Sonic Frontiers

Sonic - Breath of the Wild Oh Man...this is a rough one. While I can commend Sonic Team for alway's trying something different (for better or for worse) I have to say This is a very weird title for the Sonic Franchise. The melancholy feel, the Open world, the Mini-Levels, The Starfall event being this games equivilent of the Bloodmoon. this entire game just screams "I'm the Zelda Breath of The Wild of the Sonic Franchise" and that creates a very weird atmosphere. Sonic Games usually have a very colorful and energetic style to them. While there is certainly room to experience dread, action, humour and serious moments. "Gloomy and Melancholy" are not moods that mesh well with the Sonic Franchise in my personal opinion. And The Cutscenes between Sonic and his comrades inbetween the game progression make that very clear. They start of as interesting...but they are so abundant they become...tedious to say the least. While on the one hand I think it's great to see character moments between them and flesh out their relationships. They aren't paced well. and feel like they are getting in the way of the story more than moving it forward. Though because of the set tone it is refreshing to see Eggman have a more serious demeanor like in the Sonic Adventure Era. Over the years ol' Ivo Robotnik was becoming more of a comic relief villain instead of an actual threat, so atleast that is a welcome change. - Overworld and Leveldesign Frontiers has a vast open world to explore and I must say exploring the open world is mostly a pleasant experience. the gameplay is smooth, The abundance and ever expanding sets of grindrails, baloons and bumpers keep the world very easy and fast to traverse. Though I am giving a minus point for not having an active minimap on display. The Levels on the other hand are all Complete-Garbage-1-minute stages. akin to The Shrines of Zelda Botw instead of actual dungeons. and I HATE it. not only are they all short. they are all re-hashed snippets of stages from older games. Green Hill, Mystic Ruins, Chemical Plant. etc etc. So it's just a worse experience than Sonic Generations. (but atleast without 2D sections mixed in). - Combat They gave Sonic more active combat moves in this game. and it is a very mixed bag of an experience. The basic-skills work fine but the moveset isn't expanded upon in an intuitive way. leading to an overload of Information in countless tutorial sections instead of intergrating those mechanics in the overall gameplay naturally. and this is something the devs where blatently aware of as they stuff reminders and tutorials on your face with every load screen. What Sonic also has is levels for his Power, Speed, Ring count and Defense. something that sounds fun on the surface. Until you discover that YOU CAN'T USE THOSE UPGRADES IN THE LEVELS. So those levels with those impossibly short par-times. yeah good luck. cause you aren't getting a speedboost to help with that. you left those skill back in the overworld. Another thing I never expected to say is that this game made Super Sonic boring. Normally Getting to go Super was an event. a pinacle. Something you had to earn by getting to the end of the game when you collected all the emeralds. or fullfilled a certain 100% criterea. Now you go super for every major boss, and the Combat is just pounding away at HP-bathtubs and hope your ring timer doesn't run out before your finger gets tired. the camera angles are abyssmal too, you can hardly see what you're doing, and the added quicktime events don't even grant you an extra damaging attack if you manage to succeed them. horrible experience. - Having Played Shadow Generations a year before this I can certainly see where the basis for that game came from. They clearly knew the foundation of Frontiers was good but they hadn't perfected it to the Sonic formula yet.