Sonic Frontiers’Rhea Island stands out from the other four in the game, as it completely breaks from the core gameplay loop, but not in a good way.Sonic Frontiersplayers will quickly get used to the gist of the main islands: find substories with friends, collect things like Gears, Keys, and Memory Tokens,complete Cyber Space levels, and defeat the Titan of the island.
Rhea Island, on the other hand, just sees Sonic complete six big towers with complex platforming challenges. After completing a tower, players get a major story dump that gives glimpses intoSonic Frontiers' Ancients, Sonic’s cyber corruption, and so on. At first, the more complex platforming is welcome until players learn that’s all this island is, but this would make more sense if it didn’t happen all at once.
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Sonic Frontiers' Rhea Island Overloads Players With Too Much Story and Platforming
Aside from Ares Island, each of theStarfall Islandsfeel incredibly similar. This is especially true of the first Island, Rhea island, and the last one. Whereas Ares' Island perhaps set up the expectation for a variety of locations inSonic Frontiers, that’s just not the case. Rhea Island feels like it was supposed to be something else, with the platforming bits and major story reveals all placed here for some reason. Indeed, the best way to handle the fatigue of these interesting, yet seemingly unending platforming challenges would have been to work them into Sonic Frontiers' gameplay more naturally.
Had every island included a tower like this, with players needing to complete it to advance the story, it would have introduced a little more variety into the core gameplay loop, shown and teased the overarching lore and story more effectively, and paced players better as a whole. Indeed, nothing is revealed on Rhea Island that couldn’t have slowly been dosed out and created an even betterSonic Frontiersstory. With this approach, Rhea Island could have been its own, full island, and perhaps it would have allowed a little more creativity in the environment of the islands.
The grassy planes seen on many of the islands quickly grow old, even as a few of the islands have more unique ruins and architecture. Having a reason for a snow-covered island, an island that is completely busted, or something more unique would have been much better in place of Rhea Island, and indeed, spacing out its content would have madeSonic Frontiersa much stronger entry in the franchise.
Sonic Frontiersis out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
