Sonic Frontiers' latest update comes with an unexpected difficulty spike.
The Final Horizon, the third and last free update for Sonic Frontiers, has arrived, bringing with it more story and challenges, a revised finale, a new Super Sonic form, and the ability to step into the shoes of Tails, Amy and Knuckles. It's a generous offering from Team Sonic, who've, rather surprisingly, also opted to up the challenge and then some for Frontiers last hurrah.
The ability to play as the other characters and the changes to the latter parts of the game seems to be going down well with players, but many aren't happy with just how difficult the new content is - particularly the trail towers, which don't come with checkpoints.
"This s*** ain't even fun," writes YesHai on the Sonic Frontiers subreddit. "There's fun/challenging difficulty and then there's spiteful/cheap difficulty. This feels like the latter." Feeling much the same, shrimp-parm says, "The DLC's difficulty spike is actually insane. This s*** has me seething."
Over on Twitter, players are also sharing their reactions. User @AyliffeMakit summed up their experience of update three with a video of their encounter with new boss Tank+. This souped-up version of the baddie fires projectiles at a relentless speed, and as you can see from the video below, dodging them is almost impossible.
the update 3 Experience (patent pending) #SonicFrontiers #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/oaSneCe6ILSeptember 29, 2023
Elsewhere, user @BurgerDum has likened the update to the infamous Eggmanland from Sonic Unleashed, considered by many to be the hardest level in the entire franchise. "Update 3 really feels like Kishimoto looked at the criticisms of recent Sonic games being way too easy," they add.
Sonic Frontiers Update 3 in a nutshell: pic.twitter.com/3MvSJ66l0HSeptember 29, 2023
Not everyone is finding the extra challenge a slog, though. "I'm here for it," says Reddit user_soap666. "I've been loving the difficulty and thought it was a nice surprise. Was not expecting this at all lol. I've also been playing Sonic for 30 years, and it's nice to see that they clearly didn't make this update for little kids or casual players."
The blue blur is racing onto Sonic Superstars next month on October 17. As we found in our Sonic Superstars preview, it could be the 2D Sonic revival that you've been waiting for.
Elsewhere, the Sonic Superstars team doesn't think pixel art will be a "viable" art style in 10 years.
