Sonic Frontiers: beginner tips to level up and progress fast

Just started Sonic Frontiers? Then these are the tips you need

Sonic Frontiers is finally available worldwide, and we’re getting our first taste of a bigger Sonic world, complete with dozens of tiny challenges to complete, an RPG upgrade system, skill trees, combo-based combat, and more.

It’s a huge departure from what we’re used to from Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends, and in this guide we’re breaking down some important tips. If you’re just starting with the game, read through our tips below and you’ll be ready to take on the biggest Sonic game yet.

Sonic Frontiers tips

Upgrade Sonic

Sonic Frontiers is kind of an RPG – kind of. Sonic’s speed, ring capacity, and power are all tied to stats that can be leveled up over the course of your adventure. Exploring the world, completing missions, and picking up collectibles will grant you various currencies for you to collect and spend on upgrades. Hermit Koco, the taller of the mossy, ruin-like Koco creatures, will be able to exchange these currencies for cold-hard upgrades, making Sonic more powerful.

Homing attack

The Homing attack is everything. It is your primary attack button, and it’s going to get you through a lot of tough platforming challenges. When in battle you can basically mash this button to execute combos, as long as the enemy isn’t defending or in the middle of attacking you. It’s tempting to mash this button for every fight, but you will unlock more attacks through skills. Yes, you can get pretty far simply by mashing the button out, but unlocking skills and varying your attacks is how you defeat enemies quickly.

Movement combos

One place where you don’t want to mash is during movement combos. There are dozens of platforming challenges littered around the world of Sonic Frontiers that will ask you to run around loops, homing attack to balloons, boost in the air, slam onto the ground, grind on rails, and much more. While you can just get around some challenges with smart use of momentum and jumps, many of them require you to pay close attention to the attacks you use. 

You’ve got boost power

You can boost by holding the right trigger, and you should do it often. You will sometimes have access to infinite boost, which is fantastic, but it’s often limited. Still, many challenges and bosses will require you to boost almost constantly, so managing the amount of boost you have at your disposal is essential.

Burst Boost

Once you’re carrying the maximum number of rings (best avoid enemy attacks for this) you will be able to access Burst Boost. This is a strong, faster version of the regular boost, and will even power up your Cyloops. Just make sure to be careful when managing your rings. Having a lower overall capacity will help get Burst Boost more easily, but carrying a large amount is generally better than not.

Sonic Boom

One of the skills you can unlock, Sonic Boom is almost certainly inspired by Street Fighter’s Guile. Sonic lets loose a barrage of ranged attacks at high speed, and this attack is very powerful, able to take down an opponent’s health bar fairly quickly. This should be one of your primary attacks against bosses, and therefore should be one of the first abilities you unlock in Sonic Frontiers.

Quick Cyloops

Cyloops are performed by holding a button and running around your foe to flip them over, or damage them. Some foes require Cyloops in order to damage them at all, so getting them in quick will help a lot. You can simply press the Cyloop button mid-combo in order to perform a Quick Cyloop, once you’ve unlocked the skill You should make this the second skill you should unlock as a priority.

Combat combos

Now that you’ve unlocked a handful of combat skills, it’s time to start executing proper combos when in battle. There are more combat skills to unlock, and they essentially all start with you executing the homing attack, and then swapping mid-combo to one of your other attacks, such as your ground slam, Cyloops, or Sonic Booms.

Tough terrain

Pretty much everything in Sonic Frontiers is meant to be climbed, but getting there is difficult. If you investigate enough, you’ll find secret springs, grind rails, platforms, and more that will allow you to reach tough areas and find new items to help upgrade Sonic and his abilities. If you ever see something that seems out of reach, look a bit more closely around the environment and you just might find a path – or the start of that path could be pretty far away.

Complete ruins

Ruins allow you to access classic Sonic stages, with both retro stages making a return, and some brand new stages that take place either in 2D or 3D. These are a classic blast of Sonic gameplay, and each of them come with four challenges to collect rings, complete the stage at speed, and grab the red rings. If you complete all challenges and bonus challenges, you’ll get the maximum amount of Keys, allowing you to play more and progress further in the game. If you come out of a Ruins stage with few challenges complete, it might be worth retrying until you tick all the necessary boxes.