![]() ![]() ![]() Sonic can dash (there's even a sprint button you activate by clicking the left stick), he can perform his floor slide and he can now boost drift through the air, describing a lazier arc when doing so while the homing jump is used to string together combos and snap you towards grind rails in the open zone. Some boss fights have a Shadow of the Colossus vibe to them as you scale bigger enemies and while the combat isn't exactly finessed it is fun. That emptiness, though, lets you feel through Sonic's new moveset for Frontiers - one that's a joy to play with, and promises a fun toolset should be in place for the final game. There is an emptiness to it, as you'll have noticed in those gameplay videos, and this demo certainly can feel sparse - it's a small section of the map that's on offer, within only a handful of challenges and a couple of bosses to take down in order to collect enough portal gears to progress to the next gated off area with the vague promise that as you progress there'll be more unlocked and more to play with. It doesn't sound like much, or look like much. ![]() It's an open space liberally littered with various collectibles - there are seeds you can collect that will enhance your attack or defensive powers, tokens to be collected and portal gears obtained from beating bosses that help you unlock new areas, while on your travels you'll come across small puzzles and platform challenges. I understand some of the reticence around it, because when viewed as an open world game Sonic Frontiers hardly inspires. ![]() Sonic Frontiers - Announce Trailer The Sonic Frontiers announcement trailer. Team Sonic is insistent on using the term 'Open Zone' rather than open world (you can read a bit more about what precisely that means in our interview with producer Takashi Iizuka), and it's certainly a more focussed map that's on offer, even if you've the freedom to explore it at will. Get up and running in Sonic Frontiers, though, and there's a decent amount of promise in a Sonic game that's not about simply moving forward. I think Sonic Frontiers has a fair chance of landing the transition to an all-new style as effectively as that game - faint praise once again seeing as Sonic Adventure had more than its fair share of flaws, but this is Sonic we're talking about and things haven't always been straightforward. Which is a bit of a shame, given how Sonic Frontiers plays an awful lot better than it looks - faint praise, perhaps, seeing as in its unpolished, unfinished state it looks frankly horrendous, but praise nevertheless for what's quite easily the boldest, bravest shift the series has seen since 1998's Sonic Adventure. Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Series X/S, Switch.Shakily running on a PC at a low resolution that doesn't do the visuals any favours, the button prompts for the tutorial are incorrectly labelled and there's almost a sense of polite embarrassment from the Sega representatives manning the booth, not helped by the car crash quality that drew small crowds when the rough demo was first fired up at Summer Games Fest. With gameplay demos that were rough around the edges and an open world that was strikingly sparse, there's the hope that a first chance to play it might turn things around but first impressions really aren't promising. Sonic Frontiers, you've probably already noticed, didn't look too hot upon its proper reveal earlier this month. ![]()
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