As someone who's generally unenthused about Sonic The Hedgehog, Frontiers isn't exactly a homerun, but it was a breath of fresh air compared to previous "modern" 3D entries when it comes to both storytelling and gameplay.
The opening hours for me were specially wonderful when it comes to traversing and platforming in a very open and vast lands in high speed collecting Memory tokens, although that will wear out unfortunately as a result of the game revealing it's cards way earlier than it should have in my opinion, despite being labelled as "Open-Zone" by the developers, in practice it still behaves similar to other AAA open world games on the saturated market with so many collectibles scattered on the map and the obligatory buildings that reveal a portion of the map, granted you don't have to do needless climbing but simple challenges so that's nice change, The obstacles and courses can be enjoyable and I command the designers for allowing experimentation when it comes to obtaining the collectibles outside scripted courses through other means using your mastery of the gameplay, although many of them can also often transition the game's perspective from 3D to 2D and you're locked into that perspective until you complete the course or backtrack which was extremely annoying occurrence that only added frustrations when it came to traversal.
The Cyper Spaces stages are decent distractions but aren't amazing, (specially the classic 2d stages, S ranking all of them barely requires an effort outside first 2 stages and they lack or nerfed many features from main game, introducing different set that can throw some players off), same goes for action chain challenges and fishing mini-game (The last can especially gain you collectibles for progress or upgrades which bypasses many other content if you dedicate enough time for it).
The combat is major step up from previous efforts, the attack animations are fantastic, they do good job selling sonic's raw strength using his incredible speed as his main attribute, but it lacks depths other video games combat have and I argue in this case it might be for the best since it won't overshadow trademark gameplay, although difficulty becomes non existent and inexcusable with the parrying mechanic that requires no timing but a hold of the buttons and cyloop which can spawn infinite rings, perhaps these mechanics and ideas should have been removed or balanced more appropriately, the Guardians are fine first time spectacle but they become more repetitious as they respawn or reappear in other places, meanwhile the Titans are incredible bouts and spectacles (minus true final boss...)
The opening hours for me were specially wonderful when it comes to traversing and platforming in a very open and vast lands in high speed collecting Memory tokens, although that will wear out unfortunately as a result of the game revealing it's cards way earlier than it should have in my opinion, despite being labelled as "Open-Zone" by the developers, in practice it still behaves similar to other AAA open world games on the saturated market with so many collectibles scattered on the map and the obligatory buildings that reveal a portion of the map, granted you don't have to do needless climbing but simple challenges so that's nice change, The obstacles and courses can be enjoyable and I command the designers for allowing experimentation when it comes to obtaining the collectibles outside scripted courses through other means using your mastery of the gameplay, although many of them can also often transition the game's perspective from 3D to 2D and you're locked into that perspective until you complete the course or backtrack which was extremely annoying occurrence that only added frustrations when it came to traversal.
The Cyper Spaces stages are decent distractions but aren't amazing, (specially the classic 2d stages, S ranking all of them barely requires an effort outside first 2 stages and they lack or nerfed many features from main game, introducing different set that can throw some players off), same goes for action chain challenges and fishing mini-game (The last can especially gain you collectibles for progress or upgrades which bypasses many other content if you dedicate enough time for it).
The combat is major step up from previous efforts, the attack animations are fantastic, they do good job selling sonic's raw strength using his incredible speed as his main attribute, but it lacks depths other video games combat have and I argue in this case it might be for the best since it won't overshadow trademark gameplay, although difficulty becomes non existent and inexcusable with the parrying mechanic that requires no timing but a hold of the buttons and cyloop which can spawn infinite rings, perhaps these mechanics and ideas should have been removed or balanced more appropriately, the Guardians are fine first time spectacle but they become more repetitious as they respawn or reappear in other places, meanwhile the Titans are incredible bouts and spectacles (minus true final boss...)