Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds

Nudging into pole position for this generation of the kart racing genre, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is all gas, great gimmicks and most importantly, great fun.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is your quintessential kart racing game with great content and a unique and interesting gimmick in the form of the CrossWorlds. What appears to be a very simple kart racing game has far more depth and difficulty than meets the eye, with a plethora of modes, tracks, racers and upgrades. Granted, there are some minor gripes with the tracks sometimes feeling overwhelming, and some punishingly unfair moments. Still, if you are looking for a classic kart racing game with fun mechanics and great online and local co-op gameplay, then this is for you! Sonic is back and with a bang!

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is SEGA’s ambitious new entry in the kart-racing genre, combining familiar mechanics with deep vehicle customization and a wide variety of race modes. While drifting requires more skill than in competitors and gadget management has some limitations, the game impresses with its content, creativity, and fast-paced action. Overall, it stands as a strong contender for the genre’s top spot, offering both fun and challenge for racing fans.

With some of its features “coming soon” the future of the game remains unknown, but in the here and now this is an uneven but nevertheless breathless racing game that wins you over eventually.

With fun cross-dimensional tracks, extensive customization, and strong online play with crossplay, this chaotic and spectacular kart racer shines, though its overreliance on powerful items and occasional visual clutter make it feel unbalanced at times.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds doesn’t reinvent the wheel for the genre, but it puts its own spin on things with dimension-hopping tracks and deep customization for both vehicles and abilities. There’s plenty of content to enjoy, especially with friends, and the charming cast pulls from both Sonic and other Sega franchises. It sticks to what works, but it does so well enough to make it highly recommended.

Ultimately, the lack of single-player content, such as the boss fights and time challenges found in Transformed, leaves the experience feeling hollow. I don't know what critics are thinking calling this superior to Mario Kart World. At this stage, even Kirby Air Raiders is a better time than this middling pile of mediocrity.

The main reason I bought this game is Hatsune Miku. But beyond that, this is the most expensive game that I bought twice for me and a friend. This game is basically a must play! ONSOKU ROCK IT!

It’s ok it just needs more work done on it like giving you a few more invincibility frames after you get hit cause you can easily get Mario karted and I wouldn’t recommend it to first timers(I meant to set the thing to Xbox one)

¡El mejor videojuego de karting ahora mismo! Pero, el matchmaking en línea está completamente roto. Todo mundo juega los mismos 4 gadgets con los mismos kart turbo, por lo que al llegar a nivel "legendario" estás totalmente obligado a jugar esos mismos gadgets y karts y aprender a espamear el ****, o prepárate para llegar en los últimos lugares en todas y cada una de las carreras que juegues.

constant server issues that do not happen in any other online game for me when the game works it's fun

this game is mediocre at best and the worst the current market has to offer at worse. But it has some good things! those being: an extremely fun roster of characters, characteristic of the sonic franchise, and the collaborations just help it even more! the interactions between rivals at the start of races are really fun and give a little but really special flavor to the whole game. and the extremely good soundtrack, characteristic of a Sonic game. now onto the bad stuff: first, the art-style, its pretty as anything sonic should be, but the characters and everything else clash so much and not in a good way, this could be a problem of the sonic characters having the same models for as long as i can remember, but also to the fact that its obvious how much the game tried as much as possible to flex the graphics it could possibly have, like "hey we have so good textures and realistic environments!" which, dont get me wrong it can work if done properly! its just that they didnt get close to doing it properly, the colorful cartoonish characters of sonic do NOT get along well with ultra realistic environments, this has also been shown in Sonic Frontiers which also looks bad! it would have been better if they stuck with an also cartoonish environment like they have done in most sonic games. The next bad thing is the gameplay, the racing aspect of the game feels EXTREMELY clunky, the physics of the game feeling really wrong to control leading to sometimes not being able to control the kart, the controls feeling really unresponsive sometimes is a problem too, the best way i could describe it is like driving an actual real life kart? like it feeling really heavy to control and to drive with. another bad aspect is the pace and speed of the game, now when i first got into the demos and open test i expected a crazy speed, since it is a sonic game after all, but when i got into the game, it was so incredibly and gruelingly slow! it felt like being on a traffic jam sometimes, then i discovered the super sonic speed mode, hoping it would fix that problem, and yeah it was way faster but, at most i would compare it to Mario karts 150cc?? and sometimes even to 100cc, its clear they knew about this lack of speed and tried fixing it by adding cheap speed effects on the screen for whenever you get boosts, that and a dinamic camera, which helps trick your brain, but doesnt fix the slowness. This could be explained by the fact that they probably designed the tracks as quick as they could, and then they realized that if you played on those tracks at a "Sonic Speed" you wouldn't be able to play them at all (thanks to the ammount of curves tight spaces and tight turns everywhere). Another problem i had is not being able to enjoy the tracks i raced on at all, the main gimmick of the game is being able to change tracks mid race, thus the name "Crossworlds" but that sadly makes it so you cant enjoy a track for more than one or two laps instead of the status quo of three, dont get me wrong that can be really fun for some people, but similarly to Mario Kart World, i didnt enjoy not being able to digest the tracks without being thrown straight into another one. Another complaint is the price, now 70 dollars for a sonic game is not bad, sadly its what triple A game cost nowadays, and i thought that its worth it still thanks to the cool crossover characters like Miku and Mega-man! sadly the characters were split up between free updates and season packs, the latter costing 7 dollars each! now it is true you can buy them for 30 dollars if you want ALL of them, but i only wanted Mega-man and maybe Pac-man! its overall a CRAZY price for only two characters, a singular track and a singular car, mind you with this money you could buy the brand new Silksong in most countries! and mind you again the characters arent even voiced! they dont even have interactions! even if you bought them all in the 30 dollar package, youd only get 6 new tracks and 12 new voiceless characters, which doesnt sound bad at first, until you factor in what most other games give you for less money, or even outright FREE!! like mario kart 8 deluxe with 8 characters and a titanic ammount of new tracks for 25 dollars (less in some places) or games like hollow knight that straight up give you new stories and endings for FREE!! its overall not a fair price for a game that, as we already stated, is mediocre at best. To summarize, if you are a sonic fan or fanboy id recommend this game to you, you'd definitely like the interactions of the characters, but if youre just a casual, i would NOT recommend this game at all, there are way better and more engaging options in the market right now, with many gimmicks and fun ins-and-outs to them that just totally invalidate this game, and even if you do buy it, wait a little, as of launch, even though the players reported many game breaking bugs in the open tests, the developers totally failed to fix most of them. so wait a little, kay?