Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review — Rolling around at the Speed of Sound

When I previewed Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds at Summer Game Fest this year, I had such a blast that it led me to awarding the SEGA team one of our Best of Summer Game Fest awards. (Place Preview Here). My expectations were set pretty high and CrossWorlds hit every benchmark so far, with DLC already announced and more on the way. This racer has everything; great level designs and gameplay, fun collectibles, insanely good music, and lots of customization options. Can Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds compete with other racing games on the market? Let’s talk about CrossWorlds at SONIC SPEED!

The level designs are so much fun with some levels being very iconic in the Sonic-sphere, while some will be fun and new for all fans. These levels have multiple branching paths in the levels themselves, but the best part of CrossWorlds’ gameplay is the CrossWorlds aspect itself. In the Grand Prix, when you finish lap one, the player in first place will get a choice between two courses. Usually it’s a course you can see and a Mystery Course. When selected, a Ring will open up and teleport all players to the new location, then players return to the original map for lap three. 

The Grand Prix is made up of three levels like the ones I mentioned, plus a final race that includes one lap from each of the last three maps back to back, but without the collectibles aspect and an extra three points to the winner of the race. I absolutely love this setup for various reasons, but the main one is that the first three races can sometimes feel random because of the chaos of the sheer amount of items, collectibles, and more. Meanwhile, this final race feels like it’s more about pure skill of driving since everyone’s focus is fully set on winning, not the side aspects. 

What are the “side aspects” I’m talking about? Collectibles. Each race has five Red Rings that you need to find throughout the race. These will be found on laps one and three. They can sometimes be difficult to find and that’s what makes them fun. You’re moving so fast through these maps that you can try and get a red ring and end up flying off the map entirely, or hit a wall. Plenty of times I missed a red ring AND didn’t place first. Getting all five Red Rings will provide you with tickets you can use for all sorts of things in the main menus or to redo a course that you messed up during a Grand Prix. While I’m not someone to use my in-game currency to redo a match, I can see it being fairly useful for people with limited time during a gameplay session or just someone who knows that if they do the map again now, they can win. These collectibles add a bit of flair to the Grand Prix that’s reminiscent of the Silver Coin challenges from Diddy Kong Racing on the Nintendo 64 (which happens to be my favorite Kart-Racer of all time). 

Rivals are also a new and fun aspect of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. Rivals are chosen at the beginning of a Grand Prix with two choices, a normal rival and a more difficult rival. Beating these rivals will provide you with in-game currency bonuses, but more importantly, an icon saying how many times you’ve defeated that character as a rival. The fun comes in during the races themselves, as the rival character will have voice lines goading you along or getting upset when you pass them. These moments make the end of races even more exciting in the same way beating the Podracer Sebulba felt even sweeter in Star Wars: Podracer if you played as Anakin Skywalker. 

Some characters are a tad more mean than others. For instance, I spent most of my time playing as my favorite character in the Sonic-Verse, Tails, and my second favorite character, Shadow. If you’re Tails and your rival is Shadow, he will actually make fun of Tails being Sonic’s side-kick. If you’re Tails and your rival is Sonic, Amy, Knuckles, etc; they’ll be more playful with their banter and it’s a lot less of a stress. These rivals make Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds even more fun and keep me playing, especially if I lose and they make fun of me.

Driving the carts themselves feels fast on every difficulty past the easiest. Drifting will be your friend in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds as some of these turns and areas can come at you very quickly. You have to be on your toes as you also don’t see a lot of the track in front of you at any time, and tracks reshape themselves quite frequently. Your cart can turn into a boat and plane allowing for variance in maneuvering. While the boat setting can be a little frustrating at times, the plane feels very easy to move around the sky and provides a lot of great moments, especially when flying next to the fire dragons in some of the middle stages across worlds. 

Difficulty can get very hard, very fast. I would recommend all younger players to start on the easiest difficulty and work their way up. Those of you who are more experienced with racing games could start on the second easiest, but the speed and intelligence of the AI players gets hard FAST. I would say I’m pretty good at racing games and I struggled at times even on the “High Speed” setting (the second easiest setting). Meanwhile, “Sonic Speed,” the middle difficulty out of five, were some of the hardest moments when I was just getting started. By about six hours in, it was doable. New players beware, though. 

Race Park's the second mode that opens up and is interesting and full of different ways to play. The game suggests you play with other players, and they're right, it makes the mode a lot of fun teaming up with your friends. You’ll start by getting a rival group to go against. You and your team will need to beat them in three tracks of any type.

There are several game types including Triple Team Tap Boosts where hitting your teammates will speed you up. Extreme Match where all items are on Extreme Mode causing all sorts of chaos with monster trucks, super boosts, and more. Double Team Shoot-Out which is a battle-type mode, as three more modes. As I mentioned, you can win at any three to beat your rivals and score their vehicle. As you continue, the teams will get harder and the cars will get more impressive. The couch co-op worked great for me and my partner, with no lag or graphical problems seen during play sessions.

I ran into just a few bugs here and there, like Charmy T-Posing in the character select screen (which has since been fixed before launch) and my cart getting stuck in a wall momentarily before glitching back out. These are easy fixes that I would expect to get sorted out quickly either day of release or soon after. Otherwise, the game runs smoothly on the PlayStation 5 with extremely short load times.

The music is everything a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog could want. One of my favorite moments going through the maps for the first time was speeding my way into the Ocean View map from multiple Sonic the Hedgehog games. You’ll hear that iconic music playing in the background and be teleported to the past. Meanwhile, all of the music feels “iconically Sonic” - fast-paced, rock-heavy, and it doesn’t get old due to the massive variance in music throughout the game itself.

Customization in racing games SHOULD be a staple. You should be able to customize colors, aspects of the vehicles themselves, and create themes. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has a great customization selection with each vehicle type having a cart meant for you to customize. I crafted a speed-based vehicle that worked well with Tails and after that, never really went back to a pre-made cart again. However, not every cart will work with every character. Tails is an acceleration character, so a cart built for him doesn’t work as well with a speed character like Sonic or a handling character like Amy. 

Much like characters, carts also have types for you to mix and match. You can choose from speed, acceleration, handling, boost, and power. As previously discussed, you can customize to change things here and there, but for the most part, speed carts are fast, power carts are slow; power carts knock people around, and much more. 

You can also paint your cart to match any character you want, and can add decals such as Sonic eyes at the front of the cart like I did. 

The gadget cards are a fun way to snag some bonuses and make carts work with your type of gameplay. I like to go fast and leave my rivals in the dust, so I have a bonus that gives me rings anytime I use a speed boost from the course. There was an item I don’t have in my game yet but loved it in the preview; the ability allowed you to get a boost from bumping into other players. I loved using this early in races and just slam into other players to move to the front. Each gadget card can be customized and will grow as you do to add more abilities. 

We have already gotten announcements for DLC for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. During Summer Game Fest’s main event, we saw the showcase of Hatsune Miku, Joker from Persona 5, and Ichiban Kasuga from Like A Dragon racing their way to CrossWorlds with a Minecraft crossover being announced at the end. Shortly after, we got the announcement of a crossover with Spongebob Squarepants being added to the list! Each of these are already in the Character Select screen with a label over their head saying when their expected arrival will be throughout the next few months. 

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds does a great job of separating itself from other cart racers while staying true to the pure chaos and speed that is Sonic the Hedgehog. If you’re looking for a challenge, plenty of collectibles, interesting stages, and your favorite Sonic the Hedgehog characters (and the DLC non-Sonic characters), Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds will be right down your racetrack!