Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review: a technicolour racer with ultra-clever ideas

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is a wonderful, bright-eyed racing game that calls back to the classics, while adding in a bounty of features to elevate its more traditional racing style. It’s simple on the surface – you pick a classic Sonic hero or a cameo character (like Hatsune Miku), and head to various race tracks to compete in racing cups. Be the first to the finish line to achieve victory and glory. But the game is much deeper beyond this simplicity, with an array of fresh features spicing up each course.

The main draw here, that differentiates Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds from others in the kart racing genre, is the appearance of Rivals. As you compete in tracks, you are sliding, gliding, and racing against a menagerie of heroes and villains – but you always have one particular character who exists as your measuring stick.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds‘ Rivals are a neat twist

As a cup begins, you’ll be given this Rival – you can select from an array of difficulties – and then, they’ll spend the rest of your races taunting you. If you overtake them, they’ll make a mean comment. If they’re ahead of you, they’ll boast openly. While it should be annoying, the feature actually gives more meaning and pressure to each race. It incentivises blasting forward, timing your weapon attacks well, and taking each corner at full speed, even if it’s out of spite.

There’s just the right level of taunting bits in Rival dialogue to motivate you onwards, making you want to push forward and have your Rival eat your dust. And with an optional mounting difficult, you can work towards facing off with ever-more-powerful Rivals, perfecting your kart movements as a means to best them.

It’s an incredibly clever idea, and one that makes single player matches equally as exciting as those shared online, with real players. It’s an effective way to teach players new skills, bringing out competitive, inspired feelings.

Beyond Rivals, there’s also plenty of other twists to the formula that make Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feel like a standout kart racing experience. Gadgets are a cool addition. As well as being able to collect special abilities in each track, you can also build a custom kart loadout with various latent skills – for example, faster boost. Experimenting with these gadgets lets you shake up each race, and there’s real fun in figuring out which gadgets can be paired for a real advantage.

Course variety and mini-games add longevity

In any kart racing game, longevity eventually becomes a concern. But Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has plenty of neat twists that add to this game’s long-term play. First, the major cups – there’s around a dozen, but each individual track has its own unique variants, as portals can pop up to fling you through space-time, adding new twists in each approach.

There’s also ample variety in the tracks for each cup, with settings like a casino, a pirate ship, an ancient empire, a neon club, and more. Each has its own spaces for drifting, Transformed mechanics that force you into the air or to the sea, and plenty of other quirks to keep you on your toes.

In the game’s dedicated Race Park mode, you’ll also find special variants on these tracks that change up how you play. In one particular variant, you’ll be tied to your teammates and you can boost by hitting them. There’s 4 x 4 x 4 competitive race variants here, as well as a Team Shoot-Out mode where you collect attack abilities only. There’s also a very fun Extreme Match mode, where power-ups are wild, and every leg of your latest race is interrupted by some new weapon or other.

In better news, there’s even more ways to play arriving in the near future, with a raft of crossover characters and new maps announced. With this long-term support, it feels very like Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds could cement its position as a solid new kart racing game, and a real headliner in the scene.

Racing to the future

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feels like a big deal. While the Sonic Racing series has always excelled, it feels like a game that’s learned lessons from the franchise’s past, as well as from other games in the kart racing genre. Cynically, I could point out similarities to the well-established Mario Kart franchise here, but CrossWorlds elevates itself with an array of clever choices, and new design elements that build on what’s come before.

It’s not entirely revolutionary, but with a sleekness in its racing, and plenty of ways to shake up the status quo, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds arrives as a bright, creative new kart racing game, with plenty of charm to make an impact.

_{A PlayStation 5 code for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds was provided by the publisher and played for the purposes of this review.}

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