Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds game came out last year to much fanfare. A Sega competitor to the dominant Mario Kart, much like how Sonic was created, entered the space to give an alternative to what you know and love about Mario Kart. Now the Kart racer space is full of competitors, each trying to compete with Mario Kart in their lane. After getting a chance to play the game’s second DLC season’s content while playing the game for the first time, I have to say this is a different experience and feels perfectly like a Sega and Sonic game from my perspective.
With the game having so many crossover characters in the first year, for Year Two the developer has added some more cool characters and cars, but also some that celebrate the history of Sega itself. For the Shadow the Hedgehog fans, Super Shadow has been added to the roster. Also worth mentioning is the addition of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Rei and Asuka, along with cars based on Eva Units 00, 01, and 02. The cars have a high-end race car feel mashed up with the Eva units, kind of like a superb Hot Wheels collab.
Sonic Racing CrossWorlds also features a big Godzilla collaboration with a stage with the iconic kaiju attacking a city, with the race taking place around the chaos. The game has some fun Godzilla-themed cars and an Extreme Gear (Hoverboard) vehicle for Mothra. The Godzilla car is my favorite, and I think the King Ghidorah car is pretty inspired. The Mothra Extreme Gear (Hoverboard) for me is the most creative one besides Aang’s glider from the first year DLC. There are some great McLaren cars in the game with Sonic in a McLaren racing team suit. Though in all honestly, it’s not really something that gets me excited compared to the other features.
What I was really hyped to see were cars made from Sega’s old consoles. The Sega Genesis one with the classic three-button controller as the front of the car, with the full Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X combiner console in the back, was fantastic. The Japanese Sega Saturn one is great, but the nostalgia bomb was the Dreamcast one with that large controller as the bulk of the car. That’s the one I sought out and played with first after Godzilla. They also showed cars based on old Sega arcade cabinets from the 1980s; those I’d love to drive in the game.
A new game mode called Duel Mode is in year two of the game where you have two characters in a one-on-one race, with the two tied together, with whoever is in the lead taking control of the race. Duel Mode is a mode that can be played with player vs. player or player vs. CPU. I played it mostly against the CPU, and I found it to be a better, more thorough version of a ghost race that also lets you continue on in a fighting game-style format of races versus different rivals. Each character has dialogue for their different rivals as well. Being that I’m not deep in the Sonic lore, it went over my head with some of the characters.
The preview I played showcased Bayonetta, another new character added in year two along with her Extreme Gear. She looks great and plays well, and the mode is cool, as when a person takes the lead, they get to decide which worlds both racers are transported to. I didn’t experience much difference in weapon items between winning and losing. Facing the computer, it just feels like the difficulty can get tougher when you’re winning versus chasing them down.
Overall, I think the new stuff is exciting and got me interested in playing the game more. The game feels more like an arcade racer with Kart racer elements than a standard kart racer we’re used to. For me, the game felt more like playing Outrun than something like Crash Team Racing or Mario Kart. I might give it a go and review it once I give it a sizable amount of hours of play to really see everything there is in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.
