Sonic Frontiers
Fair · Action · 2022
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $39.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 16.4h
- Value
- $2.44/hr
- Reviews
- 89% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 81% over the last 30 days against 89% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, 2 GB or AMD Radeon HD 7870, 2 GB, 30 GB of storage. Windows only.
Sonic Frontiers is a groundbreaking open-zone action-adventure game set on the ancient Starfall Islands. Join Sonic as he battles hordes of powerful enemies with an all-new combat system, explores the mysteries of the islands, and saves his friends!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $11.99, set in November 2025. 27 discounts in the 4 years on record. They run about 65 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 8 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 94 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Hob ($19.99, scores 62) beats it on value, while it beats Prince of Persia® ($1.99, scores 45).
Steam's global achievement data puts 23 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. Players rate it 89 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 81 percent. Something recent has soured the room. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 36 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written June 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 58 percent of the 1,583 reviews written there were positive, against 89 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (boost, time-limited); the score docks it lightly for that.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
87% start to 23% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
144 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
My quick review of this game is as follows: Ugly, Pointless, Unfocused, extremely empty. Piece of advice if you want to play this, get it on a discount like I did. Now for an overall review. This is game was clearly made just to HAVE an open world sonic game without any idea of how to reach this goal other than that. Unlike games such as Mario or Donkey Kong, where their core gimmicks are used creatively to...
Garish, ugly, empty, directionless, and pointless. Has one of the worst openings for a Sonic game in recent memory (seriously go compare to the opening of Sonic Unleashed, did SEGA execute their internal CGI team or something??) I'm a big Sonic fan. I thought I could enjoy it for its movement alone, but when the main gameplay loop is "check map, go towards icons" in a sterile, bland world I knew I was in trouble...
I love Sonic Frontiers, regardless of its shortcomings. The lack of a stylized UI, art style, realistic looking graphics with asset flips thrown together, randomly put together puzzles, easy forgiving challenges, and the janky controls and platforming hinder the experience, but despite all that, it is still a really enjoyable one. Usually I'd speak very negatively against all of what I mentioned, and in a way I'm...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Sonic Frontiers scores 56/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1237320/sonic-frontiersThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 18, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.