{"id":106609,"date":"2022-10-24T14:38:09","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T14:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/sonic-frontiers-the-final-preview\/"},"modified":"2022-10-24T14:38:09","modified_gmt":"2022-10-24T14:38:09","slug":"sonic-frontiers-the-final-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/sonic-frontiers-the-final-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Sonic Frontiers: The Final Preview"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Back in May when I played Sonic Frontiers for my first preview, I came away with an overall positive first impression, but also a feeling that there was still a good bit of work to be done. The game felt buggy, the performance didn’t feel optimized, and there was a ton of distracting pop-in of objects and obstacles floating around in the sky. <\/p>\n

Here we are five months later, and I got a chance to go hands-on again with a PC build of Sonic Frontiers, this time for a full six hours to check out the first three islands in their entirety, and while a lot of those same issues that I experienced the first time I played are still present \u2014 the pop-in and a handful of minor bugs \u2014 it is clear that a lot of work has gone into tightening up Sonic Frontiers’ performance and polishing its visuals. It’s still an uneven experience, both visually and mechanically, but when my time was up and all I thought about was the disappointment of not being able to play more, that seemed like a good sign that Sonic Frontiers is in a pretty healthy spot heading into its imminent November 8 release.<\/p>\n

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The big thing I got to experience this time around versus my first play session was the full sense of progression through each island. I’ve talked previously about how you need to collect portal keys to open up Cyber \u200b\u200bSpace levels, beat Cyber \u200b\u200bSpace levels to get vault keys, and use vault keys to unlock chaos emeralds, but there’s another important element to the game flow as well: memory tokens. Each of the three islands was home to one of Sonic’s friends who were trapped in Cyber \u200b\u200bSpace, and in order to try and free them, I needed to collect a ton of memory tokens. Typically, these are rewards for exploration in the open world, and they’re the main reason you’ll be looking out for springs, ramps, grind rails, speed boosters, and all other manners of gadgets that send you zooming through the world. <\/p>\n

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Collecting and delivering these memory tokens back to your friend is one of the ways you’ll progress Sonic Frontiers’ story forward. Every time I made a delivery, I was rewarded with a cutscene between Sonic and his trapped friend that would shed a little bit of light on the mysterious Starfall Islands and the cute little native rock people known as korons that inhabit it. There’s a compelling mystery that serves as the heart of Sonic Frontiers’ story, and I found myself very interested in seeing how it all unfolds \u2013 and even more interested in the dynamics between Sonic and each of his friends, which really takes center stage during these cutscenes Each island has a story to tell, with each of Sonic’s friends being a key player in how that story unfolds. <\/p>\n

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I managed to clear the first island in my first three hours or so of playtime, and after a very cool boss battle that I can’t and wouldn’t want to spoil for you, I found myself on Ares Island, a desert themed island that housed all new enemies, mini-bosses, Cyber \u200b\u200bSpace levels, and memory tokens. Here I had to repeat the hunt for the chaos emeralds again. In that way, Sonic Frontiers is very formulaic, but the three islands I’ve explored so far were so different that I was happy to repeat the dance each time. The one weak point in this whole formula are the guardian mini-boss battles, which are required in order to obtain the portal keys that unlock Cyber \u200b\u200bSpace levels. These fights are typically grand in their spectacle, but are rarely actually fun to play. And worse, they’re repeated multiple times throughout the island without any variation. , there are a few exceptions, like a fight against a sumo guardian that encloses you in a cage and requires you to bounce off the fences in order to bump the boss into the electrified portion. The more you bounce, the more force you’re able to bump the boss with, and trying to find the right angle to bounce a bunch of times before hitting the boss was a lot of fun. <\/p>\n

The one weakpoint in the whole formula are the guardian mini-boss battles. <\/p>\n\n

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And then there are the Cyber \u200b\u200bSpace levels, which, like the guardian mini-bosses, varied in their quality, but were all fun. Each is a bite-sized traditional Sonic level that comes with three sub-challenges to complete, in addition to just completing the stage. They are: Beat the level under the S-Rank time limit, beat the level with a certain number of rings, and find all five red rings. Even though these stages are very short, even by Sonic standards, I found that the short length of each one actually lent itself well to how replayable they were. I would retry some of them for 10 or 15 minutes, trying to find the optimum path that would get me to the exit in time for the S-Rank clear, or trying to find that last red coin, or simply to try and see all the different paths that a level offered. <\/p>\n