Sonic Frontiers Breaks the Boost Formula Without Finding Anything to Put in Its Place

Sonic Frontiers lands on the Starfall Islands and asks a simple question: what does Sonic the Hedgehog look like when you take away the straight line? Sonic Team’s answer, released November 8, 2022 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, is the series’ first open world — a set of islands you run across rather than through. It is ambitious, uneven, and worth your time.

Trailer, via Gematsu.

The Starfall Islands Are the First Real Open World Sonic Has Had

Sonic Frontiers is a 3D platformer and action-adventure game. As Sonic, you explore the Starfall Islands, which cover flowery fields, forests, ancient ruins and deserts, to collect the Chaos Emeralds and investigate the islands’ relationship to them. The world keeps the traditional Sonic furniture — springs, boost pads, grind rails — and drops it into terrain you can approach from any direction.

Writers compared the open structure to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. That comparison holds for the shape of the thing, not the density. The islands are wide and quiet between the set pieces, and the quiet is where the game’s best and worst ideas live side by side.

Combat, Cyloop and the Moves Sonic Keeps

Sonic keeps his old abilities: high speeds, rings, rail grinding, homing attacks. He can double jump, sidestep, drop dash and boost when he has enough energy. The new additions matter more. Combat attacks give him something to do besides run past enemies. He can run along walls. The Cyloop draws a circle of light around objects and interacts with them.

The Cyloop is the sharpest idea in the game. Draw certain shapes and it does different things — an infinity symbol or a number 8 lets Sonic boost indefinitely for a short time. Collect the maximum number of rings and he gets a temporary endless boost too.

The player can customize the controls and adjust difficulty along with Sonic’s speed, turning, acceleration and sensitivity. Progression lets you upgrade speed, attack, defense, ring capacity and the boost gauge. That is a lot of dials. It is also the honest admission that Sonic’s handling has never had one correct setting.

Rescuing Tails, Amy and Knuckles

Doctor Eggman travels to the abandoned Starfall Islands archipelago to steal technological secrets created by the Ancients, ancestors of the Chao. He uploads his artificial intelligence unit, Sage, into a portal. Robotic defense units are summoned. Sage detects a threat signature, stops hijacking the portal and starts a protection protocol, drawing the Chaos Emeralds to the islands and dragging Eggman into an artificial dimension called Cyber Space.

Sonic, Tails and Amy investigate the emeralds’ activity. Their plane is pulled into a wormhole to Cyber Space. Sonic escapes to the islands in the real world, where a disembodied voice tasks him with finding the emeralds and destroying the robotic Titans to remove the boundary between the real and digital worlds. Knuckles was transported there while exploring the ruins above Angel Island.

Sonic frees his friends’ digital forms from cages Sage created. Destroying the cages corrupts his body more and more. Sage warns him to leave and turns the islands’ mechanical guardians and Titans on him, then grows to sympathize with him while watching how he treats his friends. She and Eggman form a mutual familial bond.

The Koco, the Ancients and The End

Through visions of the local Koco, Sonic and his friends learn the Ancients’ history. The Ancients are an extraterrestrial race whose planet was destroyed by “The End,” an all-powerful entity. They used the Chaos Emeralds to escape and were drawn to the Master Emerald on Earth. The End followed and began wiping out their new civilization. The Titans were built to seal The End inside Cyber Space.

That is a real story, told in fragments, and it is the most interesting thing Sonic Team has written in years. It also arrives in pieces that the open world does not always support. The islands are the point, but the lore is the reward.

What Works and What Does Not, in Order

1. The Cyloop. A single mechanic that turns the environment into a toy and gives combat a reason to exist.
2. The open islands. Freedom of approach suits Sonic better than a corridor ever did.
3. The combat and upgrade systems. Thin on their own, useful as texture.
4. The Titan fights. The game’s clearest goals and its loudest moments.
5. The Cyber Space levels. Traditional Sonic stages, and the least interesting part of a game sold on leaving tradition behind.
6. The pop-in and the empty stretches between points of interest. The cost of the scale.

A Model for Future Sonic Games, If Sega Commits

Takashi Iizuka, head of Sonic Team, wanted Sonic Frontiers to be a model for future Sonic titles the way Sonic Adventure was in 1998. That is the right ambition and the wrong execution to stop at. Frontiers proves the open structure fits Sonic. It does not prove Sonic Team has finished building it.

The Nintendo Switch 2 port, subtitled Definitive Edition, followed on June 23, 2026, tied to the franchise’s 35th anniversary. A four-year gap between the original and a definitive version tells you Sega sees this game as a foundation, not a one-off.

The game was generally positively received among critics, who praised it. The published critical score sits at 7.2 out of 10 across eight outlets.

The Score Holds Because the Frame Is Better Than the Fill

That number is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason: Sonic Frontiers is a good game with a great idea inside it. The open-zone freedom is not a gimmick. The Cyloop is not a gimmick. The story about the Ancients and The End is not a gimmick. What holds the score down is everything around those things — the uneven pacing, the empty ground between landmarks, the sense that the budget ran out before the islands were finished.

Sonic Team built the right frame. The next game has to fill it.

7.2 of 10.

game review · Open World Games · Platformer · Sega · Sonic Frontiers · Sonic the Hedgehog