It’s the grind.

Sonic is always going to be important to me. There’s just no getting away from that, no matter how hard I try. I’m gonna love Sonic probably for the rest of my life.

That doesn’t mean I’m always going to fall in love with each new release from Sonic, or that I’m not going to have complicated feelings when I play them.

Such is the case, unfortunately, with the latest Sonic game, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

Now, I’ve prided myself for years for being fairer than others when it comes to assessing the quality of Sonic games. I rated Unleashed highly well before the “consensus” of Sonic fandom reached that point, and my favorite Sonic game is the fandom-darling of the future - Sonic Forces.

Y’all’re gonna get there, eventually. :)

But I consider this review to be a continuation of that trend, because I’ve seen lots of reactions and reviews of this game that act as if it’s this amazing game. That it’s impressive.

I don’t think the people saying all this are being as fair as you might think, unless “fair” just means “positive.” Which it doesn’t.

Does the good outweigh the bad in this game? Sure. If we were still operating in the same 2012 landscape that Sonic and All-Stars Racing: Transformed launched in, I’d consider this to be a contender for best kart racer!

I appreciate that Sonic Team seems to have learned some lessons from Team Sonic Racing while making this game. In hindsight, the way TSR is set up makes zero sense.

The speed type is expected to go ahead, and teammates are incentivized to follow their trail - which becomes a problem with how many timed obstacles there are that come to bite the following teammates in the ass.

Meanwhile the “technique” type benefits from going off-road, which you’re not really gonna wanna do a whole lot of because you’re following the speed type’s trail and getting hit by every obstacle on the way.

Then there’s the power type, who often ended up in the back of the team, who can open up alternate pathways. What good those alternate pathways will do for your team when you’re BEHIND all them is beyond me.

In CrossWorlds, you just have different stats and different classes of vehicle. There’s speed vehicles, acceleration (technique), power, handling (technique again), and boost.

Boost is just Extreme Gear from Sonic Riders! It honestly works a lot better than I expected, especially after experiencing it in the Open Network Test. It’s surprisingly solid!

You can also customize said vehicles pretty nicely! For everything besides Extreme Gear, you can mix and match different pieces of vehicles to make a unique and cool-looking ride… or a really goofy-looking one, whatever floats your boat.

Technically you can mix and match Extreme Gear parts, but it for some reason looks shitty? It’s very noticeable that you shoved two pieces of two different vehicles together, for some reason.

There’s also some really good color customization, with the ability to customize the texture/shininess of the paintjob making a welcome return from Team Sonic Racing!

Cluster and I have had a lot of fun either coming up with a paintjob that better-suits the character than the default, and even paintjobs that’re inspired by Pride flags! Especially with some clever use of the basic decals you get by default, you can really Pride up your ride!

We also have the largest roster of Sonic characters of any Sonic racing game yet! This powered most of the enthusiasm Cluster and I had upon the game’s reveal, as one of our big wishlist items after playing Team Sonic Racing was mainly just wanting more Sonic characters to play as!

Credit is also due for the Time Trials mode at Sonic Speed, where for every 3 races I get a new soundtrack to have playing in the background of my game. It really helps, for reasons I’ll get into when I reach the negative part of this review.

Then there’s the racing, which is probably the best it’s ever been in a racing game with Sonic in the title. The drifting is as close as it’s ever come to Mario Kart, the items are mostly fun, and it just feels dang good winning races as Rouge the Bat.

I think that’s basically everything nice I have left to say for the game. I have a lot left to say about the game, so much that I honestly don’t know if I’m gonna get to everything. I’ll do my best.

If I had to pin the game’s greatest weakness down to one thing, it’s gonna be the grind. This is a grindy-ass game for the kart racer that doesn’t have any rail-grinding in the races.

I praised the Time Trials earlier because they provided a good amount of reward for how much time and effort I was putting into it. That doesn’t last. Once you’ve unlocked a number of soundtracks, the amount of races you have to win to unlock another increases from 3 to 6. And by god, ’3’ felt like a real sweet spot that made the legitimately-grindy time I was having somewhat bearable.

There are what’s called “Friendships” in the game. You might be wondering why you’re only hearing about that in this review now and not earlier, and it’s because it’s a dogshit part of the game.

In “Friendships,” you unload a fuck-ton of Donpa Tickets (that’s the in-game currency, which I’m also only bringing up now for the same reason as before) onto a given character and you are rewarded with a character-specific unlock! This includes titles, decals, and even skins! Sounds great, right? Right?

Each character gets at least one (1) skin, and it’s of a stupid-ass “AI” coloring where they’re this mono-colored robot who makes dumb robot noises. The game makes you spend an accumulative 3,000 tickets to unlock that, for the privilege of spending another 7,000 tickets to unlock another title - if there’s actually anything beyond that, I will be sure to congratulate the first gamer to notify me on their decades of virginity.

If you complete a race at first place, in single-player or in a friend lobby, you get 15 tickets. If you complete a race at first place in world match, or while assisting your friend in Race Park, you get 25 tickets. Just to put into perspective how much 7,000 tickets is.

Right, I haven’t gone over Race Park yet. There is some fun to be had in race park, the little spins on the usual racing format can legitimately be fun - to the point where I honestly wished Mario Kart had similar! I wish that were the whole story, I wish this game could’ve just taken the win and left it at that, but there are a number of caveats.

First of which is that you can’t actually go online and do a set of 4 (or more) races to determine if you or your friend(s) won the overall set, like in Mario Kart 8 and World - instead, you’re limited to playing together in single races only.

This is kind of a huge oversight! Cluster and I have had so much fun over the years playing Mario Kart and selecting a series of courses to see who can win overall, it makes no sense not to include that in this day and age.

Speaking of selecting courses, that’s pointlessly weird and bad in online Race Park too. You can either have a course randomly selected, or the host can pick a course unilaterally, or you can put it to a vote… between three randomly-selected courses.

Neither the newly-released Mario Kart World nor the decade-old Mario Kart 8 had this problem. In those games, all players have the ability to pick from *any* course in a friend lobby. It just feels like such an avoidable pitfall.

There’s one more caveat to Race Park that I have yet to cover, except I kinda have because it’s once again one of the biggest recurring issues of the game.

It’s the grind.

Race Park is seemingly *the* place to grind for Donpa Tickets, where every 3 races you win against a team of AI-skinned dipshits you get a set amount of Donpa Tickets. This reward, after you’ve gotten all the good rewards (vehicle unlocks) out of the mode, starts at 25 tickets per 3 races. If you clear all 24 races against your AI rivals at this stage, you’re rewarded with another set that gives you *30* tickets per 3 races.

After those 24 races are won, Race Park takes it up a notch and starts giving you 35 tickets per 3 races. But if you go crazy (just absolutely fucking nuts) and clear THOSE 24 races, Race Park goes to a whole other level and starts giving you 40 tickets per 3 races.

It increments by 5, every 24 races. 24 races is a lot of races. Eventually, this becomes the most efficient way to grind Donpa Tickets. After you’ve sunk 144 races into the damn thing, you’re at 50 Donpa Tickets per 3 races - which is, notably, where it frankly should’ve been from the beginning.

As of writing, I don’t know if it caps out. I know that it at least goes up to 70, but who knows! Maybe in another 144 races, shit’ll get fucking real! (EDIT: After 240 races, the Donpa Ticket reward caps out at 70.)

Now you might be wondering, what if I don’t care about Friendships? A likely scenario if you’re playing a Sonic game. What is the incentive for grinding these tickets out? Well, the game actually has challenges you can clear throughout itself!

My partner actually cleared all but a few of them, in not that much time! The last 3 challenges they have left, after which point they’ll have essentially completed the game, requires you to have grinded out a total of 23,800 Donpa Tickets.

It’s at this point I feel it’s worth pointing out that, if a game lets you clear everything as quickly as they cleared it, you’re going to feel incentivized to finish up that last bit. You’re at 99% completion, why not push for that last 1%?

And it’s because of that my partner told me they honestly felt tricked by the game - it was pretty smooth-sailing up to this point, and now they’ve hit a wall that they’re asked to just grind through. It’s honestly pretty obnoxious!

There’s a few other issues the game has, on top of its general grindiness. What little writing there is in the game is mildly-amusing at best and legitimately grating at its worst. I really don’t think this was a game that called for Ian Flynn, and it unfortunately mostly just brought out his worst traits as a writer into the script.

The marketing is saturated with talk of how you can race on land, air, and sea. Racing on land is the game’s strongest point, with air a distant second as it just can’t help but feel sluggish and boring - with the sky littered with boost rings to try and make you feel some semblance of speed.

Sea racing is the worst, however, and it really didn’t even need to be. For some reason, in a game that launched after a Mario Kart that did not have this issue, they decided that you can’t drift while racing on water. You can drift in the air, which makes zero sense, but while you’re at sea you can only charge up a jump.

Mario Kart lets you do both, and much better.

I kind of wish we were just racing on land in the game, though. I know people liked Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, and I remember liking it too, but the different modes of racing don’t feel at all cohesive in this game. It’s like they stapled two dogshit racing games onto a solid racing game and there’s no option where you can just play the racing game that’s actually good.

I should talk about the items. Some of them are much worse than others, on a level even the Spiny/Blue Shell of Mario Kart cannot compete with - the worst of which, Cluster and I have determined, is the stupid fucking slime item that’s a combination of Mario Kart’s lightning and blooper items.

Now, you may be wondering to yourself, who was asking for a combination of the lightning and blooper items? Couldn’t they have just had them be separate like in Mario Kart?

Yes, they could’ve. By the way, I didn’t mention, you have to rotate the analog stick (that you’re currently steering with) in circles in order to make sure the slime (that is also slowing you down) is wiped away.

There are a lot of times in a racing game like this where we get frustrated. The shuriken that cuts your car in half? Frustrating. The weight that flattens you? Frustrating. The dark chao who replaces your items (which is fine) but that the game warns you about as if it COULD be a weight that flattens you? Frustrating!

None of them compare to this stupid, annoying slime. None of them so consistently elicit “oh come the fuck on” from my partner and I as we play the game. There’s no time I feel less positive about Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds than when I’m rotating my stupid analog stick to wipe the stupid slime off my stupid fucking car.

You can defend against it, at least, if you have the right defensive items. Otherwise, the game would be un-fucking-playable.

Speaking of items, there’s the hitstun problem this game made for itself. Getting hit in the game sucks more than the worst race of Mario Kart you’ve ever had, and I think the blame can be pinned on the gadget system - which features one gadget, that takes up 3 slots, that shortens the hitstun to where it’s actually reasonable.

Now, why do that? Why not just make the hitstun normal and let the player have room for other gadgets?

A little story time for y’all: Once upon a time there was a game called Sonic and the Secret Rings. It was a pretty bad video game that controlled pretty badly, but over the course of the game it let you unlock abilities that let you improve the bad controls it gives you.

It rewards you by making itself suck less.

That, for some reason, seems to have been a point of inspiration for the gadget system in this game. There are numerous problems you’re going to have in every single race because of how the game is built, and you can remove a limited number of them by giving yourself the right gadget loadout. I myself have a default loadout that shortens the hitstun and makes sure the game isn’t taking away my items damn near every time I get hit.

This fixes a lot of the game’s pain points, but it does not fix the issue where I lose a ridiculous amount of speed if I even barely graze the edge of the rough on a track. There is nothing to resolve this (unless perhaps there’s a gadget locked to ranked mode that I haven’t gotten), you just have to make your turns as perfectly as possible.

It all comes back to another overarching issue of the game where it demands excellence from the player on a level that Mario Kart does not. This has tricked several gamers into thinking it’s better than Mario Kart, but the only thing it amounts to is it’s more punishing and critical of the player than Mario Kart.

In point of fact, it’s a little hard for me to accept the game being so punishing to me and demanding such perfection of me when it just isn’t perfect itself. The frustration this game builds in the player only serves to draw attention to the numerous problems it has, how imperfect it is, which does the game zero favors.

One other issue the game has is the fact they’re still insisting on these full-size cars for the majority of the vehicles. Mario Kart strikes a really good balance of fun vehicle design while still giving you a good view of the character, and it has for decades, so you’d think it might be worth it for Sonic to take notes. Apart from when you pick an Extreme Gear to race on, you get to mostly just look at the back of your racer’s head and a lot of their car.

It’s not just an aesthetic issue, either! These cars are big, bulky, and they slam into each other a lot! Now, if the collision of the game were like Mario Kart, that wouldn’t be such an issue… but it’s so bad. Every time I collide with racers in the game, it’s so fucking bad.

There are modes in Race Park where you’re incentivized to bump into each other, they even play a little positive sound effect each time you do it, but it never fully feels good. On top of that, there’s several times where if you bump someone at the wrong time you’ll send them careening off into the abyss because someone decided bumping in the air should launch players horizontally across the track!

It’s such a galling issue that, like many issues the game has, feels like it shouldn’t be such a problem when Mario Kart already solved it.

Then there’s the music. The soundtrack has its ups & downs, I think compositionally it can be a little repetitive, but the new additions from this game are mostly not that bad. With one very big exception.

Hold on, I need to look up the title of the song - a thing I never had to do for Endless Possibilities, Knight of the Wind, or Reach for the Stars. Okay, the title of this game’s main theme is “Cross the Worlds.” God, what a stupid fucking name for the worst Sonic song ever.

This is the main theme of the game and it is bad. Like, unbelievably bad. Compositionally it manages to be mostly-inoffensive, but lyrically? Vocally? Jesus fucking christ. How did we get from Open Your Heart to this?

The vocals in the main theme are an embarrassment. There doesn’t seem to be any range in which the vocalist can sound good, he doesn’t rap well either, and the lyrics… I need to get into the lyrics.

“Set your goals, steal their souls.” This is a line in a Sonic song. You don’t steal any souls in the game, but it rhymed with “goals” so what the hell.

There’s other godawful lines in the song, many of which are rooted in clumsy references to the gameplay that don’t resemble the game. “With any luck, you might become a monster truck” is a pointlessly-stupid observation (your car is the thing that becomes a monster truck, for one) but it’s right at home in a song that seems to have been written by someone who hasn’t seen or played the game.

Which, before anyone defends this garbage, wouldn’t have been an issue to begin with if they made a song like Green Light Ride that didn’t require game info.

Honestly when I first heard it I didn’t think much of it, but I am missing Green Light Ride fucking badly in this game. It has aged like fine fucking wine, especially after hearing what they’ve had without Crush 40 - both in vocals and in lyrical substance. Speaking of, where IS Crush 40?

The game does feature the work of Jun Senoue at various points, especially in the unlockable soundtracks! You can find countless songs from throughout the history of Sonic the Hedgehog in the game, but as of writing there’s one thing you definitely won’t find - the vocals of Johnny Gioeli.

This may make a disappointing amount of sense for anyone who heard the news of Johnny Gioeli suing SEGA for using Live & Learn without his permission even though, unlike Open Your Heart, it’s his song.

Instead of being reasonable and having any sense of decency after everything Gioeli’s done for them and Sonic, SEGA fought him in court and made damn sure he didn’t get the settlement he openly hoped they could have to put all this behind them and continue their otherwise positive working relationship.

So, even though it’s one of the most iconic songs in all of Sonic and it’s incredibly important to Shadow, there’s no Live & Learn. They didn’t wanna pay for it, because fucking Live & Learn isn’t worth it to them, fine. But there isn’t *any* Crush 40 in the game, as of writing.

No Open Your Heart, no Sonic Heroes, no What I’m Made Of, no I Am… All of Me, no All Hail Shadow, no Knight of the Wind, no Green Light Ride.

Now, before any fanboys chime in to defend SEGA just so they can have a 100% uncomplicated time enjoying the game, there is no version of this that is “respecting Johnny’s wishes.” He was asking for compensation and respect for his ownership of Live & Learn, not to be erased from Sonic.

They’re snubbing Johnny Gioeli - the defining vocalist of Sonic the Hedgehog. They’re snubbing him while they’re putting brands like Alienware into the game as stickers you can put onto your car, in case I guess you personally believe whichever character you’re playing as has zero self-respect.

SEGA is snubbing Gioeli while having brand crossover after brand crossover, getting in bed with the likes of Microsoft and Paramount as Steve from Minecraft and SpongeBob SquarePants join the game, and I just can’t help but be fucking disgusted. It’s not just greed, it’s contempt for what made Sonic what it is.

There’s two different branches of DLC this game is going to receive, free SEGA characters and paid non-SEGA characters, and seemingly neither of them are going to be adding new Sonic characters. Instead, SEGA seems to be chasing after all the money they can make from outside Sonic’s audience. For Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.

It just doesn’t sit right with me that SEGA seems to believe the path to making this Sonic Racing game a success is mutually-exclusive from a path that would increase the amount of Sonic that is in it, and I don’t like the lessons it could take away from what success it may achieve. That they can’t “win” with just Sonic.

Maybe they’re right.

Maybe there was just no way for them to make enough money to justify developing this game if it was just Sonic, even after having a successful film trilogy. Maybe Sonic just isn’t good enough for a successful racing game, to “beat” Mario Kart. God knows I’ve had multiple Sonic fans come up to me to say that to my face, in *defense* of the game.

I don’t know. I just think that’s fucking bullshit.

I love Sonic. I’ve loved Sonic for years, and for many of those years I loved Sonic even more than I loved Mario. I would’ve loved this game so much more if, instead of putting its fingers in every non-Sonic pie it can, it was a celebration of Sonic on par with Mario Kart World’s celebration of Mario.

Mario Kart World’s soundtrack is brimming with remixes of beloved Mario songs, the main characters of the game are given these wonderful outfits they can put on that are a delight for someone who’s loved them for years, and it all takes place in a cohesive world that encapsulates damn near everything Mario’s done over the past 40 years.

I wish Sonic had that. I wish I could race as Tikal the Echidna, driving from Sky Sanctuary to the Death Egg, before stopping to take a photo with Cluster where I maybe pose her to where it looks like she’s kissing Amy Rose. Maybe even while a fun remix of the Hero Chao Garden music is playing.

But that’s not the game we got.

It’s still a pretty solid game. It has some glaring issues, but I’m having fun. I hope that, after reading my review, you can go into the game with reasonable expectations. It isn’t a perfect game, for a “Mario Kart killer” it could barely kill Mario Kart Wii at most, but it’s pretty good.