Sonic Racing Crossworlds is the follow up to 2019s Team Sonic Racing, a good game in its own right but nowhere near as good as Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed. Crossworlds is fun but it just misses the mark in a number of areas, its gorgeous visuals, exhilarating core gameplay are undone by a lack of polish and single player content.
Unlike previous Sonic kart racing games, Crossworlds is developed solely by Sonic Team. As the title suggests, the big gimmick in Crossworlds is the way each track will warp into another on the second lap of a race. It’s a neat little idea that makes the game less predictable and more exhilarating.
This is helped with the inclusion of boat and aircraft sections during the races, as it was in Transformed. It makes the racetracks more interesting not only visually, but it generally gives the gameplay an extra dimension for the player to think about. The aircraft portions of the tracks are mostly excellent and easy to master, if you can avoid the environmental hazards you can use these moments to either pull ahead of the pack or catch up. The boat sections are a little more arduous and these parts of the races seem to have been designed to inconvenience the player.
At their foundation every kart racer hinges on two things, the racetracks and the power ups. The tracks in crossworlds are extraordinarily gorgeous and multi-layered, with most of them based on locations and levels in the blue hedgehog's back catalogue. Radical Highway is just as brilliant as the level it is based on from Sonic Adventure 2. It’s a shame that the classic 2D games have been ignored.
However, there’s a fair few really bad tracks, which is to be expected in any racing game. But in Crossworld's case, the bad tracks are really bad. Some of the design choices have the intended impact of making the racing too chaotic.
Which brings me to the power ups, the power up items are not much different than those you’d find in a Mario Kart game. You get your usual missiles, boosts and shields, etc etc. All of which can change the outcome of a race in an instant, which is to the game's benefit. But the relatively short tracks often makes the game feel like a party game with a racing game attached to it, not the other way round. But the chaos does add to the fun, especially if you’re playing online or one of the harder difficulties. The game never lets you off the hook and you immediately want to get back into another race if you’ve not come first place.
As a single player experience the main content comes from the grand Prixs, with eight in total,bringing the number of racetracks to an impressive twenty four. There are four difficulty levels that will change the speed of the AI, Normal Speed, High Speed, Sonic Speed, and Super Sonic Speed. Anyone who has played a kart racer before will have no problem with the easier difficulties. It’s only when you crank it up to Sonic Speed and Super Sonic speed that you’ll find the game a real test. And boy is the game a hard nut to crack at the highest speed, one misstep in a race is agonisingly difficult to recover from.
And it’s not the only way to make the game harder, along with the crossworlds gimmick there is also the Rival that you have to compete with. The rival will be any one of the twenty three character roster and you get more tickets each time you finish above them in a grand prix. It gives the game more depth, and each rival will have an amusing dialogue interaction with your chosen character at the start of the race. But I did not care for it much, it often makes the rest of the AI racers feel a little pointless as from my own experience the rival would finish in the top two positions of most races.
To make things easier you do get gadget slots that upgrade your vehicle, you start off with one but you can unlock six slots. The better the gadget the more spaces they will fill, as you progress you can unlock ones that are more useful. These gadgets are varied, for example you can equip some that will increase the number of rings you pick up, an extra boost at the start of a race, or you can make a certain power up more powerful. It’s a good inclusion but it’s another reason why the game feels like a party game before a racing one.
Outside of the grand prix modes and time trials there is not much else here in terms of single player content, there is the glaring absence of a campaign mode. The game would have benefitted with something similar to the team adventure mode in Team Sonic Racing. Don’t get me wrong I do not expect even a half decent story in a kart racing game, but the campaigns in the previous Sonic kart racers were excellent. The varying challenges allowed you to learn and master the basics of the game, it was also an engaging way to unlock rewards.
Progression and the customisation in the game is tied to the tickets you’re awarded when you complete a race, win a grand prix or finish higher in a grand prix than your rival. And the rewards can be spent fitting out your karts, and there is a lot to unlock from the four different kart types. The customisation is not quite as good as it was in Team Sonic Racing but there is a lot to play around with.
Sonic Racing Crossworlds is an absolute blast and bundle of joy. For anyone who likes these types of games it is an absolute must buy. Although its different components don’t always come together, it has a lot of depth for a kart racer without forgetting to be fun. But its lack of campaign is a big miss, and this is a £64.99 game without future DLC included in that price. I was unsure whether to award this higher than the 7.5 score I gave Team Sonic Racing, but I think it just about earns an 8. Its gameplay is more inventive and there appears to be a decent amount of free and paid content planned for the future.
Verdict:8/10
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