I’ve said a lot about video games over the years, both here and in other places, stuff regarding game balance, difficulty, fun, the idea of games obsoleted by other titles, but one comment I don’t ever think I’ve made before is that it feels like a game has too MUCH money, and the nature of how constantly showering it around can ultimately dilute the core game experience.

Now I’m not against the idea of a game wanting to look as prestige as possible. A big part of why games like Psychonauts 2 and Hi-Fi Rush are able to elevate the conceptual goals of smaller scale stuff like A Hat in Time or No Straight Roads is because of that big company money injection. There’s a lot of appeal seeing a game be as visually robust and smooth as God of War Ragnarok throughout the whole runtime, and much praise should be given to all the talented animators at Santa Monica who brought it all to life. Ragnarok can look quite gorgeous on the PS5, with much more environmental diversity than its predecessor, but in this case, it almost feels like because of the way the game designers and the story writers communicated everything, there’s just a stupendous amount of STUFF fit into the game. Remixed old worlds and plenty of new ones, tons of new characters, substantially more enemy types (there was one single time I fought a troll recolor in this one compared to 2018’s 5+), tons of gear, tons of gear slots per character, three characters, different gear slots per weapon, tons of skill branches per character, forty different crafting materials, various lore poems, cute references to other Sony adventures, a surplus of walls to climb up and shimmy between, and a LOT of pretty water to slowly boat around. But there’s a cost to all this, that being when so much money is thrown at the game, a lot of these systems feel like they were created to fill holes that only exist because they themselves built them, giving the development teams reason to be busy, and that it was necessary to make sure almost any possible player could get to the point of interfacing with them.

The majority of God of War Ragnarok (or at least 2/3 of it) is in combat, and combat functions almost exactly like it did in the previous game. As Kratos you attack enemies with either your axe or the Blades of Chaos, parrying attacks when they come across, activating various cooldowns for more powerful attacks, calling for your companion to attack when you want an opening in, and gradually getting more gear and toggles and skill tree attacks as the game does on. It’s easy to pick up and well-balanced on the main path, but like in the 2018 game, the numerous RPG elements of looter gear and stats and associated bonus effects don’t convince me of complexity as much as add more numbers and uncertain effects to enemy reactions, and more things for the staff to be busy designing.

I made my way through by making my build as much of a mighty glacier as possible with high defense, high attack and buffs to get around the overly tanky enemies; most of these stats still feel pointless and the vast skill trees have a handful of interesting techniques but few things as practical as basic attacks. In most cases my general game plan was to upgrade attack as much as possible and stack with both a weapon buff and the melee buffing runic (nothing else seemed as tempting as the simple yet practical strength boost), which could inflict devastating damage upon most enemies and even bosses. That strategy never changed once I discovered it, and as much as the game showers you with three types of armor and weapon handles and six different runic attack slots, nothing felt like it ever disincentivized me from sticking with the 1.75 second Realm Shift for how much of a headache the combat can be at its worst.

While this applies to 2018 as well, the idea of a “Luck” stat still feels obscenely pointless in an action RPG. In a turn-based RPG or other game based around skill checks with particular set outcomes, a luck stat is mimicking the idea of D&D rolls, and it can be incredibly helpful for landing attacks or status effects with a very low hit percentage but high reward upon nailing it, as well as avoiding could be devastating blows from your opponents. In the context of an action game, where very small character movements can change the properties of your attacks and it’s hardly a “guess” if an attack right in an enemy's face can hit them, (unless you’re negatively affected by move assist) it doesn’t feel meaningful because nothing in the various skill trees feel like they offer “chances.”

It feels like it was thrown in because “hey, we’re an RPG now, want to see number go up and have specific equipment built around that number going up, even if prioritizing it would make enemies more spongey? Trying to work out the effects of this stat was another money sink that didn’t meaningfully make combat more interesting.

He does get one new weapon: a Spear. It’s………not great. The main gimmick of the spear is the fact that it can be thrown and detonated, up to five separate times, but even beyond it turning the combat into a clunky TPS where the throws are meant to be at range, the spear explosions lack animation oomph for some reason, the melee doesn’t feel as fluid as the other weapons, and it takes long enough to set up all the spears that it just seemed easier to get in with the more damaging, impactful melee weapons. For all the effort put into its design and place in your arsenal, it felt unnecessarily situational in ways I’m not sure it was meant to be outside of puzzles. Even as a projectile, the axe you start the game with feels more effective and powerful. Puzzle-wise, it’s used to put in a hole, either for swinging or for blowing up specifically marked rocks, some of which you’ll see in the middle of long dungeons before you have it. For all the effort put into crafting the spear and its skill tree and everything, to battle Heimdall in the story, it felt clunky trying to integrate it into basic gameplay. I like how the Heimdall fight itself uses the spear, trying to catch him offguard with ground bombing, but for everything else, this weapon felt like a thing to add, not to enhance, just to add.

At the very least though, when playing as Kratos, the sheer number of options, however needless they may feel on combat as a whole, at least give you a lot to learn and experiment toward, provided you go through the hassle of unequipping and reequipping numerous different skills tucked in their own sub menus within submenus.

This doesn’t apply as much to this game’s handful of drawn-out Atreus gameplay segments. From a story perspective, their existence makes perfect sense as a way of getting information Kratos could not and building up tension for the final battle and making Atreus better stand out as his own person making meaningfully developed decisions. From a gameplay perspective, they’re reflective of the worst stereotypes of western “movie games.” Atreus’s combat is even simpler than Kratos’s, with only one weapon, two kinds of arrows and some basic melees. There ARE other kinds of combinations in the skill tree, but his skill tree feels like even greater fluff, because it doesn’t feel like any complex technique has much of a significantly greater effect than basic happy slapping. It’s also during these segments when the longest, most consistent talky walky climby moments in the game occur. The second one introduces a manic pixie dream girlfriend character just to give him someone to talk to, to tell him some exposition and to fight a boss together that’s never mentioned again. This chapter is spread over at least two hours of gameplay. I’d find the relationship endearing if she wasn’t so obviously shoehorned in to fit the plot purpose of giving him someone to talk to for otherwise limited effect on the core plot, and even though the segment of their meeting ends with fighting one of the two bosses who stands out from the others mechanically because of the arena, it feels incredibly slow and limited to have the pacing drag to such a crawl while forced walking (or slowly animal riding on water) along a rail.

Speaking of keeping you on rails, for being an M rated game, as opposed to an E for Everyone experience, there’s a shockingly high amount of “no child left behind” moments when it comes to literally any kind of puzzle. Once Atreus gets the Hex arrows, the puzzle design more or less plateaus there. Can you arrange the arrow shots in a line, then throw your axe or Chaos Blades into one of the spots in order to activate them? Congratulations! You’ve solved most of the game’s puzzles in different variations. Outside of one late game variant of this puzzle for a chest I may or may not have cheated hitboxes around to solve, one of the few standout puzzles was early on. You had to figure out the right timing to decide which geysers to freeze and which ones to unfreeze, affecting a weight that you need to rise with you on it in order to open a gate. It’s a nicely thought-out puzzle that stands out from everything else. Or at least it would be a nice puzzle, if you didn’t get two companions chirping about what the answer is should you struggle for even 2 minutes.

Much has already been made of the amount of backseating the game gives you if you spend basically any extra time at all thinking over a puzzle. It feels weirdly patronizing and you can’t turn it off. It’s one thing for a game to just have easy puzzles where a player can get an Ah-Ha moment from something which isn’t that hard to more experienced puzzler gamers. It’s another thing to tell the player a puzzle solution out of pity because they spent slightly too long trying to figure something out. For the most part this level of backseating doesn’t even make sense narratively; Kratos with his world weary experience should be more aware of how rudimentary contraptions work than needing his son or a talking head to tell him the answer. There is ONE time in the entire game when this backseating adds to the experience, and that’s when Freya is so desperate to be freed from her being bound to a realm and so fed up with Kratos at that point for the additional grief he gave her on top of that, that her barking orders at the player on how to finish puzzles fast actually makes sense contextually. It’s still annoying, but in that instance makes sense contextually as a moment of gameplay and story being in harmony.

But what about the core story? Overall, it kept me curious for most of its run and largely succeeded at what it wanted to do. Its presentation and characterization carry it and on a moment-to-moment level it felt like its focus on plot made things more interesting to think about compared to 2018. Aside from said obvious girlfriend insert, the rest of the core cast has interesting things to say and distinct personalities when reacting to situations. Many scenes with Kratos are carried greatly by Christopher Judge’s performance and the character animation presenting his reaction to the heavier story scenes with a massive chip on his shoulder. Freya is a character for whom certain people were very very upset at what happened to her at the end of 2018, but I think despite that contextually appropriate backseating, her character’s arc felt like it was given thorough consideration and a satisfying conclusion.

Despite some corny MCU-esque writing in parts and a few questionable voice direction choices (mainly Odin, who sounds like the grandfather character in a typical sitcom), it’s enjoyable and incredibly well presented thanks to the talented team of character animators and voice actors. Saying that, ProZD’s squirrel character is both well-voiced and animated, but none of his constant quipping landed for me and he felt jarringly out of place relative to every other character, even that not super funny but still occasionally charming Mimir. The game starts well, and the ending does mostly deliver on promised spectacle, even with that second Atreus segment bringing things to a halt for a few hours, and a long section with the Fates feeling more like a means to stress the direness of the current situation more than meaningfully add. The Hellheim section also felt very tenuous in terms of importance despite the solid gameplay contained in it. It started with an Atreus segment that leads to freeing a giant hell dog, then going to a Kratos segment where he and Atreus must go through an entirely different set of areas clear up the mess that was just created. Mostly it serves as more of a reason to want to stick a spear through Heimdall’s head and fight a giant boss more than progress anything more relevant; a stark contrast to how this game’s predecessor handled that realm. Also, somehow, you’re forced to backtrack through a lot of previously explored Vanaheim once you get the spear weapon, but there’s an entire massive giant separate area in that realm that’s completely disconnected from anything plot wise, elaborately designed with tons of pathways and chests and encounters. It’s like the gameplay team was incredibly inspired but the story team wasn’t entirely sure how to meaningfully carry a lot of the runtime despite solid scripting.

With that being said, I appreciate a lot of what the gameplay team pumped out, plot relevance be damned. Most areas give you the option to keep exploring after your plot goal is accomplished and it doesn’t feel like typical open world filler. These sections feel meaningfully curated in a way you rarely see in modern AAA games. It’s nice to free the shackles of a giant whale, reunite a giant Jellyfish family or have an entire crater hunting giant dragons. Even if I did groan when a chest contained only money or random crafting materials, there was a lot to explore toward outside the main story. The side content was more absorbing than I thought going in, except for the combat trials which like Hellheim are an unexpected downgrade from 2018. They started off fine but gradually became a massive test of patience, where the “final” trials require you to replay previous combat missions again and again to get 5 different combinations of mission clear order for the hardest fights. It’s blatant padding to replay basic mobs over and over for what? A 5-minute survival challenge that does nothing but show what happens when big arenas are thrown out the window and the camera does a horrendous job showcasing enemies attacking from off camera with grabs and projectiles given no distinction by the red arrows? No thanks.

Finally, the soundtrack, the Game Award “Best Score and Music” winner over such distinct contenders as Metal Hellsinger with its uproarious standout metal or Xenoblade 3, a game showing Yasunori Mitsuda continuing to evolve his style over nearly 3 decades of VGM compositions? Unfortunately, it’s extremely forgettable. Specifically, the battle tracks. There are a few cutscene BGMs in the game that do shine, such as that plays after Atreus is practically shooed out of Sindri’s house, a couple during scenes Kratos is sad and mournful, a moment when an incredibly devastating plot beat plays out, and a particular standout when meeting this game’s version of the Fates. The main theme is used at an appropriate time as well to hype up the final battle, but in general, despite spending nearly 50 hours in this world, very little stuck in my head musically while playing. The composer didn’t do a bad job at all; he just did a solid job composing what the expectation of film score is. Moments like a bar brawl presented in one of Atreus's sections could’ve been severely uplifted by a strongly distinct track. Heck, Hi-Fi Rush did a similar thing to hype up one of its brawls near the ending of that game, so I don’t see a reason why a game with so much more scope and capability to do almost anything it can defaults to the general expectation of what music is for an average blockbuster film, rather than a game.

And that’s just it. Few moments encapsulate the God of War Ragnarok experience than having an incredibly pretty, cinematic cutscene where the game wanting you to press the touch pad for heartfelt hand painting will constantly bring up the gameplay pause menu while trying to do it. The need to be cinematic feels in turn, overcompensated by game design that kept its game designers very very busy, regardless of how impractical or obsolete those efforts might be at enhancing the game’s core combat. Some of these efforts are a success, with some strikingly effective story scenes, character beats, consistently gorgeous visuals, and a ton of side content that stands out as being meaningfully crafted, but the game as a whole left me mixed. It is acceptably enjoyable and painless a lot of the time, but the battle between itself to hit as wide an audience as possible feels as though too much money was spent to put too many cooks in Sony Santa Monica’s kitchen.

Brief recap on my feelings regarding the base game of Frontiers (www.backloggd.com/u/SunlitSonata/review/560239/). Despite its jank and extraneous systems like stats and a skill tree, I liked it and fondly think back on how distinct an experience it felt. I liked that we were getting a weightier plot in a Sonic game for the first time in a long time that feels aware of how much fans spent time with these characters over the decades, and an open world that gave players numerous directions and microchallenges to quickly jaunt between. Elements like combat and the Cyberspace stages weren’t very deep but they added variety as quick segways outside of the open world exploration to keep the experience fresh despite its repetitive core structure. They each had their moments; combat shining in the more Sonic Adventure-esque boss encounters and Cyberspace shined when you could properly plan movement across the stages but neither were pushed that hard over the run. The first two additional updates bringing legacy Sonic songs to find in the worlds, high score challenges and most importantly a spin dash elevated the exploration and focus on world movement to a satisfying degree; Cyberspace practically got a new layer with how fast you were. So, I was looking forward to how the last update would continue to play with the foundation.

With that being the case, oh boy is this update split in quality. There’s stuff that’s incredibly fun to play around with and exciting to imagine expansions for, and then there’s stuff I seriously question what was going on with putting Frontiers’s existing game systems up to the task, sometimes in the same place! It’s wild. Thinking more about what the update means for Sonic’s future instead just what’s here as a free expansion to an already released game, I’m more positive than most on here but it more than ever highlights the biggest strengths and weaknesses that exist in Frontiers’s current foundation.

One of the most attention-grabbing points I’ve seen going around is just how ludicrously difficult this update apparently is, like the game suddenly turned into Kaizo Frontiers or The Lost Levels or something like that due to its challenging tower climbs and trials attached to them. I’ll be honest though, while a few can be challenging the only tower that annoyed me with it was Tower 2 because part of it required nudging Sonic very slightly with the analog stick to balance on the narrow tops of platforms which is the opposite of speed. You had boxes on your first go to propel you up but they wouldn’t respawn upon a fall off, forcing players to inch their way forward if they fall below even once
(Update: This was fixed in a patch to make the pink blocks reappear if you cause them to despawn so you no longer have to incur a load screen, neat).
It’s also the only one that had a challenge involving thinking of enemy behavior in a specific way beyond being able to tank hits and spamming retaliation moves so while initially frustrating getting it down was fairly satisfying, not unlike a Devil May Cry secret mission.

There’s been quite a few comparisons made to KH3’s Re:MIND DLC. While weighed down by charging $30 compared to this being free, they’re both very conceptual addons that feed into stuff the fans wanted and pushed the game to its limits. The big difference though is that KH3’s main verb was its combat system and the fanbase was more than willing to get smacked in the face by superbosses even if game journalists weren’t. The reason Kingdom Hearts II Final Mix went on to be seen as the peak of the series for at least a decade was because of its superboss challenges. Fans adored Lingering Will and the Data Organization and hoped for something like that for years to fairly test their meddle after subsequent games dropped the ball there. KH3 had some clunk when it first launched, but the updates made a lot of Sora’s varied attacks feel smoother and more kinetic while the extra bosses genuinely topped what Kingdom Hearts II’s battles had to offer in terms of spectacle, music and even challenge while still being fair. The fanbase was prepared and even excited to be walloped.

Meanwhile, Sonic games have been incredibly easy for the past 14 years, so I can believe a lot of the fanbase was just lulled into thinking they never would test players meddle to this extent and got skill issued from most of the stuff here, especially with the option to switch to Easy Mode alleviating a lot of it (Extreme is a bad difficulty but that’s independent of this expansion). But the bigger issue in Frontiers specifically is that the combat worked best as a drive by occurrence to occasionally break up exploration and battle phases, not an actual system. The first, third and fourth challenges are all a cakewalk if you can just tank the hits and mash away with the canned animations. The fifth and final trial prior to the new final boss is to fight the first three bosses with only 400 Rings, Level 1 attack and a practically frame perfect parry on anything besides Easy Mode and to me this very thoroughly missed the point on one of the base game’s most beloved components.

In the base game of Frontiers, the first three Titan fights were the culmination of an entire island of exploration. Sage threatened you with the might of one at the start of each island, Sonic was on the back foot trying to get away from them, and the island progressed as Sonic collected Chaos Emeralds, helped reassure his friends, whilst the island music grew intense and bombastic, leading into the explosive action, cinematic moments with hard af metal vocals as payoff for the gradually building mundanity before. They were a surprisingly great example of setup and payoff communicated through all aspects of the game working in harmony.

In this, your incredibly tight timer means it’s harder to enjoy the spectacle and instead you must think about which interchangeable move deals damage the fastest while watching the same cinematic animations over and over for every new attempt. Getting up to Wyvern’s level once in the base game was epic. Doing it multiple times when retrying gets very tedious and stale very fast as you hear the same lyrics and see the same animations again and again. Before even battling Knight he jankily spins around and spawns a quick spike shield to knock you down. Not too bad in the base game since you’d likely increased your rings plenty for protection at that point but in this challenge it’s a death sentence since there’s no shot you’ll have enough rings left after taking a hit there. Thus, sending you to do the first two battles again just to get back there. It’s the one mandatory portion of the DLC I would call outright bad and seriously question how much playtesting it got.
(This ALSO got patched to make the challenge more fair and less tedious, tho not sure how it affects difficulty levels other than Easy Mode, your get out of jail free card is at least more easy to grab at the door).

The alternate ending in Frontiers is just that; an alternate ending. The plot of this scenario more thoroughly carries tension compared to the entirety of the final island in the base game, and if you didn’t like the original ending bc it didn’t feel epic enough compared to games like Sonic Adventure 2 or Unleashed, here you go. There’s some sick soul stuff going on here if you’re willing to deal with a camera constantly getting stuck on trees, a finnicky targeting reticle and adjusting to a much stricter parry (less strict post the December 6th patch), but it does fundamentally alter the mood of Frontiers’s final moments to something closer to most prior 3D Sonics. One worry I had going in was that this ending would effectively patch out the original ending invalidating anyone who liked that conclusion but no. It’s contextually presented as another choice Sage could have suggested before heading into the base game’s final battle. In that regard, this would’ve best fit as a dialogue option right after clearing Rhea, but I can also imagine it would be too much to ask players to create new saves just to get back there when most people interested in this have clear files.

The main passion and thought I see in this update in regard to the future went toward the three new characters and the Cyberspace stages, funny enough.

Amy’s pretty fun to run around with in this game and if there's anything I'll go back to beside the Cyberspace challenges it's playing as her. Some people wish she used her hammer more often than her Tarot cards, but looking at her kit from a functional perspective I appreciate what was done with her here. Giving her the highest basic jump of the cast is a great way to differentiate her from the rest and tie into her Adventure 1 and Rise of Lyric movesets, without a doubt the biggest influences here. Once you unlock them it’s fun to bounce around for insane height as she flips around in the air to do a short hover that feels pretty smooth. She also has a cute variation on the multihoming attack from Lost World which was neat to see from an animation/speed perspective, as well as a more seamless variant on her hammer spin move from Sonic Adventure 1. It helps too that Amy is the most similar to Sonic at her core among the three new characters so her moves largely feel seamless in Frontiers’s foundation with a specific focus on vertical height. Honestly, Peak 3D Amy.

Tails takes a bit to get used to. He’s the only one of the cast with no homing attack, instead having a projectile as a weapon and his flight working like an initial horizontal motion followed by a big jump. I like how in classic Tails fashion you can easily kiss the level design goodbye hopping in his Sonic Adventure 2 plane I was genuinely shocked they brought back here. The plane replacing his boost can be annoying at max rings if you just want to get more speed while grounded since there’s still no option to turn skills off but you can unlock a spin dash so it isn’t too bad if you get him to that point. Any moment where you need to jump on a spring is questionable given the lack of homing, but it is compensating for Tails being the only character to consistently hold air position if you want him to. I could see him working in the future if speed was handed to him more by the environment or using his laser cannons were faster but there’s a foundation to do so and challenges playing to his uniqueness.

Knuckles. . . really needs more work. Gliding and attacking isn’t close to as seamless as it was back in Sonic Adventure 2 twenty-two years ago, with a second delay every time you start a glide and stopping in the air before doing a slower divebomb, compared to SA2’s quick and instantaneous drop. Even gliding itself is initially stiff to get used to, not nearly as bad as 06 Knuckles since the downward arc is more natural and you can reliably jump off the walls, but something you need to get used to.
(Update: A recent patch made Knuckles’s glide turning a lot less stiff than it once was on top of removing the second delay when pressing the jump button which is well appreciated. But you still can’t swap characters without going to one spot on the map over and over, somehow).

He’s saved by the actual challenges themselves, testing the player to glide carefully and think about wall climb travel. His skill tree has some fitting quirks but nothing to fit the enemies on the island at all with their overtuned speed and crazy beefy health bars. The fact that even HIS moveset, for the guy known for being the muscle of the group, barely attempts to make combat interesting or exciting makes me wonder if Sonic Team even wants the combat experiment to continue.
(Update: Strength parameters have been adjusted so leveling actually means more, but giving the characters stats at all was still a bad idea, even thought this about Sonic in the base game).

Still, I hope not; the fun of base Frontiers and even this expansion was using the various character abilities to seamlessly explore, not stopping for combat over a long period nudged by mostly vestigial stats.

But the Cyberspace stages, surprisingly, are a real highlight and the biggest straight up BUFF over the base game. In the base game, Cyberspace levels could often be fully 2D, not being particularly fast. The levels were very short and even with multiple objectives including a ring count check, time and Red Ring collecting a lot of them were one and dones. There were only two stages that changed up the gameplay and one of them (drifting) worked terribly without evolving on a base mechanic. Now, introducing Sonic’s sprawliest 3D only level design since Sonic 06, objectives that require exploring the stages, gimmicks that complement speed in interesting ways and game design built around speed tech like your insane spindash and magnet dashing. I really hope we see more level designs along these lines in the future because I liked every single one I attempted. The biggest issue here is that by the very nature of exploring you’re never incentivized to go to any of them. If you’ve been Cylooping the various glowing ground spots as the characters, you’ll get more than enough Lookout Koco to never even think about trying these. And sure, you COULD get vault keys in the original game from Big the Cat, but that was a choice to avoid exploration and use currency in a specific way, not a consequence of being curious. But I’m glad the team realized the inherent potential these could have as a side order to the main game and I hope this is where they expand on particularly, perhaps even incorporating aspects of this design into the maps themselves.

Overall, this update was perfectly acceptable and carried by its fun character movement, new level/world designs, and general fact that it is free, but I feel like certain aspects, such as the high difficulty outside of Easy Mode, or the incredibly poorly thought out fifth trial are VERY wrongly seen by some as being a transfer into the next game. Sonic Frontiers being in the position that it is would only be this hard when it’s feeding into the existing audience playing the game months after launch, not the general gaming public buying it for the first time after seeing reviews from major publications. I hope the focus on more sprawling sequence breaky level design remains alongside the varied methods for traversal and alternate characters in dense worlds more in Sonic’s typical vibrant art style for the next game’s tone and I’ll look forward to what modders can accomplish with the new toys they were given to play with in the meantime.

As is often the case, the music hit pretty hard. The new Final Boss theme is much more bombastic than the version in the base game and is pretty in line with the hyper anime energy Sonic used to have, the chapter themes for each of the main characters can get repetitive but are pretty atmospheric, the Cyberspace remixes are really rad and more intense to fit with the crazier stage layouts, and the particular theme that plays when you first switch back to Sonic, excellent stuff right there. With that in mind. . .

For the love of god Sonic Team, P L E A S E, PLEASE fix the pop-in for the next game! It’s more jarring here than in the base game because the new characters have some form of flight. Switch 2 is on the horizon so make the mandatory Nintendo representation only be on that platform. We don’t need the PS5 game held back by its Switch limitations any further when this style of game could look exciting to explore when so many platforms and objects aren’t appearing right in your face the moment you approach them.