Sonic Racing: Crossworlds still don't have their own identity

Sonic Racing: Crossworlds The finish line, scheduled to be launched in September, is approaching the finish line quickly. I had a chance to play a kart racer for the second time and my opinion on the race was barely changed from the verdict during the summer race festival: It gave up on the best aspects of the ex Get closer to Mario Kart. In the second session, I spent more time on the game, had the opportunity to compete on other tracks, and as a competition of Hatsune Miku and Ichiban Kasuga that I hadn't been able to get before.

Crossworlds sees you jump into a kart or hover board and with several others The racer in Sega's voice characters catalog (plus other franchised guests!). Each race on 24 different tracks is three laps, and the second lap takes place after the racer teleports to the travel ring, taking place in a completely different world. As the racers approached the second lap, each jumped to which competitor and which world each jumped to, two options were randomly given from the total pool of the other 15 worlds.

It's an interesting head, best seen in Grand Prix mode, which is the focus of the SGF preview and my latest hands-on. In this mode, you will earn many points based on your position, which add up at the end of a series of matches to determine the final winner. Each Grand Prix is ​​four races, the fourth and final race was played in three previous tracks – the first lap is the track that starts with the first race, the second lap in the second race, and so on.

As in the case of SGF, I squeezed my computer-controlled competitors on the hardest available difficulty (there is a more difficult difficulty, but not available in either preview). The joy of winning is hard to enjoy the game without trying. I still believe that the challenge will come when there is a chance to play against other humans, but before that, Crossworlds felt lacking compared to what it was before.

Game borrowing mechanisms and functions Sonic Racing Team and Sound riderbut lacks team-oriented relay races, or the latter's fuel management and character abilities. These aspects make Sonic Racing and Sonic riders very different from Mario Kart to make them more identity and make them more challenging – it makes sense to win in those races, and I remember hours of playing (especially riders) and want to push myself to be better. I haven't gotten that feeling from Crossworlds yet.

Like all other characters, Hatsune and Ichiban have their own statistics that influence the details of the game – with some tweaks to how each kart is handled in the race. This must be small, though, as I didn't notice any obvious difference between them, and there was any change in my time compared to SGF's Jet The Hawk and Amy Rose. Replacing the plate load of the kart is a more obvious adjustment. I tinkered around with the kart plate system–which allows you to create several established loadouts to change how your kart behaves–a little more this time around, creating plates that let me start off with the monster truck transformation so I could run over everyone from the very start, or draft off others more easily and overtake the competition by stealing their rings, or spin like an unstoppable top while drifting to bash other racers and build extra speed boost.

The plates were fun to build, and I hope they had a bigger impact on my performance to encourage me to spend more time tinkering in the store. But I won with them and I really don't have to adjust my strategy to play with either of them. I still need to collect the rings to build speed, pick up items to mess with opponents, avoid other racers’ items, and drift around the corner. Like everything else, customization doesn't help distinguish CrossWorlds from its competitors – it hasn't had this experience so far, like it's entirely CrossWorlds.

I still wish I just missed something. I usually like sound games that focus on racing, so this game that doesn't connect with me feels like I'm lying to myself. I'm sure that once I'm sitting on the couch with my closest friend and we screamed at each other's cloaks we managed to achieve, that moment I recognize what makes Crossworlds unique. But until that moment, I chose to be cautious about it.

Sonic Racing Crossworlds is launching on September 25 for the Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and Switch. The game will release Switch 2 during the holiday season 2025.