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Sonic Frontiers Finally, some good fucking food. Now, while I liked this game, I'm not about to go comparing it to Mario Odyssey or anything like that. This is very much a AA game rather than a AAA game, but I paid 40 bucks for it, which feels about right. The open world is really more like a playground filled with obstacle courses for you to run through to collect the various tokens in the game, but I'm fine with that, really. There are some old-school style Sonic stages, both 2D and 3D, that you can teleport to from certain spots in the world, but the real attraction of this game is just being able to freely run and jump around at high speeds. You can level Sonic's speed up to 99 and when you get there he is absolutely blazing. Using your speed to find shortcuts that weren't intended by the game feels really cool. I also appreciate that you don't have to collect every single little thing to achieve 100%. There are far more collectibles than you actually need, so you can choose how you want to go about unlocking everything. If one token or key is giving you a hard time, there are plenty of others to look for. Maybe some will feel that's cheap, but to me it just means more freedom to do what I want. I only really have two complaints. The first is that there are too many times when the game takes control away from you in the middle of running around to show you a cutscene or tutorial or do a QTE. In fact, when you max out Sonic's rings you get a major speed boost and an electrical aura, which is dope, but every time you do it plays a cutscene, which is annoying. This is the main issue bringing the game down for me, and I hope if they make another open world game they learn to integrate this stuff with the gameplay better. It wasn't a deal breaker for me but it does bring it down by a point on my personal scale. My second issue was that there's a lot of pop-in. Not so much with the environment itself but with the various rails and platforms within it. This isn't an issue when you're actually using them since you can always clearly see your next jump, but if you're trying to figure out how to get to a place on the map far in the distance, you can't count on looking for a connected rail or platform because the game might not have even loaded it if you're too far away. You have to run around and see what pops up, which is a drag. But other than those two things I had a pretty fun time with this game. I'm looking forward to the free DLC which adds Tails, Knuckles, and Amy as playable characters.