This game has been an incredibly rewarding and consistently fun experience throughout my playthrough and, having finished the game, I came out having wonderful time, even if its not entirely perfect.


Firstly I want to go over a lot of my positive thoughts:

This game's style is EXCEPTIONALLY strong, both in it's visuals and audio. The game has a really strong visual identity, with lots of bight and vibrant colours mixed with some excellent character and environment design, that work together to create a world thats an absolute treat to experience. Similarly with the audio, the music is constantly upbeat and energetic, really adding to the game's unique visuals and enhancing the experience as a whole.

Control-wise, I feel its really important to go in understanding that it doesn't play like a lot of other 3D-platformers. The game implements a duel-stick scheme that allows you to control Penny and Yo-Yo independently of one-another, and makes it so that the only buttons that are needed are triggers for things like jumping and rolling, though thankfully you can still use the face buttons for those and other actions too! Having messed around with it, once you get a feeling for how movement and controls work, you can tell these levels were designed around allowing for a lot of momentum and movement, as well as to allow for sequence-breaking and flexibility for how you choose to traverse them, and it fells INCREDIBLE to play! I recommend really spending some time to get a feel for the controls, as once you figure out the full potential of them, your options when it comes to movement and traverseal open up tremendously!

This is all brought together with exceptional performance on PC! On my set-up with an RTX 3070 Ti and a Ryzen 5900X, I was always able to play at a locked 120fps with no drops nor stuttering, and it felt incredible to play at that kind of framerate! Similarly on my OLED Deck, it ran locked at 90fps at max settings, so it seems like this game is very well polished on an optimization level!


While I've had a great time however, I DO have a few critiques about the game:

Physics can be a bit janky in sections that require more precision, as I found certain sections I had to play more carefully in order to avoid the physics causing me to fall-off a platform and die. This also extends to some gameplay issues in-regards to collision as there were several points where things like Yo-Yo or even Penny herself would get stuck on geometry, keep hovering in mid-air on certain platforms, or in some cases even getting soft-locked into parts of the level geometry. Thankfully the game is pretty forgiving in this sense with no lives and being able to restart at checkpoints instead of the beginning of the level, but they were something that could occasionally cause some frustration and break the flow of gameplay.

Another issue for me stemmed from some general polish issues in regards to cutscene presentation, as the cutscenes that are in-game felt like they needed another pass in terms of animation, as they felt rather unpolished and rough around the edges. Same with the pre-rendered cutscenes, though Id argue to a lesser extent, as well as there being some general issues with sound-balancing throughout both certain cutscenes and gameplay.


Overall however, despite some of my issues, I've been having a GREAT time with this game, and would absolutely recommend it to those who love 3D-platformers and especially those looking for something more experimental and faster paced! Its got it's quirks that I hope will get addressed in the future, but stick with it and you'll find a game thats bursting with charm and character and that will keep you coming back to replay and master for a long time!

For as long as I can remember, Kirby as a series has always been a part of my life, and the more modern style of 2D games have always been there as some of my favorites of all time. But while games like Planet Robobot I've always had a lot of fondness for, the era of this series' 2D outings on Switch have been... lacking to say the least, and for a while I was concerned that we'd never reach the kind of highs that the 3DS games had reached again.

Throughout all the games in the series however, Return to Dream Land has always been somewhat mysterious to me as I never played it when it originally came out, and got to it MUCH later in my life. So with the prospect of a remake, I was excited but cautiously optimistic based on what I had seen.

That's why I am beyond pleased and happy to say that Deluxe is, in my opinion, the BEST way to play this game now, to the point where I don't think I could ever go back to the original.

While I still like the original game and will always respect it's legacy and the impact it would have on the series moving forward, this remake takes every step to both improve AND add onto the original in ways that I didn't even know I wanted from it.

The visuals are spectacular with a really nice almost cel-shaded visual style that helps add a lot of character, and having a main-line Kirby game on this system that actually runs at 60fps improves fluidity SO much for the gameplay.

The host of new and returning mini-games makes for a really fun time that I've so far found that I've been getting a lot more out of then I thought I would, and the amount of polish and care that's been put into staying faithful to those game's origins is extremely appreciated.

And the epilogue, while not being too long, adds a LOT to the experience, and offers some of the best boss fights not just in this game, but I'd argue in the entire series, and provides great closure to Magolor's character.

Honestly, playing this game really brought me back to when I was younger and played those 3DS games for the first time, and has really allowed me to rekindle what I love about this series so much, as well as make me even more hopeful for where it will go from here.

If you have never played the original game before, this is an absolute must-buy in my opinion, and especially a great way to jump into this series' 2D outings as well. Obviously for those who have played the original, it will really be up to you personally on how much the new additions are worth a re-buy. But as for me, I don't regret it for a second, and will absolutely be coming back to this one for years to come.

Genuinely had such a difficult time playing through this game that I only got about an hour in before calling it quits.

The game looks awful, with a lot of really generic theming for the environments and some really awful rendering for the characters, ESPECIALLY Sonic. Music is generally really bland and very few tracks stand out, with an over-reliance on samples that try to emulate the sound of the Genesis titles but come off more as grading. And the level design from the first 2 zones ranges from bland to down-right unbearable, especially in Casino Street Act 3 where the cannon segment took me 4 MINUTES to get through and then it proceeded to follow up with ANOTHER cannon segment that felt unfair and more like a chore to play.

Maybe I'll come back to this game in the future and try to finish it, but I currently have no motivation nor drive to cause of how little fun I had playing this. I'd simply just stick to the original trilogy or Mania if I need my 2D Sonic fix, but this would be the absolute last place I'd look to get that kind of experience.

I feel like it isn’t a stretch to say that the past decade hasn’t exactly been the most kind to Sonic as a series in regard to his 3D outings. Despite having an extremely strong start with games like Colours and Generations, the rest of the decade would end up being plagued with mediocre and uninspired releases that once again put into question how much SEGA actually cared about maintaining a sense of quality with this series. Games like Sonic Lost World and Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric deviated too much from what people expected from the series and at the same time didn’t stand on their own and we’re riddled with many issues retaining to their plots and gameplay loops and in some cases crippling technical issues; and after the release of Forces, an uninspired, underdeveloped, and ultimately what felt like a misguided project with too little time/budget, its safe to say that there’s a reason that we haven’t gotten a new mainline game in the series in 5 years.

So why do I bring all of this up? Because I feel it puts into perspective where a game like Sonic Frontiers’ is coming from, and why leading up to its release, it was important to really highlight a change in direction for the series and how it and it’s developed have needed to evolve for a while now. And while the game is certainly not perfect in more then a few ways, I’m very happy to say that for once I’ve come out of one of these games feeling more optimistic for the future for the series.

PLOT

I don’t want to spend too much time on this point since it’s not my main focus of this review, but something immediately clear to anyone who’s played a game in this series over the past decade compared to this game is that the writing/plot here are quite frankly night-and-day in terms of significance as well as quality. Its clear that the writing style of the past few mainline games and their emphasis and self-contained stories and very juvenile and amateurish writing just wasn’t working out anymore, and in a lot of ways it was dragging down the experience of the rest of the games that they were attached to.

Having a significantly more experienced writer like Ian Flynn, a prominent figure in the development of the Archie/IDW comics, was a better call and its immediately clear with the characterization and dialogue of the characters in-game.
Having more focus helping the local inhabitants, the Koco, with specific issues that relate to those character’s own issues and giving them a sort of mini-arc to help us get to know them better, while in a way also fixing some of the issues that plagued their characterizations from prior games. Specifically with Tails, as his main issue revolves around him feeling like a burden to Sonic and always needing to be saved by him, directly calling out games like Forces that had him do exactly that in said game. It feels like there’s a lot more respect and care put into how these characters are presented and it genuinely made me care a lot about the interactions with them in the plot.

Same can be said about the new character, Sage, who starts as a villain and slowly works towards being an ally. She was a great addition and made for a pretty compelling character that actually felt more like a direct threat to Sonic, but as the plot progresses you really start to sympathize with her and her struggles with the situation as well as trying to make her creator, Dr. Eggman, proud.

One other area of the plot that I really appreciated too was the way it added onto the lore of the series, specifically with things like the origin of the Chaos Emeralds and recontextualizing the events of previous games and making them fit into the series’ main structure. It felt like there was a lot more attention to try and have these games feel more connected, and I’m personally really interested to see how these aspects of the lore get implemented and built upon in the future.

GAMEPLAY

Its safe to say that over the past decade or so, Sonic Team has REALLY relied a lot on the “boost formula” style of 3D gameplay that was introduced with Unleashed, and while I wouldn’t make the argument that games like that, Colours or Generations aren’t fun or enjoyable to play, its also clear that it was starting to overstay it’s welcome and that there would need to be some serious changes to the formula in order to help evolve the series more.

That’s where the “Open-Zone” structure of this game comes into play, and while it’s definitely not without its flaws, I can’t deny just how much fun this style of gameplay was to control and experiment with when it worked well.

The kind of open-world format that this game goes for is more akin to something like Mario Odyssey or Bowser’s Fury I’d say, where you have these more open-ended areas with sort of mini-stages placed all over the world, and your main source of progression and exploration is going through these segments and completing different challenges. Much like the more linear level-focused games of the past with branching pathways, having tons of these laid out around the world always made for a fun diversion and often felt like segments of what would otherwise be a full-level, made it feel really invigorating and fun to explore the map and try to find more of these segments. This also extends to the way Sonic controls in the open-world too, as the sense of speed you get from a character like him works SO well for traversal and movement. Things like the boost have returned, though work a bit differently in terms of momentum/acceleration, but the real surprise for me and the thing that enjoyed using the most was Mania’s drop-dash mechanic, which is the first time its appeared in an official 3D game and words incredibly well. Often using it made me feel like I had a much better sense of speed and movement then using the boost at times, and it was incredible satisfying finding tall areas that I couldn’t get to with the boost, and completely breaking them with a drop-dash to get there in record time.
While the sense of speed is incredible though, its clear that some aspects of the open-world leave a bit to be desired. As an example, there’s a lot of points where the terrain can be uneven cause of the way it was designed and running past these areas can really mess with the momentum and fluidity of the movement when you encounter them. Most of the time it doesn’t amount to much other then it just looking a bit odd, but then there are weird moments where it can send you flying into the air cause of how much momentum it suddenly gives you. It’s not too prevalent of an issue, and admittedly not only is it pretty easy to course correct, its still a bit jarring when it happens, and I can certainly understand why it would be distracting for some.

The other main issue I have with this new structure is the way challenges are implemented throughout the world, and how most of them can be very basic and uninteresting. Most of them just involve really easy tasks like stepping over floors of light-filled boxes or skydiving into square-shaped rings to complete each objective, and it kinda feels like I already know how to beat some of these before I even start them. It’s a shame that a lot of them are structured like this too, cause there are some with more intricate puzzles with things like beams and mirrors that you’d want to see evolve more over the course of the game, but most of those are only used once and never again afterwards.

Another new pillar to the gameplay loop this time around is the added emphasis on combat throughout, and I feel like it manages to do a lot more then other platformers in regards to trying to find a balance between being more in-depth while still being pretty simple to understand, but does ultimately still feel pretty button-mashie in terms of its execution, though it still manages to be pretty enjoyable in short bursts despite that. You’re working pretty hard to build up more XP early in the game to unlock new abilities and said abilities do make a big difference with the amount of variety you have in actual combat scenarios, especially in combination with the game’s new cyloop ability where you circle around enemies to reveal weak-points or stun them, same with the parry move what can deflect enemy attacks and becomes pretty necessary throughout things like the boss fights. While a lot of basic enemies and some points of a lot of the bosses give you ample opportunity to spam attacks on them, certain enemies will find ways of shielding themselves or blocking your attacks, and the Guardians which are this game’s sort-of mini-bosses often require you to complete certain challenges and obstacles to reveal their weak-points and actually hurt them.

The biggest source of this definitely comes from the boss fights, which are without a doubt some of the best fights we’ve had in the series in a long time. The main progression of the story revolves around Sonic finding and unlocking the vaults of the Chaos Emeralds around each island, and usually culminates in finding the final emerald resting on one of the Titans’ heads. Because of that, each fight then transitions into becoming Super Sonic, and often having to find ways to counter each bosses’ attack patterns and find opportunities to properly attack them and while some of these fights are better then others, I found that the structure of these fights in combination with how they’re presented made them really stand out a lot, and definitely highlighted more of the strong points of the game’s combat, though the main drawback to this is that most of these fights cannot be replayed without the use of save-states.

There’s one last main pillar of the gameplay loop here and it’s the Cyberspace levels. Essentially the plot reason for these stages is that Sonic is reliving memories of past events he’s experienced, which is why the stages pull layouts from games like Unleashed, Generations, and even a bit of Sonic Adventure 2 as well. While I can appreciate the fact that they tried to tie this in more with the plot to give these stages an actual reason for reappearing, that still doesn’t take away from the fact that these are probably one of the weakest parts of the game and it has purely to do with the overreliance on certain themes/tropes that the series hasn’t been able to shake off over the years.

In terms of background elements, its mostly familiar territory with pretty overused themes in the series like Green Hill Zone, Chemical Plant, and Sky Sanctuary being EXTREMELY prevalent and being the majority of what you’ll see in these segments, and while I can’t deny that they are still memorable level themes, they’ve been used to death and back over the past decade or so and I would’ve vastly preferred to see more original themes for these segments, much like the city highway theme that’s used the least in these segments. And while the original layouts of these stages still work very well for the most part and can be fun to play through, its clear that Sonic’s new physics and momentum don’t entirely play well with these other levels and don’t feel as refined as those said games. While I still found these segments to be fairly enjoyable, these were undoubtably one of the game’s weaker attributes, and I hope that moving forward we can finally start moving away from these extremely repeated level themes and have more of an emphasis on new stage themes.

Ultimately however, despite some of my issues, the main gameplay look proved to be very enjoyable to me and I really appreciated the immense sense of speed and momentum that the game provided, and the “Open-Zone” structure of the game really proves that it’s a great template for the kind of faster-paced gameplay that Sonic as a series provides, and its something that I hope the team sticks with and continues to refine and add onto moving forward.

PRESENTATION

One thing that most games in this series have managed to always be consistently good at for the most part is their presentation, and for me it’s no surprise that Frontiers is no exception to this. It’s clear that Sonic Team has really been spending a lot of time refining and tuning their in-house engine to make their newer games look really solid and playing through Frontiers reminded me of how far the tech has come with translating this series over to newer hardware and really elevating the look of the world/characters.

The lighting is really gorgeous and character detail/rendering as always is extremely solid, and on the note the world as a whole often looks full of detail and life. I wasn’t sure at first how I’d feel with the game going for a more pseudo-realistic look with its environments, but in combination with the excellent lighting and rendering, it contrasts surprisingly well with the art-style of the characters. In my opinion its one of the nicest looking Sonic games to come out, but I still feel like a game like Unleashed slightly edges it out because of that game’s strong art direction, so I definitely hope that Sonic Team in the future can further refine this look as I feel what they have here gets extremely close to being incredible. This holds doubly true for the animation work, as while it’s seen a considerable improvement from Forces, I still feel like there’s a good amount of jank to it and that it’s not quite as polished or expressive as I feel it should be.

On the topic of music, I was genuinely really surprised by how much variety and range this game had overall. There’s a lot of more ambient and relaxing music on the main islands to fit the more open nature of them, but that’s in combination with a lot of really upbeat and electric sounding music for things like enemy encounters, sort of highlighting their more abstract and almost robotic look. This is doubled-down even further with the Cyberspace stages with each have their own tracks and they all are FULL of energy and more varied tempos and compositions. It helped considerably in making up for the overused level theming, as in a weird way it helped these stages feel slightly more varied than they otherwise would be.

However, the biggest strength of the music in my opinion has to come from its vocal tracks, which primarily appear in the boss fights, and they all do an incredible job of heightening the tension and impact of these fights. It really adds a lot to experience having these really intense and energetic punk-rock tracks playing while fighting these towering bosses, and really helps elevate what would otherwise be a pretty good fight into a great one.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, Sonic Frontiers is a game that I feel, despite its flaws, manages to finally break a long-standing trend with this series that lasted for a decade, and finally provides a lot of needed hope and optimism to the series. It might not be the most polished, and there may still be some semblance of overreliance on the past to help it reach it’s lofty goals, but when this game works best it can genuinely be so easy to get lost in it’s gameplay and sense of speed and exploration, and ultimately I feel that it’s a format that can really become something truly special if Sonic Team sticks with it and continues to refine and develop it further.

As it stands now, for what is essentially a first-pass of this new structure for Sonic’s 3D outings, it manages to stand out considerably among it’s contemporaries and despite it’s flaws still proves to be a very fun an fulfilling experience. For the first time in a while, I’m genuinely excited about the future of the series again and what it has to offer, and I hope that the team will look at the feedback from players and really stick with this formula and refine it more, as I feel that there is something really special in what we’ve been presented in its current iteration and feel confident that it can reach even greater heights in the future.

For now however, while nowhere near perfect, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game and can definitely see myself coming back to it in the future.