I finished Sonic Frontiers earlier this week and generally had a pretty great time with it. It certainly has its flaws – levelling up ring power one-by-one for a start – but its high-speed open-zone exploration and great characterisation make it a confident step in the right direction. Sonic fans are finally eating well.
Positive final thoughts aside, one of Frontiers’ areas was so bad that I almost didn’t end up finishing it. For the first two islands I was having a merry time, rolling around at the speed of sound and clearing out everything on the map. Both islands have some of the same issues like wonky bosses and a few challenges that feel a little forced (looking at you, hamster wheels) but they’re held up by how engaging it is to run around as Sonic at high speed and blaze through everything with no troubles.
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Then I got to the game’s third area, Chaos Island. Despite following pretty much the exact same formula as Kronos and Ares, this third map somehow manages to trip itself up at every possible turn and show off the uglier side of Frontiers. By the time it had me doing a pinball minigame with a mandatory score of 5 million, I was ready to peace out and leave Sonic to his cyber corruption for good.
For context, Sonic Frontiers is paced in a surprisingly formulaic way, essentially having each area start and end in the same way - find the chaos emeralds, chat to one of Sonic’s friends and develop their character, do one or two asinine minigames, fight a boss, rinse and repeat.
This formula is already a little tiring by the end of Ares Island, but it’s exhausting when you realise that Chaos Island is just going to make you do it all over again. Even if, like me, you enjoyed the first two islands, by 12 hours of playtime you’re expecting more to change than the scenery.
Being repetitive isn’t the main thing that’s wrong with Chaos Island, though. The big problem comes from how it’s all laid out. Whereas Kronos and Ares were both mainly comprised of one large map for Sonic to run around on, Chaos tries to mix it up a bit by being set high above in the clouds and split up into several different mountainous landmasses.
Such design makes it hard for Sonic to remain running for too long without having to stop and use rails or Springs to get around, which feels at odds with the “open-zone” spirit of Frontiers. I groaned every time I had to get to another island because it inevitably meant that I’d have to go back and forth on another awkwardly linear rail section instead of running around like I wanted to.
Sonic Frontiers is at its worst when it switches to 2D platforming. For whatever reason, Sonic’s momentum is different in these sections and it just ends up feeling off. Frontiers also forces you to stay in that perspective until you either complete the section successfully, or fall off of it, which you’ll end up doing on purpose just to get out.
Chaos Island has more 2D sections than any other island in the game, so you can see the immediate problem. If you hit a Boost Pad or a spring, you’re almost guaranteed to find yourself swapped to 2D, which makes even the act of running around the island a pain. For a game whose core identity is letting Sonic move around freely, it’s a massive misstep.
And then there’s the pinball minigame. The goddamn pinball minigame. Sonic Frontiers trips over its own feet a lot, but I was able to forgive most of it because of its ambition to reinvent Sonic and because it’s the first go at a new formula for the blue blur. The pinball minigame is unforgivable, though.
Before you get Chaos Island’s last Chaos Emerald, Sonic stumbles across a pinball minigame built into some ruins (don’t even ask, it’s lampshaded straight away). For no good reason, Frontiers then asks you to get 5 million points to proceed with the main story and get the Chaos Emerald.
Random difficulty spikes pop up a few times in Frontiers, but this one feels extra egregious because of how ridiculously high the score is and how far removed from the rest of the gameplay the minigame is. Even with multipliers, getting 5 million can take close to 15 minutes of non-stop pinballing. Couple that with the physics being ever-so-slightly off, and it’s a wonder this made it into the game at all, let alone as something mandatory to see the ending.
Beating the minigame only took me four tries and around half an hour in total, but I’ve seen some players report that this section took them days to complete. It’s just incredibly strange for a main objective and, with the amount of complaints that have been made so far, I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t get patched out in the future.
Thankfully, an epic boss fight and a refreshing fourth island let Frontiers pick itself back up again just in time for the finale, but Chaos Island is a really rough middle section that should have been cut. While many areas of Frontiers show what the future of Sonic could be, this is the blueprint for how not to do an open-zone area.
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