Sonic Frontiers had a lot of pressure on it at launch. The teams behind it hyped it to the moon and back. So gamers were eager to see if it was worthy of that hype or whether it was just hot air. The answer lies somewhere in the middle. While critics were mixed on it, gamers like it overall. There are issues with the title, including the long-known framerate issues, but other game elements are a lot of fun. However, even amongst the diehards of the game, there are some specific parts that even they don’t like. For example, have you reached the pinball mini-game?
It’s true. There’s a pinball mini-game in the title. Now, if this were an optional thing you could do to get rewards and unlock special items, no one would’ve minded, per se. However, it was a part of the primary campaign, and you had to play it to progress. That was a problem for some as you had to get 5 million points to advance. The mini-game itself was straight-up pinball, but getting to 5 mil was anything but easy or guaranteed.
As a result, many have gone online to blast the pinball mini-game and talk about how they almost quit the game due to it. But, again, you had to beat it to progress through the story. Some noted online that to get through the pinball section, they had to spend over an hour on it. Some weren’t that lucky and said they were stuck on the mini-game for days! That’s a lot of time to do something that isn’t related to Sonic The Hedgehog.
So what went wrong here? Well, many have said that Sonic Frontiers feels like SEGA and Sonic Team “throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.” There are open-world sections. There are the cyberspace sections. You have skill trees for the first time. The combat is very complex in sections, etc. That’s a lot of things to throw at a game about running around and collecting rings. We didn’t even get to the part about rescuing your allies.
Gamers might not have minded it if the score required to pass the game was lower. Even by pinball standards, that’s a really high score to achieve.
It’s possible Sonic Team could do a patch to get the score lowered if enough players rant about it. So if you’re struggling with this mini-game, let your feelings be heard.
Source: The Gamer