It seems like June will be a packed month for gaming this year, especially for Sonic fans. Thanks to IGN, we’ll get a lot of insight on Sonic Frontiers before it releases during the holidays this year. The first few days of the month have already blessed us with two different gameplay videos, with the first focusing on exploration and the other focusing on combat. I’ll link both videos below as I explain my feelings on them.
Exploration
First off, I really liked the exploration video. As a person that always found greater interest in the environments and locations of a game, Sonic Frontiers did not disappoint me. It absolutely had problems that were noticeable upon the first watch, like Sonic’s ridiculous hitbox and the stiffness of some of his animations. I won’t even get started on the pop-in. Even with all of that, the video had a specific purpose and it achieved it: it made the world seem really huge, and the fact that we only got a taste of what it had to offer in a seven-minute video makes me more excited for what other locations we’ll get to see, not only throughout this month but also when the full game releases.
Combat
Next, the combat video was pretty cool. It felt good seeing Sonic actually punch something in a modern Sonic game, and the physical hits felt very impactful. I hope to see many different and smoother-looking attacks when the game releases because, much like the animations in the first video, they look pretty stiff at the moment. I will say that the variety of enemies are really nice, and I’d like to see how fighting multiple various enemies at once will work.
Breakdown
While I had a mostly positive opinion around the videos, others felt very different. The first video probably got the worst of it, and reasonably so. Being a gameplay video that focused on exploration, it was a lot easier to observe the environment and find a lot of issues the game had. Of course, the issues weren’t limited to the environment, but a vast majority of the complaints were found with it. The combat video, while being seen as an improvement, also had its fair share of criticism. Said criticism included how the transitions with some of the attacks don’t look very good and how Sonic getting attacked lacks impact.
While a lot of the complaints are valid, people are using them to come to rather harsh conclusions about how Sonic Frontiers will turn out in the final product. I don’t blame them, considering we’ve waited a while from when the game was announced for some information (and years before then without even knowing it was in development), and this first look… left a lot to be desired. It’s absolutely rough looking, and a lot of things need to be fixed before it releases for the game to be something truly great.
All that being said… it’s only the first look at gameplay. It wasn’t the best first look we could’ve gotten and I can’t stress that enough but people are basing too many things off of these videos when we don’t even know the full context of them, such as what point during the development cycle these videos were made. If it was very early on, the game in its actual current state could be much better than what we’ve seen.
Even without that, there’s still six months left until the game releases. A lot of the changes and improvements that the game needs (that we’ve seen at least) can be made in that time. That’s not to say that those changes will be made, but I think more time needs to pass before we look at the state of the game and determine whether the game will be a disappointment in itself.
Final Thoughts
We’ll just have to see what the rest of the month has in store for Sonic Frontiers. But what do you think? Are you still excited for the game? Did the videos do anything to change your opinions on the game, and how so? I’d love to hear your thoughts.