Hands on Sonic Racing CrossWorlds – Now we’re racing with portals!

There was a time where many would have pointed to Sonic being the best kart racer around. With a pair of games in the early 2010s, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed had great circuits, a fun and eye-catching vehicle transformation system, and a huge roster drawn from more than just the Sonic universe. Those vehicle transformations are making a comeback in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and it’s easy to argue that Sonic’s erstwhile rival Mario actually cribbed from his homework, with Mario Kart now also having transforming vehicles and a quirkier line up of characters.

But where Mario’s just gone open world, Sonic’s now going inter-dimensional, or maybe intergalactic?

This is the big hook for CrossWorlds. The karting will feel pretty immediately familiar, slotting right into the genre staple elements and tropes, while the tracks will bounce back and forth between driving on roads, powering across water, and flying through the air, but everything changes after the first lap. At that point, the race leader is able to choose between two portals, deciding which CrossWorlds stage you’ll be teleported to for the second of the three laps. Through a four race championship, the final round will be one lap each of the first three race tracks, teleporting you between them instantly.

It’s an interesting idea, and the CrossWorlds are a potential wildcard that the leader can use to play to their own strengths, though when there’s 24 tracks and 15 CrossWorlds stages, they could quickly become the part of the game you know best, especially if players online start to gravitate towards a particular one or two.

This also puts another bit of pressure on for the light collectathon angle. Each track has got five red stars to collect, in amongst the long strings of rings, of course. It’s a bit like collecting letters or other pickups in a platformer, except that you’re also trying to win the race, and you really only have the first and third laps in order to grab them.

There’s a bunch of other intriguing twists to the kart racing formula from Team Sonic. It starts at, well, at the start of the race, where the way you get a boost is much more like a sim racing game’s need to get the revs just right. That kind of approach can also be seen when drifting, where a drift bar fills up repeatedly to very clearly demonstrate how much of a boost you’ll get when you come out of it.

If those a shade of more realistic racers, then the air tricking is right out of the arcade extreme sports playbook. As you’re going through the air on a big jump, you can flick and flip your car around pulling over-the-top tricks to build up a boost… but make sure not to hit the ground again while tricking or all that effort will go to waste. This combined with the handling in general, not to mention that clear blue sky Sega aesthetic, really does make Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feel like a classic arcade racer.

But you wouldn’t get something like the Gadget Plate at the arcades. You simply wouldn’t have time to make use of this degree of customisation before you run out of coins to feed the machine!

Dished out by the mustachio’d cat in a hover car, Dondon Pa, Gadget Plates let you equip a whole bunch of car-modifying Gadgets. A plate has got two rows of three slots which you can fill up how you see fit, with gadgets taking up a number of slots and then modifying everything from the vehicle speed and acceleration, to letting you carry three items, doubling boost, increasing the chances of particular item types, and making certain items more powerful.

If you expect to win on skill and speed, the vehicle mods would be the order of the day with a bump to defensive item odds, but someone that likes to race in the thick of it would get much more out of boosting attack item chances, a giant rocket punch mode, and a quicker recovery. You can set up multiple gadget loadouts and switch out the plates between races as well, which will let you switch up some of how you race.

There’s some neat ideas in Sonic Racing CrossWorlds that bring a real arcade feel to the genre in a way that maybe only Sonic could.