite cope, and Sonic’s physics don’t interact with the terrain right, etc. That’s the open world in Frontiers, to me. It really IS “Sega Hire This Man.”
On top of just being bland as hell, too. They are extremely poorly laid out, there’s not enough good landmarks, there’s not enough to make them feel truly lived-in… it’s just a random collection of assets surrounding a generic theme like “plains” or “desert” or “volcano” without any consideration of making anything feel like a place. It’s boring and easy to get lost in the bigger zones.
But, again, when the vocals kick in and you’re barrel rolling with a cyber dragon at 600mph through the sky? Who cares about anything else.