Sonic Frontiers offers several difficulty settings to allow players to tailor their experience to their own personal preferences, with these settings largely impacting combat in the open world and against bosses.
Sonic Frontiers is an open-world adventure featuring Sonic on a quest to rescue his friends from Cyberspace while uncovering the mysteries of the Ancients and dealing with a mysterious Artificial Intelligence known as "Sage." The game takes place on the Starfall Islands, with each of the islands offering a fresh set of challenges for players to overcome alongside the 30 Cyberspace stages found scattered across them.
Difficulty Differences
When choosing a difficulty in the game there are several considerations to make, but the main effect of the difficulty settings is on the difficulty of combat. Fighting in the Open World requires players to make use of Sonic's various powerful attacks in conjunction with dodging and parrying, and the difficulty will determine the health and attack power of the various foes Sonic will face throughout his adventure.
This is particularly noticeable when facing bosses, who can seriously hamper Sonic's progress even when Super Sonic form renders him invulnerable. Since difficulty alters the health, defensive power, and attack power of enemies, it becomes noticeably harder to inflict enough damage on bosses before running out of rings when playing on higher difficulties. Meanwhile, regular fights become far more treacherous, leaving less room for mistakes as every attack shaves away more of Sonic's rings.
The difficulty settings have no effect on the general platforming, the cyberspace stages, or the movesets of enemies, and players won't miss out on much by playing on a lower difficulty setting. The largest exception to this is hard mode's impact on the final battle of the game. If players wish to see the true ending of the game and the post-credit scene associated with it, they'll need to play in hard mode.
Adjusting The Difficulty
Fortunately, difficulty settings can be adjusted from the pause menu at any time during gameplay, allowing players to adjust the difficulty down if they're finding things too tricky, or turn it up a notch if things seem too easy. As a result of this, it's possible to play through the entire game on a lower difficulty, only changing the difficulty to hard when entering the final battle, and still achieve the true ending.
This game generally offers tons of ways to adjust the gameplay to suit the player, including various adjustments to Sonic's speed and handling via the options menu, allowing players to play the game their way.
Sonic Frontiers is available for PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch.
