Sonic Frontiers offers fresh new gameplay features

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Sonic Frontiers includes more content and offers more playtime than prior Sonic titles.

Seth Franco, Staff Writer

Sonic Frontiers marks a return to greatness for the Sonic series as a captivating 3D platforming adventure, with content to offer for all types of players.

The game is focused around open-world exploration and quest completion. This is an expansion of concepts seen in past games, but is also revolutionary in the fact that this game is fully built around the open world, which has not been seen in any prior Sonic game.

However, the breakout “Cyber Space” levels still function as platforming stages that are more traditional for the series.

Overall, Frontiers includes much more content and offers more playtime than a majority of prior Sonic titles.

One of the distinct aspects of Frontiers is the plotline. The storyline takes a noticeably more serious approach than most of the recent Sonic games. This is a return to the form of the early 2000s Sonic games, and it also helps the game be taken more seriously. 

Many ongoing writing issues related to Sonic’s friends, who are likewise major icons of the series, have been remedied by the improved storyline and new writers.

The soundtrack, written by Tomoya Ohtani and featuring Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens and Tyler Smyth of Dangerkids, is very experimental, while still maintaining a style that suits the series.

The game has faced criticism for low render distance and other mechanical issues, but was received better by critics than many of its 3D Sonic predecessors.

The game is another success in the current era of the series, dubbed by many fans as the “Sonic renaissance.” With two successful movies, Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic The Hedgehog 2, a new Netflix series, Sonic Prime, and now Frontiers, the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise seems to have made it out of the slump it was stuck in for the past decade.