Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review – Sonic's best racing game yet

There are some genres that are inarguably dominated by one standard bearer, and there are none that exemplify that better than the kart racer. Mario Kart is the undisputed king, and no matter how many attempts there have been at the crown, none have even come close to knocking the iconic plumber from his perch.

Until now.

There have been a bunch of Sonic the Hedgehog racing games over the years, and all of them have been largely fine. Sonic and Sega All-Stars was a fun little change of pace, but didn’t cause much of a storm. Sonic Team Racing was fun, but lacked a layer of polish and had a disappointingly small roster. The less said about Sonic R, the better.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is the one that finally breaks through to be a truly great kart racer, and importantly, one that keeps the spirit of what makes Mario Kart great while making a few mechanical adjustments to give it a unique flow.

First of all, there’s an extra coat of polish to driving compared to Sonic Team Racing. It sounds silly, given that it’s Sonic’s whole thing, but that game lacked a proper feeling of speed as you were going around the tracks. Here, the visual effects and SFX combine with a tighter and more active camera to really give you the sense of blasting around at the speed of sound (none of the tracks use that song, by the way, so it loses points there).

It also puts the focus on boosting as much as possible. While your top speed is already pretty quick, the game takes every opportunity to give you that rush of pushing you beyond those limits. Drifting is as mechanically important as accelerating in this game, as even though most tracks are extremely wide, every corner requires you to throw out your back end to get around it.

This adds a couple of extra layers of skill, as not only do you need to learn the right points to start and end drifts to clear corners as quickly as possible, but while drifting you build up a boost bar that can give you a huge advantage as you speed out of a corner – as long as you don’t do it directly into another corner and smash into the barricade, as I frequently do.

It gives races a much more active feel, as there are few moments where you can rely on just holding the accelerator. You’re always having to look ahead and start making your next move before it arrives. What helps this feeling is that the pack of 12 racers stays together a lot more than in Mario Kart. Even with World’s increased 24-racer cap, you often spend entire races running at the front and rarely encounter others; however, here, one mistake can send you tumbling down the pack – though that’s alright, because it only takes a few good moves to start climbing the ranks again. It makes every race a thrilling push-and-pull where you can never comfortably frontrun for long.

It has a great approach to Grand Prix mode too, which does exactly what Mario Kart World tried to do, but better. Where Mario Kart had you race from one track to the next via long straight roads that were fairly uninteresting, CrossWorlds just has you drive straight through a portal and get right into the action.

The way it works is that you’ll start on one track, do a lap of it, then at the end of the first lap, whoever’s in first gets to pick between two options for what track everyone will be transported to for lap two. There are several environments that you can only experience as these second-lap track changes too, which makes it a great joy to experience them all and see your favourites pop up as you go through the portal. Then, for lap three, you’ll return to the original track, only now it’s undergone some changes. The severity of these varies per track; it could be as simple as some new boost pads and item boxes being scattered around, or as complex as a completely new path opening up.

The game also has a rivalry system. After you’ve selected your character and car, you’ll be randomly assigned a rival character – though you can manually change both your rival and their difficulty level if you want. Throughout the Grand Prix, the game favours your rival, making sure that they usually finish first or second without your intervention, and the Grand Prix is less about winning outright than it is about beating that character.

It’s a fun little system that gives you an extra goal to focus on outside of just winning. The rival gets a special marker on the minimap and an indicator above their head so you always know where they are. On top of that, there are custom dialogue lines for each rivalry pair out of all 23 characters on the base roster, which is really fun if you’re a long-time Sonic fan who knows who all these colorful little freaks are (I’m one such fan, I call them freaks with love), plus they’ll also give out little barks as you hit each other with items or overtake each other to really get in that feeling of a fun competition between these colorful characters.

It is a little disappointing that the same isn’t true for the DLC characters though. I would’ve loved to hear Hatsune Miku trash-talk Big the Cat and the Minecraft Creeper, but oh well.

There are some fun side modes outside of Grand Prix, too. Time Trials are there, of course, but you also have the Race Park, where you can unlock new vehicles by beating rival teams in team races, which means you essentially have all of Sonic Team Racing in this game too. This is also where you’ll find custom races, which give you control over just about everything, from what items can appear to which specific tracks can appear when going through portals mid-race.

Doing just about anything earns you tickets, which can be spent on a few different things, but are mostly for unlocking new car parts, as there’s a lot of customization you can do in that department to unlock different modules that alter a car’s stats. Then, on top of that, you have the Gadget mechanics, where you can apply up to six buffs to your car that give you bonus items, make your boosts charge faster, and many more things. It makes building a car for online races a surprisingly complex process.

What I think will ultimately stop it from truly being a “Mario Kart killer” is the fact that it can be a little obtuse to new players. Mario Kart is very easy to read at a glance, even for small kids, but CrossWorlds requires an extra layer of skill, even for beginner players, that will stop some people from getting into it. It wasn’t until my second Grand Prix that I really felt like I had a grasp on the game’s course design, as while the game is very beautiful to look at, there can be a lot of visual noise that’s hard to sift through when you’re seeing it with fresh eyes.

Still, the fact remains, I’ve never had this much fun with a kart racer not named Mario Kart; Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is finally a high-quality alternative to the series that understands how to make going fast fun in a variety of ways. I like Mario Kart World a lot, but it has its fair share of detractors, and those people will be thrilled with what CrossWorlds has to offer.

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