I promised myself I wouldn't write massive reviews but oops have too much to say for this.

Man...it bums me out to say this. After coming back to Frontiers from launch and messing with the Koco challenges and spin dash, my hopes were extremely high for this update. Sadly, it let down big time.

The new characters are rough. Like, really rough. Even though they all technically control somewhat like Sonic, they don't have the same snappiness. Gliding with Knuckles and flying with Tails has this stupid animation every single time you activate it, and there's no way to turn it off. So you're always brought to a pace breaking halt to do something that sometimes you don't actually intend to do.

The difficulty is amped up to an insane degree. This results in the guardian fights being kind of stupid and I ended up just avoiding most of them. Same goes for the challenges once you reach the top of the towers. They are ridiculously difficult, especially the "boss rush" one that was created seemingly to say "fuck you, here's your difficulty" and nothing more. It's so much more difficult than it has any right to be mainly because you get introduced to a brand new "perfect parry" that has nothing clearly designed for it, and just feels wrong in a game where you are supposed to hold it down.

Climbing the towers can actually be pretty fun. I enjoyed the challenge, and even if I fell I was always ready to climb back up them. I think their difficulty was overstated.

The new Cyber Space stages are also really good. They feel substantial, and even though the S rank times can be crushed, that doesn't mean they are extremely easy, either. It feels like they actually planned on a spin dash and power boost and I think designing with that in mind let them go wild in terms of design. They're no Unleashed stages, but they're like a decent Generations stage.

The final boss was also not great. I had no idea why sometimes my attacks would deal damage and others didn't, but once you figure out you have to break the moon line (which is a whole thing trying to cyloop) it's somewhat easy. I still just wasn't a big fan of it, though. The perfect parry is still such a stupid thing to have to add in a game where you are supposed to hold it down. It doesn't help that the trees block the orbs that you have to parry back either. I'm sorry, but I think I would rather take a lame Ikaruga clone than this.

It's clear that they tried with this. They cared, and I'm happy we're seeing that from Sonic Team. But that doesn't excuse this from being overall disappointing to me. They pushed the Frontiers frame to its limits, and I think at a point it eventually crumbles under it.