Sonic Frontiers PS4

Product Information

Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and the Scottish Highlands) may take longer to reach you. To play this game on PS5, your system may need to be updated to the latest system software. Although this game is playable on PS5, some features available on PS4 may be absent. See PlayStation.com/bc for more details.

Become Sonic and journey to uncover the mysteries of the remains of an ancient civilization plagued by robotic hordes. With nothing but a handful of questions and a disembodied voice to guide you, set out to save your friends and the enigmatic inhabitants of the Starfall Islands from a colossal, mechanized threat. Whatever they do with Sonic, it needs to be a pinball machine at heart. 1-3 was. Frontiers is. And I can't think of much in between that remembered that about it. It's the core, and it's been missing. Except generations, but Generations was just 1-3 remix + CD, so it was naturally a pinball machine. Adventure across the Starfall Islands and see what each has to offer at the speed only Sonic can deliver. Blaze a trail as you see fit and discover side quests, solve puzzles, scale enormous structures, go fishing, and encounter a friendly face or two along the way… Alas, when we get to performance, things are even less appealing. Frame-pacing issues remain like every other 30fps version of the game but they seem slightly worse overall. Furthermore, the frame-rate regularly slips just below 30 fps further increasing the judder. The action stages definitely perform best but they're still less fluid overall than any other version of the game and, without motion blur, appear rather stuttery. The island areas are obviously the worst, and I've only had a chance to test the first area - I'd imagine it gets even worse in later areas given the increase in complexity.Adventure across the Starfall Islands and see what each has to offer at the speed that only Sonic can deliver. Blaze a trail as you see fit and discover side quests, solve puzzles, scale enormous structures, go fishing, and encounter a friendly face or two along the way…

He also talks about it here, where the translation says he'd like to "challenge the level design without boosts like the [Adventure] series". In other words, Kishimoto is thinking about a game that swaps out boost for something closer to the Sonic Adventure games. For the best experience on consoles, you'll want to play on either PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X. They are virtually identical on every front - they use the same visual settings, feature the same modes and resolution options and both look great. By default, the game begins in its 4K resolution mode which, unsurprisingly, delivers a native 4K image, albeit with a 30 frames per second cap engaged. Once you're given control, I recommend immediately hopping into the options menu and enabling the 60 fps mode instead. Contrary to pre-release rumours, this mode seems to offer a dynamic 1800p presentation which, when coupled with their excellent new TAA solution, offers surprisingly crisp image quality and a target 60 frames per second frame-rate. Why this isn't the default setting is baffling to me as the game instantly looks and feels dramatically better at a higher frame-rate. After a lengthy development period, Sonic Team's latest creation has finally arrived and after doubts and fears about the quality of the title based on early trailers, I'm happy to say that Sonic Frontiers is a good game - a really good game. However, there is a massive asterix attached to that in that it depends very much on where you play the game. The experience ranges from sublime to, well, Nintendo Switch, where the compromises made are problematic in many ways.There are a lot of good things to say about Frontiers visuals but, at the same time, its flaws are egregious to the point where I should probably discuss them first. The most serious issue with Sonic Frontiers stems from the way it handles object draw-in. Sonic Frontiers exhibits some of the worst pop-in I've personally witnessed in a modern game. Running across the terrain, it's difficult to ignore entire structures, platforms and foes popping into view from nothing. The primary issue is that while the engine does have an LOD system - which is used for certain types of terrain detail - many objects do not have an appropriate LOD or imposter assigned to them so rather than fading from a low detail version of a model to a higher detail version, they simply pop into existence. The games doesn't even bother with dithering or blending the transitions - objects suddenly appear out of thin air every time.