Still, if Sega's new game is indeed going to make its "2022" release window, either the devs have a much more polished experience hiding at Sonic Team headquarters, or we're going to see this game launch with some of these issues intact. It's not done yet, and I've seen iffy pre-release demos of games that turned out brilliantly, so the above complaints are not final "review" judgments. The word "janky" became a chorus among members of the press during the event, and seemingly everyone I spoke to described their own eyebrow-raising moments while playing the game. I mention those complaints because I truly do not know how much can be chalked up to "press-only, behind-closed-door" demo limitations. By comparison, the copy-and-pasted terrain that fills out the most boring regions of Halo Infinite looks like a Renaissance masterwork compared to the desolate landscape in this demo's beginning area. A consensus of jank on Generic Hill Zoneīefore I sing this unreleased game's praises, however, I should clarify that Sega did not bring its technical A-game to this weekend's press-only Summer Game Fest Play Days event.Īnd I still wonder if Sega ripped basic assets from an Unreal Engine marketplace to make what I've dubbed "Generic Hill Zone" (a riff on older games' "Green Hill Zone"), at least for the content I could hop-and-dash through in a 30-minute demo. The game seems to fix many of my complaints about every full-3D Sonic game that followed 1999's Sonic Adventure. In my brief time with the game, I could already tell that Sega is remixing the Breath of the Wild formula in a way that feels new and Sonic-appropriate. Sonic Frontiers delivers fresh ideas that Sonic's 3D pantheon has sorely lacked for decades. Either way, I can now talk about a different kind of preview experience: going hands-on with something that looks and feels like an actual Sonic video game, as opposed to the zero-UI tech demo that was previously showcased. It comes via the in-person Summer Game Fest Play Days event. Screenshots are surfacing on social media of the demos title screen. If you have been wondering what it might look like, youre potentially in luck.
Maybe you didn't see the preview footage, which debuted exclusively at IGN earlier this month, or maybe you blocked it out of your mind. Sega has shared quite a bit of footage of Sonic Frontiers now, but one thing blue blur fans havent seen yet is the title screen. Quite frankly, we've never seen a Sega gameplay reveal land as poorly as Sonic Frontiers.
#SONIC FRONTIERS GAMEPLAY SCREENSHOT SERIES#
Our hands-on preview called it 'an exciting new step forward for the Sonic series into uncharted territory, and based on my time with it, Sonic Team seems to have hit upon a winning formula. LOS ANGELES-Ahead of this week, the next fully 3D Sonic the Hedgehog video game, slated to launch on all console families by the end of 2022, wasn't looking so hot. Sonic Frontiers is a new open-zone action game, taking the series in a new direction from the 2D and 3D games of the past.