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With Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds on the horizon I thought it was time to replay its predecessors to give myself some perspective on the series before playing Sonic's next fun racer.
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (2010, PS3)
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing was co-developed for arcades and consoles by the UK based game factory Sumo Digital. The game is a fun racer similar to Mario Kart: you can charge drifts to gain boosts and sabotage your opponents with various items. In contrast to its inspiration however stands its arcade origin; CPU controlled characters are quite strong on the standard difficulty and the courses feature many tight corners and unwalled sections. Compared to today's fun racers this game is incredibly basic and void of gimmicks: There's only a small selection of basic items that cannot be stocked up, there are no flight or zero gravity sections and each lap is the same. The most gimmicky track feature are vertical loops as we know them from Sonic's games. Since item usage is somewhat restricted this one is way less chaotic than most console fun racers and let's you focus on the actual racing part much more. Unique to this entry into the series is a very talkative commentator, a feature I haven't seen in any other kart racing game, that adds a unique vibe to this game on top.
As basic as the game is in its mechanics, it's surprisinigly rich in content. It offers over 20 courses based on various Sega franchises covering more than 7 distinct themes. Almost as many playable characters featuring not only Sonic and his friends and foes but, also various heroes from Sega's arcade and Dreamcast franchises. There's a set of music tracks to choose from for every course too.
Overall this is still one of my favorite fun racers even today. It may feel a bit basic and isn't very friendly to casuals and newcomers, but I really enjoy its demanding course layouts that leave little room for sloppy play.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed (2012, Wii U)
It may sound unbelievable today, but the sequel to Sonic's first modern fun racer came out only two years later. It goes full Diddy Kong Racing, introducing water physics and flying sections to the game. Some courses now change their layouts as you progress into later laps, more fun items have been added, there's more characters to choose from and the course selection was diversified by adding courses from various other Sega franchises. Courses now only feature one track of background music each, but some of them are absolutely exceptional (thinking of the After Burner and Panzer Dragoon stages). The commentator talks a lot less in this game, which I don't mind. But it's too bad he'll be gone in the "sequel".
Objectively this one is just a fantastic game. Personally however I'm not a huge fan of the long flying sections and of courses changing their layouts across laps, which both diverge a tad too far from the traditional racing gameplay, but still enjoy this game a lot. It's a real shame this gem has its best version stuck on a dead console (the Wii U) and that Sega never released an updated port on the PS4. With CrossWorlds around the corner there is also no hope for a remake or remaster any time soon, unfortunately.
Team Sonic Racing (2019, PS4)
Considering how good Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is there was no reason to assume they would deliver another improvement with the follow-up. Unfortunately Team Sonic Racing managed to disappoint even with low expectations for Team Sonic Racing. As the title suggests Sega ditched the Sega All-Stars theme of the series, so all those fun Sega characters are gone, as well all related courses that gave the previous games their excellent variety. The character roster shrunk down from over 20 characters to a meager 15. Courses now only feature four or five distinct themes, of which not one stands out much because of a generally mediocre art direction. The mission mode that has been a staple of the series now comes with a story... that's not worth reading at all and only wastes your time until you realize you can just skip it entirely (granted, I don't think that's a problem at all because these games don't require story modes anyways). Also people claim that the online mode at the time of release was completely broken and I have no idea if that was ever patched. Not even the gameplay seemed to save this game, because I found it unbearably slow — as if playing Mario Kart at 50cc — and thus incredibly boring to play. Playing in a team with two friends also didn't help to make this game more engaging. This one really seemed to be unredeemable.
Until just recently when I checked it out again and had that funny thought that went like Maybe increasing the difficulty will increase the game's speed?. Well, it turns out that it does, so now I found the game actually fun to play on both hard and expert difficulty, in both team and single modes. The courses are for the most part actually well designed and the music is really good too. There's a customization feature that's even better than that of Mario Kart 8 (shame you can't save more than one custom setup per character, though). But unfortunately playing on the higher difficulties doesn't magically add variety to the roster, nor the course selection, doesn't improve the overall course visuals and definitely doesn't fix the issues related to online play. With all said, this game is still just fine at best. Even if the game is more fun and engaging on hard mode and higher, because to be honest it also gets quite uncontrollable when slingshots and team ultimates are performed at higher speeds.
I guess Team Sonic Racing was a complete miscalculation on part of Sonic Team and Sumo Digital. According to Wikipedia both previous Sonic & (Sega) All-Star Racing releases sold around 1 million copies each (Transformed roughly 30% more) mostly to an audience that didn't mind the arcade inspired difficulty of these games. Meanwhile Team Sonic Racing sold itself more than 3 million times, reaching an overall much more casual audience. They weren't prepared for the demands to the online servers and probably changed the difficulty naming last minute. At the very least I can imagine there having been a time during development when hard was just normal mode.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (2025, PS5)
After initially demo playing it at gamescom I also played the open network test and offline demo for a couple of hours. I'm leaving most of my thoughts for later since I'm getting the full release, but so far I'm expecting at least an overall improvement over Team Sonic Racing. If nothing else I generally liked what I played and am looking forward to getting to play the full version soon.
Now to close this off, a personal remark: What happened to my boy Metal Sonic? He had by far the coolest machine in All-Stars Racing 1 & 2, then they gave him a generic car in TSR and now he's only getting a recolor based on parts from Sonic's and Shadow's cars? Did the Sonic mandate dictate he can't be cooler than Sonic? What's up with that?