Sonic Frontiers: The Lost Levels
Definitely a very scattered addition to Sonic Frontiers. Having new playable characters in Tails, Knuckles, and Amy is really cool and I really liked being able to control someone other than sonic in a mainline game for the first time in a LONG while. There's a whole extra island full of the typical stuff you'd need to find and do in the base game, just now split across 4 different similarly-controlling characters. The big primary gripe that I (and a lot of other people) have with this expansion is just the fact that it's uncharacteristically difficult compared to the base game or just other sonic games as a whole, and it really emphasizes the flaws from the base game rather than playing towards its strengths. Since Sonic is for some reason the only character that can enter the (now much more demanding) cyberspace levels, in order to make interesting platforming challenges for the new characters there's a lot more focus put on the random floating sky blocks and rails that plague the islands of Sonic Frontiers, and the pop-in still does not help much. There were several instances where the game prompted me with a waypoint that to the understanding of my current view was just a random inaccessible point high up in the sky because the render distance was too short to actually show what kind of platforms I needed to be getting to or where the path to go there even starts, and conversely there were also times where I felt like I used each of the new characters air movement in a way to bypass entire large platforming challenges that I was intended to do a specific way. There's also these really tall towers that need to be scaled with their own unique lengthy platforming challenges to reach the top, and they are incredibly stressful to climb as any small mistake has the possibility of sending you all the way back down. The overworlds balance is just as sporadic as the random blocks that float around within it.
Combine that with a boss rush that is aggravatingly difficult as it demands you clear the first 3 bosses on the same pool of rings which as a speedrun challenge works fine enough for the first and third bosses but the second one being a cycle-based fight means you pretty much have to get a perfect cycle or two otherwise the entire run is dead which is always fun. They introduce the "perfect parry" mechanic here where instead of just holding the bumpers to be in a automatic parry state you need to time your parry properly which sounds deeper on paper but considering the very weirdly timed hit windows on the bosses attacks I think I understand why the parry system was how it was in the first place! And this is even after several patches that nerfed things to make them easier, this shit was even harder when it first dropped!
It's just kind of hard for me to tell who this expansion was really made for. The new characters and world make me believe it's for anyone who has played through Frontiers, but the higher difficulty makes it a pretty tough pill to swallow. The extra story content might mean it's for sonic lore masters, but really the alternate ending doesn't really amount much differently than the base games ending, if at all. The extra focus on challenge implies that it's for challenge-seeking veteran gamers, but the challenge comes more from managing the games jank and figuring out what the game may or may not want from you as the game itself doesn't really inform you on shit! I think the base game being much more mellow and casual in design helped hide the mechanical cracks in the seams, but with this game being much spicier those cracks are all the more apparent. To me, a games final impression matters as it's both the note to end the whole thing off on as well as one of the first things that I think about when I reminisce on it given that it's usually a more recent memory of playing it. Playing through this made me genuinely consider if Frontiers was actually this mid the whole time, and that's never the kind of note you want to end your bonus content on... I will give them props for making something of this caliber a free update instead of a paid expansion, but like it might be for the best to stick to the base game so as not to potentially sour your last impressions on the game like me by playing this.
Definitely a very scattered addition to Sonic Frontiers. Having new playable characters in Tails, Knuckles, and Amy is really cool and I really liked being able to control someone other than sonic in a mainline game for the first time in a LONG while. There's a whole extra island full of the typical stuff you'd need to find and do in the base game, just now split across 4 different similarly-controlling characters. The big primary gripe that I (and a lot of other people) have with this expansion is just the fact that it's uncharacteristically difficult compared to the base game or just other sonic games as a whole, and it really emphasizes the flaws from the base game rather than playing towards its strengths. Since Sonic is for some reason the only character that can enter the (now much more demanding) cyberspace levels, in order to make interesting platforming challenges for the new characters there's a lot more focus put on the random floating sky blocks and rails that plague the islands of Sonic Frontiers, and the pop-in still does not help much. There were several instances where the game prompted me with a waypoint that to the understanding of my current view was just a random inaccessible point high up in the sky because the render distance was too short to actually show what kind of platforms I needed to be getting to or where the path to go there even starts, and conversely there were also times where I felt like I used each of the new characters air movement in a way to bypass entire large platforming challenges that I was intended to do a specific way. There's also these really tall towers that need to be scaled with their own unique lengthy platforming challenges to reach the top, and they are incredibly stressful to climb as any small mistake has the possibility of sending you all the way back down. The overworlds balance is just as sporadic as the random blocks that float around within it.
Combine that with a boss rush that is aggravatingly difficult as it demands you clear the first 3 bosses on the same pool of rings which as a speedrun challenge works fine enough for the first and third bosses but the second one being a cycle-based fight means you pretty much have to get a perfect cycle or two otherwise the entire run is dead which is always fun. They introduce the "perfect parry" mechanic here where instead of just holding the bumpers to be in a automatic parry state you need to time your parry properly which sounds deeper on paper but considering the very weirdly timed hit windows on the bosses attacks I think I understand why the parry system was how it was in the first place! And this is even after several patches that nerfed things to make them easier, this shit was even harder when it first dropped!
It's just kind of hard for me to tell who this expansion was really made for. The new characters and world make me believe it's for anyone who has played through Frontiers, but the higher difficulty makes it a pretty tough pill to swallow. The extra story content might mean it's for sonic lore masters, but really the alternate ending doesn't really amount much differently than the base games ending, if at all. The extra focus on challenge implies that it's for challenge-seeking veteran gamers, but the challenge comes more from managing the games jank and figuring out what the game may or may not want from you as the game itself doesn't really inform you on shit! I think the base game being much more mellow and casual in design helped hide the mechanical cracks in the seams, but with this game being much spicier those cracks are all the more apparent. To me, a games final impression matters as it's both the note to end the whole thing off on as well as one of the first things that I think about when I reminisce on it given that it's usually a more recent memory of playing it. Playing through this made me genuinely consider if Frontiers was actually this mid the whole time, and that's never the kind of note you want to end your bonus content on... I will give them props for making something of this caliber a free update instead of a paid expansion, but like it might be for the best to stick to the base game so as not to potentially sour your last impressions on the game like me by playing this.
3 Comments
but muh spindash tho.
i felt this DLC was like an alpha test for the next sonic game that will actually flesh out everything Frontier's tried to do (hopefully). All three of them just feel incomplete, especially if you learn how to do the infinite flight glitch with tails.
i felt this DLC was like an alpha test for the next sonic game that will actually flesh out everything Frontier's tried to do (hopefully). All three of them just feel incomplete, especially if you learn how to do the infinite flight glitch with tails.
jtduckman
4 days ago