Some new gameplay footage of Sonic Frontiers has appeared, giving us a fuller picture of what the game will feel like.
First, there’s some footage of the open zone itself. Make no mistake, Sonic really is running through those wide landscapes, of trees, forests, and hills. You can explore them freely as you wish, in any direction you chose, and with enough momentum you can jump across wide chasms, things neither Link nor the Assassins can do in any of their games.
The familiar Sonic elements of rails and jumping platforms are there. If older 3D Sonic games prodded you forward a predetermined path, in Sonic Frontiers you have to approach the elements yourself to interact with them. You will have to figure out how to interact with some of these elements, but once you do, you will earn things like rings and new passageways. We do know there are also puzzles in this open zone, but they’re not part of this preview.
We also get some footage of boss battles, all three of which generally play out the same way. That standardization will go a long way in making you feel confident in taking these bosses, and you will need that, because Sony is positively tiny compared to them. Lilliputian even.
These bosses, the Titans, are every bit as large as the Titans in the God of War games. However, it may be more fitting to imagine these bosses like the Guardians of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Fighting these bosses is somewhat the middle of the boss battles in those two games.
All the bosses have Chaos Emeralds on top of them. You can’t beat them as normal Sonic, so first you have to climb each boss to grab the Emerald from them and then become Super Sonic.
Yes, you are Super Sonic for all the boss battles. That does mean you cannot be killed by any of these bosses. This may have been a deliberate choice because it would be too hard if they could do damage against you.
So instead, the challenge in these battles is to push the fight sequence forward. Doing that requires that you successfully figure out what you are supposed to do in each fight, and of course, successfully do each QTE as they come up. For example, in facing the Knight, you will have to catch the disc he throws at you, and then throw it back at it to strike it.
These fights are also marked by an awesome anime style presentation, large in scale and with loud rock music blaring the whole time. It might not be entirely your cup of tea, but I do think Sonic Team accomplished the goal of making each fight seem larger than life, so to speak.
Sonic Frontiers will be releasing on November 8, 2022 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows on Steam and Epic Games Store. You can check out the footage of the boss fights below, and read more of our coverage of Sonic Frontiers here, here, and here.
Source: YouTube via Reddit
