Sonic Frontiers is in players' hands, and it's more than likely a fair amount of them have taken advantage of the game's customizable controls for Sonic's speed. The options make it so players can take the game at their own pace, regardless of whether that's a bit slow for the sake of better control, or at breakneck speeds. No matter what, fans will be able to S Rank all the Cyber Space stages and beat every boss without worrying about moving too slow or too fast thanks to the way these sliders are made to scale with the rest of the game.
Options are made available once fans break out of the first Cyber Space stage and are made to begin exploring the open-zone part of Sonic Frontiers. Players will be notified of them through a tutorial pop-up window, but what's important to note is the little message attached that tells them if they suffer from motion sickness, they can turn on a crosshair to focus on instead of the motion blurring effects. This is a great accessibility milestone in Sonic Frontiers that should make its way to other games.
Sonic the Hedgehog: When is It Too Fast?
The Sonic series was made with players memorizing stages to get faster at beating them in mind. Speed was always a necessary asset in the franchise's core releases. As a result, certain games such as Sonic Lost World, have been criticized for being slow, even if it's for the sake of easy controls. Sonic fans usually gotta go fast, and a lot of the games in the series reflect this, but there are cons to the idea.
The faster Sonic games tend to alienate a few potential players by using blistering speeds, and to some people, Sonic is too fast to control. It's because of these hang-ups that for years, Sonic has had an internal war between accessibility and fast-paced action, and Sonic Frontiers makes the steps needed to end that debate for any games to come after it.
The Potential in Sonic Frontiers' Accessibility Features
Sonic Frontiers is best described as a merge between Sonic Unleashed's boost-style gameplay and Sonic Lost World's slower, more detailed control scheme. This lends itself well to the sliders, as they're easily set between the lowest and highest speeds of both games, which gives Sonic Frontiers a good rudimentary window to base its more time sensitive tasks on, such as what times are worthy of an S Rank.
While Sonic games aren't for everyone, as with every other title, being able to make it so Sonic Frontiers' speed and motion is within players' personal thresholds will most certainly help them keep playing. The latest game as a whole feels more accessible, as it has no lives and just tells players to "try again" when they die.
This, along with Frontiers' speed sliders, center cursor to help combat motion sickness, and even graphic adjustments to reduce motion blur and more distracting cosmetic options, shows it's making the effort to try and bring Sonic to a crowd that once tried it and stepped away. To some, these changes to the Sonic franchise may be what they've been waiting for.
Yet there's still work to be done, as while the game's many settings are adjustable, its controls are not. While Steam players could potentially get around this through the application's control mapping, console players are out of luck, which makes it so people who need custom controllers are still left out. Hopefully the feature will make its way into the follow-up title that Sonic Frontiers' true ending hints toward.
Sonic Frontiers is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.