Sonic Racing CrossWorlds Review

A friend and I recently booted up the newest racing game in the Sonic Kart series – Sonic Racing CrossWorlds. A prompt appeared onscreen to ask if we wanted to do the tutorial. He skipped it and said ‘How hard can it be? It’s a racing game’. 4 races later I was placed 5^th, and he was in 3^rd…

I am an unapologetic fan of SEGA. If anyone wonders why they keep making Sonic games, or why they put out a Golden Axe: Beast Rider – that’s my fault. Sonic All-Star Racing Transformed arrived when the company was in a bit of a drought in 2012, and it succeeded in being the best kart racing game available at the time. This wasn’t just because it was a beautiful tribute to every generation of SEGA, but because it was a fantastically designed racing game that had the player warping between three forms (air/land/sea) and allowed for Sumo Digital to go hedge-hog-wild with the courses and the fanservice. Not that kind of fanservice – get your mind out of the gutter.

Team Sonic Racing was released close to a decade later and, by contrast did not live up to Sumo Digital’s previous effort. It seemed like a dev team that had made a classic then tried to figure out a way to mix up the formula. The magic sauce was missing and the cool idea about managing a 3-vehicle team felt fiddly and not the crux for a whole game.

This time with Sonic Racing CrossWorlds, it is not Sumo Digital in control and instead, Sonic Team is steering the project. And what a project! It is an ambitious attempt to take a decade and a half of elements from the various entries in its racing series and fit it into one neat package.

This time round the roster of racers is more Sonic focused. No appearances from Gilius Thunderhead, but lots and lots of Sonic characters. These range from the familiar – Knuckles, Tails, Shadow – to the ones I am not sure anyone has heard of – the Freeriders cast, and Sonic Forces?

Each racer can pick a vehicle that has its own stats and there is a wealth of customisation available to make that ride their own.

The main mode, Grand Prix, consists of 4 races. Where the racer places will give them a score and whoever has the highest score at the end, wins.

The extra spice to this dynamic is that Sonic Team have introduced Rivals, randomly selected from the cast, and they will quip at the player as they either start to win or lose. This is a small thing, but it helped hyper-focus my desire to win and also narrowed my hatred to one character. Except for Big the Cat, he is impossible to hate.

The controls, once clarified, are actually pretty simple. There is an accelerator, a brake, an item trigger, and a drift button.

The drift button works in interesting ways depending on whether you are in a plane, car or boat. The player is expected to always be drifting, because that is how you build meter to boost, so when a player isn’t drifting, they should be boosting.

 That dual state of almost veering out of control around a corner and then boosting gleefully down a straight is a lot to deal with. It is even more to process when you take into account the amount of stimulus onscreen at any one time.

In many ways this game feels like “ADHD the video game” with a constant barrage of sounds and colours. There are several set pieces where I feel like a child being pushed harder, and faster, by their parents on a swing; there is a sense that things might unravel and you will do a big, dangerous, loop-the-loop. That feeling is pushed to its very limit when I played it in splitscreen with 3 other players. I seldom feel overwhelmed, but this game pushed me, in a good way.

I couldn’t agree with AJ’s review here any more; Sonic Racing Crossworlds is quite simply an excellent videogame, and doubly so if you’re a Sonic fan who will enjoy all the references and easter eggs. Whipping around the tracks at the speed of sound, there are plenty of places to go, and enough colours to make a thousand rainbows. You certainly won’t be sticking around, and won’t take long to find out what lies ahead.
Solo is just pure joy on a screen, and as AJ notes the over the top screen-filling frenzy can occasionally be a little overwhelming, but Sonic Team still keep the racing readable even in the midst of all this. Seeing other racers go careening past is all the motivation I need to get back into the drifting and fire off a few rolling bombs to get my placements back.
Online play has also proven to be excellent fun in the weeks after launch. Races feel closely contested, and rarely have I stayed in one position for too long, both up and down the leaderboard multiple times in a race. That the courses are still engaging to race through both on and off line, even after many times through now, is also a testament to how well they are designed. The Crossworld mechanic is also a neat twist on races that helps keep things fresh as we never really know where we’re going next until it happens.
All in all, Crossworlds is fantastic, well worth playing if you’re even remotely into Kart racers, and earns the coveted spot of second best Sonic racing game ever (there’s no knocking Sonic R off the list, sorry).

Jamie ‘Can You Feel the Sunshine’ Collyer – EIC

That sense of being inside the mind of a highly caffeinated, and over-sugared brain continues with CrossWorlds’s namesake. At the end of each lap, the player in first place gets to choose one of two paths which warps the subsequent track into a new world. This is refreshing and helps keep the game from ever becoming a question of racing lines and optimisation.

None of these innovations would matter if the tracks were terrible. And, so far, I haven’t found one that I didn’t enjoy whipping around. Once the noise of the levels starts to settle down, I was impressed about the depth to each track and the number of options available to me.

Once the Grand Prix is done, which is massive in its own right, there are also the “Co-Op” modes. This is where CrossWorlds brings back the team racing mechanics of Team Sonic Racing with the intent that each team member must contribute and help each other. Sonic Team could have brought back the one mode, but instead they have built a ton of variations on this core theme. Where I didn’t think this worked as the core experience of the whole of the previous game, re-introducing it as a game mode is genius.

So, a great Grand Prix, with a lot of things to aim for, a great set of side challenges that work… What’s wrong with Sonic Racing CrossWorlds? Nothing.

This is a title that is bursting at the seams with inventiveness and content. I can imagine a young Sonic fan being asked to design a racing game with their favourite character and them going on an energetic rant that closely resembles this final product. The amazing thing is that it all works.

Conclusion

I am not saying that Sonic games are back, but I am definitely saying that Sonic racing games are back. This is a game that loves accessible racing and has an adoration for its own franchise. It has elevated each part of what came before, and I don’t think Sonic Racing CrossWorlds can be dismissed as the ‘other kart racing’ game anymore.