Team Sonic Racing™ Reviews

As the title implies, this is a Sonic kart racing game. The main gimmick are the team mechanics, which are pretty fun with human players. I would say my main gripes are not being able to adjust options while in multiplayer lobbies. (You have to back out to the main menu.) I also had some stutter issues when too many particles were on screen. There is no particle-specific toggle, so I have to turn down all graphics which is annoying given it otherwise runs fine. The multiplayer "ready up" function seems to be pointless as the host can start the race regardless of "ready" status. But the game itself is pretty fun. If you can rope some friends in, it's still worth picking up during discounts. Especially if you never played any of the previous Sonic & All Stars Racing games.

Whomever though locking progression behind drifting trials was a good idea needs to be fired

Very fun game! Sometimes at a certain stage of gameplay lag becomes unbearable, but very fun to play.

Might be the worst sonic racing game to be honest. The CPU is weird, if you play against bots the teams almost always finish one after the other for example if in the first race of a grand prix green team is 1st 2nd and 3rd they will almost always be first second and third the rest of the grand prix. The order in which a team finishes a race seems completely predetermined and similarly if you have CPU on your team they always seem to finish the race in the bottom 6 so no matter how well you do they throw the entire grand prix for you. I like the concept of teamwork in a racing game but making it so you HAVE to rely on your team to get your ultimate in order to stay in first is discouraging at best.

you can play as vector. the game is more fun if you see it as a team based game rather than thinking you need to get first every time.

My initial hatred was overblown. Not great far from it but it's ok. Campaign could've been much more. The team mechanic is cool but not fun enough to carry a whole game. Tracks were horribly repetitive and uninspired which kills its replayability. 5.5/10

It's visually overwhelming, I don't particularly like racing games, I'm ambivalent about the IP. The story mode and dialog say, "a game for babies" but the difficulty is absolutely brutal. I'm not sure if the developers are unreasonably good at racing games, or rushed the balance in a fit of apathy but you have to drive nearly or completely perfectly. That said, I forced myself to play through it and it won me over a bit, though that may have been Stockholm syndrome kicking in. It's not my speed but the nieces and nephew like it and now I can crush them even harder. I'm a good uncle.

Somehow SEGA keeps making worse and worse racing games with the graphics and music only being the areas where some improvement is made. The car racing games peaked with their first entry "Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing" which is kind of baffling. While the game does look great and sound great what actually matters, the racing, has gotten worse yet again. The AI is rubberbanding like mad and it just feels like it constantly cheats, how the hell can Big the cat casually drive past me as Sonic with maxed speed states on my car AND me having over 200 rings??? Things like this completely ruin the experience but it's not the only way the AI ruins things for you since you race as a team. In the story stages you have to pray that your teammates get good positions so you can fully complete each stage, there's nothing fun with you having driven perfectly and finished first while your two teammates are in the last and second to last positions. Another annoying thing about the AI is that they just can't shut up, they keep saying the same cringy shitty one-liners and they are quite the chore to listen to the 200th time. Imagine if we had a normal funny sports commentator like in the first racing game instead. Sonic's and the others' characterization is so incredibly cringy and one-dimensional. Tails is the autist, Knuckles is completely retarded, Amy is , Rouge tries so hard to talk like a whore, and Shadow is an edgelord. The characterization is a complete failure and so is the story, why even include a story if it's so bad that it negatively affects the game? They also made the ultimate ability generic and boring, in the previous games you had these unique cool animations and transformations, but here they just added some random yellow fire, blurred the screen, and increased the fov. The online races are completely nonexistent. Only buy this game if you want to play through all Sonic's racing games and while it's heavily on sale. Charging more than 10-15$ for this is a scam If you think this is a good racing game then you seriously need to play more racing games.

[h1]A major disappointment compared to Transformed[/h1] Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed is one of my favourite kart racers of all time, so a sequel to it was definitely something to get excited about. After playing it for myself, I was left wondering what even happened with this one. Control is similar to Transformed with very similar drifting and stunt mechanics, so it shouldn't take you too long to get adjusted to this if you've played the previous games in the series. However, even on the highest difficulty, it feels slower than Transformed and you can't boost through grass unless you're playing as technical characters like Tails, not even with a boost wisp. So many game mechanics from Transformed are either cut or watered down. This game has no planes or boats, only racing cars on land so there's a lot less variety in the gameplay. Even Mario Kart has bikes that play slightly different, and not having them here was a missed opportunity to bring back Shadow's iconic bike from 2005's Shadow game. The item system is a major downgrade. Triple items have been nerfed - in Transformed, if you pick up a triple item, you could fire them all at once by holding the button, which is no longer possible here. All items are wisps from Colours and aren't as fun to use as the firework, drone or blowfish were. The rhythm wisp, the worst wisp from Lost World, is even worse here as it's meant to be the blooper from Mario Kart but covers so little of the screen it's basically useless against competent human players. Drifting and boosts were also way better in Transformed compared to this. In that game, performing stunts while drifting grants you a boost as soon as you land, allowing you to chain boosts together. Here, landing stunts during a drift increases your boost level that only activates when you stop drifting, which greatly lowers the skill ceiling and makes the game feel even slower. The main gimmick of this game is teamwork, which I really hated. You don't win by being in first place - you win as a team by having more points combined than any other team, so it's entirely possible to lose the race because your teammates aren't doing very well, which happened to me a few times. Team Ultimate replace the All Star moves and are incredibly unbalanced - what was meant to be a catchup system for struggling players is now something you have to work for, and it's so easy to abuse during races by passing items to your teammates back and fourth the entire race to fill up the gauge quickly. Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing had 21 characters. Transformed had 24 (30 on PC). This game only has 15 characters and are all unlocked from the start, with no characters from any franchise that isn't Sonic, which I know this isn't a SEGA All Stars racing game, it's a Sonic racing game, but even 2006's Sonic Riders had unlockable guest characters from other SEGA franchises like AiAi, NiGHTS and Ulala playable so this character roster is still a huge step backwards. The track design was quite underwhelming, too. This game has 21 tracks, but 9 of those are re-used from previous games meaning there are only 12 original tracks in this game, 4 less than Transformed. Some of the new tracks feel like clones of Mario Kart tracks - Sand Road shares a lot in common with Dry Dry Desert from Mario Kart Double Dash, Hidden Volcano's starting section rips off Bowser's Castle from Mario Kart 8, and Sky Road could be easily mistaken for Cloudtop Cruise from Mario Kart 8. This game has no battle mode at all. Ocean View from Transformed returns in this game, and the lack of the transforming mechanics really show how much they added to that game and its tracks. What was a great introduction track is now one of the blandest tracks in this game without the boat section on the 3rd lap. That was the best part of Ocean View and it's nowhere to be found here. The re-used tracks and uninspired original tracks really show how creatively bankrupt this game is. Graphics are okay, but are a huge step down compared to the previous game. Despite releasing 7 years earlier on less powerful hardware, it looks so much better than this game does even on the highest graphics settings. I even experienced a few frame rate drops during gameplay making it even less pleasant to look at. This game has a story with full voice acting, but every single cutscene in this game is just told through static text boxes and still character images. Nothing is actually shown to you; it's all told through these text boxes making it really hard to care about what's going on which makes the presentation look bad. Even being a spinoff racing game isn't an excuse, as Diddy Kong Racing on N64, Crash Team Racing on PS1 and Sonic Riders on PS2 are all racing games with fully animated cutscenes and voice acting. The story mode is also just a copy-paste job of the World Tour mode from Transformed, and while it isn't without its improvements, it's mostly a downgrade. You can get all 3 stars in an event simply by meeting all the requirements on any difficulty instead of stars being determined by difficulty. There's only 2 stars for the solo challenges instead of 4. The Mod Pods are by far the worst unlock system of all the Sonic racing games. You unlock new customisation parts by spending 10 tokens obtained from playing the game, but you can't just choose which parts you want; you have to win them at random. There are no micro-transactions or paid loot boxes in this game, but it does feature quite a bit of grinding to unlock everything especially if there's one part in particular you want. Car customisation is decent, at least. You can customise the colour, vinyl and body parts of your cars to your liking making each vehicle feel personal and unique. Even this aspect of the game could've been so much better than it is, as there's no way to add individual parts like spoilers, rims or bumpers for more extensive customisation. Hope you're not playing this game for the online multiplayer, because the servers are pretty much dead with nobody playing. A big part of this is the matchmaking system - in Transformed, you can join lobbies with a race in progress, but here, you can only join lobbies that aren't in the middle of a game. No wonder why the online quickly died shortly after release; this alone killed any chance of success this game could've had, and no update was released to address this issue. I tried finding a match for this game, but to no avail. Meanwhile, I'm still finding matchmaking games for Transformed to this day. If you have friends, good luck trying to find their time trial records on the leaderboards as this game doesn't have any way of comparing your times to your friends, yet another feature Transformed had that was removed here so now your only option is to find their times on the global leaderboards, which is especially painful for one of this game's achievements. If you own a PC and are looking for a good kart racer that's much better value for your time and money, here's the store page for Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed: https://store.steampowered.com/app/212480/Sonic__AllStars_Racing_Transformed_Collection/ This review was mostly a comparison between Transformed and this game, but even on its own merits it's a mediocre kart racing game that's bargain bin fodder at best. I wasn't really a fan of this one, and can't recommend that you pick this one up when other far better games in the genre exist. If you own a Switch, just get Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for you and your family or friends; there's far more content, more characters, more tracks and far better game mechanics at a much better value. For XBOX or PlayStation console owners, CTR Nitro Fuelled is also a way better alternative. Sonic Racing Crossworlds has been announced which is looking much more promising, so there's even less of a reason to play this in the near future, even for the most diehard Sonic fans.

Not great. Definitely not as memorable as Transformed and is a step back in many ways. Fortunately, it appears the devs agree as the latest, CrossWorlds, appears to be heavily inspired by Transformed. Maybe wait for that one. If you can't, look up Transformed and play that one instead.