Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds: The First Preview

Let's get the comparisons out of the way first; Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feels closer to the Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed era of games as opposed to the more recent Team Sonic Racing, but has taken advantage of the enhancements that Team Sonic Racing brought to the table. While I've enjoyed both formats, the three-character mechanic of building a team to work together to coordinate racing and drift lines is gone. Instead, CrossWorlds goes back to Mario Kart’s everyone-for-themselves format. Like Mario Kart, it shares some similarities, from the items on the courses to the various shortcuts and cart customization. However, while it shares some DNA, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds evolves beyond what we've gotten from its now 11-year-old competitor. Now, one area that CrossWorlds may come up short in compared to Team Sonic Racing is so far, there is no sign of an adventure mode, but this was an early look, so that might be one of the many reveals that the team is saving for later.

While many elements mimic its competitors, the green and red rocket-powered gloves bounce off walls or home in on opponents, being the most one-to-one example to the shells in Mario Kart and the customizable car parts and wheels like we got in MK8. There is still enough here to help CrossWorlds stand apart from the crowd, though. Plenty of the elements core to Sonic games, such as the various wisp powerups like drill and tornado ability, knock other racers away and defend you from incoming attacks. There were also magnets you could throw out as hazards, which pull enemies towards them if they get too close, and their ultimate rubber band item to help those in lower positions catch up, the Monster Truck, which turns your car into a massive monster truck that knocks enemies away and allows you to drive over all terrains without penalty.

Beyond the items Sonic Racing CrossWorlds is all about – well, crossing worlds, with each race separated into the traditional three laps. Still, each lap feels different, thanks to the marquee CrossWorlds mechanic. At the end of the first lap, whoever is leading the pack will determine which course the second lap will take by driving through one of two giant travel rings that transport everyone seamlessly once they arrive at that point. The options for these are randomized, and sometimes, one of the options itself is a randomizer, so not even the leader will know what to expect if they choose it.

During my demo time, my second lap took me across stages themed with things like dinosaurs, pirates, or lava, where we spent most of the lap in a plane, another mechanic that I will get to later. There are also modifiers for the second stage, called frenzy, that will alter the lap, such as placing moving boost gates along the entire lap or granting a maximum boost gauge after drifting for only a split second and making the whole lap feel like I was back in the days of the snaking that plagued and ruined Mario Kart DS. Thankfully, frenzy modifiers are random, and across my 15 or so races, the instant boost frenzy only happened once – so I'm not worried at all about it becoming an issue in CrossWorlds.

After finishing the second lap, another transport ring seamlessly sends players back to the original course, but with some minor but effective changes to the course layout in key areas. Courses like Metal Harbor evolve, where you have to drive around the outside of a rocket launchpad on lap one, but on lap three, the rocket has launched as it did in Sonic Adventure 2, replacing it with a steep Half-pipe ramp that allows players to perform as many air tricks as possible to gain a considerable speed boost when landing on the opposite side. And that's just one example! In another course with water segments, I saw gates open, allowing access to shortcuts or supercharged item boxes with a higher chance of granting better items. CrossWorlds is also hiding shortcuts around the map as well as shortcut rings that activate on the final lap tha would temporarily send me to another world. These secret rings are powerful shortcuts as they extended my lead in races or helped me catch up and made it more challenging for other racers to target me with their items. I don't know what forces were causing these rings to appear as I raced, but they were worth the effort of being ready to take them.

Like the Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed games, portions of laps, or sometimes entire laps, place you in a plane or boat instead of a car. All of these vehicles have a unique identity, and while they share similarities, they have mechanics to help them stand out from one another. In addition to the standard drift mechanic you get in a car when transformed into a boat, you have a charge mechanic that jumps it out of the water, giving another opportunity to perform air tricks for speed boosts, which can help you regain some speed after hitting a hazard or being tagged by an enemy's attack. While planes offer more routes than the other vehicles, they do so only if you spot the alternate paths, like a chain of boost gates underneath the road on Magma Planet where you need to dodge waves of magma to maximize the planes advantage. The variety of vehicles and paths gave me nostalgic notes of figuring out the best routes based on the vehicle I was in like I did in Diddy Kong Racing from my Nintendo 64 days but with all the updates to the formula you would hope for in a game released nearly two decades later.

While I was playing, I spotted some incredible inclusions spanning multiple generations that longtime fans of Sonic will be excited about. The roster of characters shown so far ranged from the expected heroes and regular all-stars Sonic, Tails, & Knuckles to less frequently playable characters like Cream, Omega, and even Zazz from Lost World. The rider you put behind the wheel also has unique stats that will affect how they drive each car, and even rivals like Sonic and Shadow have similar yet different stats, such as one having more speed while the other having more power or boost. Vehicles fall into five classes: speed, acceleration, handling, power, and boost, all of which have high stats in the matching category with the looks to match it, and I could quickly feel the change in my car as I swapped between them.

When racing in my power vehicle, which I had customized to look like a bulldozer, I felt thematically appropriate as I bullied other racers all while stealing their rings and giving myself a speed boost thanks to some gadgets I had installed, which I will also get to in a bit. Characters and types of cars have the most significant impact on your vehicle's stats, which you can then modify by changing individual car parts like the wheels, and more. I picked my favorite Shadow and raced in four of the five vehicle types, all of which worked well enough to where I finished in first place for 75% of my races and top five in all of the rest except for one (where a well-timed item hit me and caused me to miss a ramp and fall off the map in the final stretch of a race). Along with changing out parts for stats, you can also deck out your car with decals and change the colors and materials to your heart's content. Combining your character with car customization allows you to make your vehicle your own.

The last bit of customization comes from another mechanic called the gadget panel. It’s a powerful tool for changing how people race, granting abilities like an increased chance of getting certain items, adding a fourth level to the drift boost gauge, or granting you rings for performing specific actions. Every ability costs anywhere from one to three slots, and your panel to install them consists of two rows of three for a maximum of six slots. I started with only two slots, but after a few hours of racing, I increased this to five, giving me more options to slot in new abilities that changed how I approached races. Early on, I had opted for an ability that allowed me to grab rings from a greater range, which took up a single slot, but later on, I swapped to a pair of two-slot abilities that would give me a boost when colliding with others racers while also stealing 10 rings from them to help me reach my top speed sooner and also slowing my competition. Fortunately for my competitors and unfortunately for me, they caught on to my antics thanks to the ability to see other racers' builds before a race, and shortly after implementing that strategy, nearly everyone else copied it, plunging our races into chaos like a 12-player game of bumper cars. Needless to say, this was a ton of fun as we all kept trying to ram into each other to get out in front of the pack.

Even though it was just a short test drive with my favorite hedgehogs and friends, I am eager to see what else hasn't yet been revealed. The racing felt snappy and responsive, and each car customization operated as I expected. I felt like a superstar hitting enemies with the well-timed items I unleashed, and the new CrossWorlds mechanic was a blast, allowing me to learn courses while keeping each race feeling fresh, as I never knew what to expect on the second lap of every race. There’s a lot more left to learn about Sonic’s latest racer, but so far, so good.