racer

As a dyed-in-the-wool Nintendo Kid, Mario has always been the yardstick by which I measure competitors. When Sonic the Hedgehog broke out on the Sega Genesis, I couldn’t help but compare it to Mario’s platforming to measure the similarities and differences. So I have to admit that it’s difficult to approach an arcade kart racer like Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds without Mario Kart in the back of my head–especially since that series just had a new entry this summer. But it’s that contrast that really makes CrossWorlds stand out in some positive ways. Whereas Nintendo’s latest racer excelled due to its simplicity, CrossWorlds offers a massive wealth of options and customization to help you find and craft your own style. There is a lot going on, and it can be a little overwhelming, but ultimately the level of depth rewards experimentation.

From the start, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds offers three main offline modes, two of which need little introduction: Grand Prix and Time Trials are your tried-and-true staples, and then there’s the more inventive Race Park. More on that in a bit. Grand Prix is where most players will start, with a suite of seven Grand Prix to master. These are listed as three races apiece, but each one also consists of a fourth grand finale race that remixes parts of the three prior tracks.

And that’s where CrossWorlds gets its unique twist, as well as its name. Seemingly inspired by the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, in which rings act as portals to other planets, the tracks in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds are not just straightforward point-A-to-point-B affairs. Instead you’ll regularly cross a threshold through a giant ring and into a new world. The race leader chooses a destination, between one known option or another random selection. You hop into another world to visit for a little while, and then portal your way back to the main track you were in.

It’s a neat trick and has the effect of making races feel unpredictable. You can’t really sleepwalk your way through a track after memorizing every curve and bank, because before you know it you’ll be warped to a tight-turn candyland, a bouncy mushroom forest, or an airborne stunt show. As you progress through the races, you’ll certainly come to learn the general outlines of all the worlds you might warp to, but never knowing which one is coming feels exciting and dynamic. On a base PlayStation 5, at least, the world-changing effect is fuzzy and looks visually rough, but the impact it has on races makes up for it.

Adding to the variety is the transforming vehicles aspect, borrowed from Sonic All-Stars Racing: Transformed. You’ll regularly swap between car, boat, and plane forms, and they’ve been tweaked to make them feel noticeably different from one another. Car mode operates as you’d expect, as a traditional kart-racer with boosts and drifts. You can also do stunts when your car catches air, and the more you do, the bigger a boost you’ll get once you land. Plane mode gives you full vertical control, and often those segments encourage you to pull aerobatic stunts by crossing scattered boost rings. Boat mode trades the car’s drift functionality for a charged jump, letting you leap out of the water to reach power-ups or boosts that are hovering in mid-air. This might have been the hardest for me to wrap my head around, since you need to charge to the highest level to reach the best rewards and it requires some foresight instead of the typical arcade racer instincts, but it felt that much more rewarding when I would hit it just right.

To me, the core racing mechanics themselves felt fairly awkward at first. Not knowing the tracks, I would frequently run into walls, and CrossWorlds punishes you with severe slowdown for doing so. It didn’t feel great bouncing along the edges of a tight curve as the other racers passed me by, and I couldn’t get the standard karts to cooperate with my drift-heavy style of hugging turns. Once you’re bumping along a wall, it feels hard to course-correct. That problem was largely solved once I started leaning more towards racers and vehicles with a high Handling rating, though, so it really came down to finding a style that worked for me. The vehicles are also visually distinct, so being in a high-boost hoverboard is easily recognizable versus a hulking monster truck from a Power character, or a zippy sports cart from one of the Speed types.

On top of the racer and vehicle types–both of which are classified by Speed, Acceleration, Power, Handling, and Boost–there are tons of ways you can tweak both your ride and your racing style. Every base vehicle you unlock can be customized with parts you purchase with tickets, which change its stats in mostly lateral ways–a little more handling, a little less boost, for example–along with paint jobs and decals as cosmetic options. New parts cost quite a bit, so the game economy is obviously meant to sustain long-term play if you want to collect all the parts and options. The other major customization options are your gadgets, which are determined by your gear plate. Your plate upgrades as you complete more races, unlocking more slots, for up to six slots in all. Gadgets can give you a particular item at the start of the race, help you charge your drift dash more quickly, or prevent slipping on ice. There are tons of options, but in my tinkering I didn’t find anything particularly overpowered, especially since some more powerful gadgets take up two or even three slots. But the whole system is remarkably flexible, and I was able to consistently build toward my own playstyle and experiment with new ideas. Upgrading your gear plate marks most of your progression at first, after which your reward is more gadgets.

This being an arcade kart racer, there are loads of items to use during a race, and they’re not always self-explanatory. I still don’t know if I fully grasp which Chao item has which effect. But items are by far the weakest element of the racing mechanics overall, since there are just too many items that feel like they have almost no counter. The game helpfully prompts you if you happen to be carrying one of the few items that can stop an almost-unblockable attack. But otherwise, when you see a ring hovering over your head, something is about to come out of it, and it’s going to be bad news for you. That can make races feel frustrating, especially when you crash out inches from the finish line. To put it in Mario Kart terms, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has an overabundance of blue shells.

Race Park, the second main offline mode, is recommended for couch co-op or competitive multiplayer, and pits teams against each other with specialized objectives. One might challenge you to use the most offensive items against opponents while another will reward you with bonus points for using the most boost pads. You still get points for your rank in the race as usual, but these bonus objectives can make a big difference. When you rack up enough wins against a rival team, you get rewarded by unlocking their vehicle.

The rival element is also threaded throughout the Grand Prix races, as you’ll be randomly assigned a Rival at the start of each set of races. You can choose to upgrade to a tougher Rival for a harder challenge, and beating your Rival gives you progress toward a meta-goal with a reward that only gets revealed after you’ve completed all the Grand Prix races. The Rival is also generally your toughest competitor, so while you’re racing against 11 others, beating your Rival usually means you’ll usually win the race too. That has the impact of making it feel a bit too one-on-one, but it also leads to some funny interactions. At one point when my rival was Cream the Rabbit, passing her would lead to an adorable voice prompt asking, “please let me catch up!”

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds

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Meanwhile, the course design itself is top-notch. There’s a ton of visual variety, thanks in part to the courses exploring a variety of Sega-inspired worlds, and the swapping between vehicle modes means you always have to stay on your toes. The main courses seem mostly if not entirely inspired by Sonic games, spanning from the retro to the recent Sonic Frontiers. The crossworld mechanic lets you play tourist to other Sega locales and those act as fun surprises. Suddenly you’re in Afterburner, or wait, is that a Columns reference? Even after you’ve seen all of the tracks, it’s fun to play spot-the-homage.

Online play works well enough and will likely be the mode that grants the game the most longevity. You can tweak your customized ride and gear while you wait for a match, and then players vote on a track. You progress up letter grades for matchmaking, and you can join the lobby with friends to stick together. Other than that, though, it’s fairly no-frills. There’s no option to match into a set of Grand Prix races or turn on optional bonus objectives like in Race Park. It works, but there’s certainly room to grow and add more variety in the online environment.

Altogether, Sonic Racing CrossWorlds is a solid package. The single-player modes, meta-goals like collecting gear and vehicle parts, and wealth of customization options to experiment with different play styles, make it easy to recommend for players who like their kart racing with a little more mechanical complexity. Even with slightly underwhelming online offerings, it’s easy to see how Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has plenty of road ahead of it.

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