After years of mostly average review scores for Sonic games, Sega is aiming high with the upcoming Sonic Frontiers.
We all love the fastest hedgehog around, we just don’t all love his games. But it seems like Sega is targeting high review scores for the next entry in the beloved-but-flawed series. As shared by VGC, during a recent analyst and investor Q&A, the company was asked if it had any targets in mind for review scores on sites like Metacritic, which Sega Sammy’s CEO Haruki Satomi and CFO Koichi Fukazawa confirmed was the case.
“We have set internal targets, as the correlation between the scores of external evaluation organizations and sales is high in Europe and North America,” the two said. “If the game gets a high score, it can become a must-buy game, and possibly generate synergy with sales, so we are currently working hard to improve the quality of the game toward its sales for the holiday season.”
Obviously the notion that a company wants its game to review well isn’t particularly surprising, but Sonic games have a history of, shall we say, being mediocre. The most recent entry, Sonic Forces, only has a 57 on Metacritic. Sort of spinoff game Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric has a pretty awful 32. And Sonic: Lost World has an average 63, making Sonic Colors the best reviewed 3D game in over a decade with a score of 78.
Review scores aren’t everything, obviously, but considering this isn’t the first time Sega has mentioned its high expectations for Frontiers, it’s clearly a point of concern for the company.
And it’s not like people don’t care about Sonic anymore – the latest movie has pulled in a huge sum of money, so people want to experience that hog going fast. Hopefully Frontiers will be able to redeem Sonic in some shape or form, but we haven’t even seen the game in action yet, so who knows how the game will turn out.
