Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers (Sequel to Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart) officially released!!

Oh lord, Carnival Night is horrendous.

Edit - in fact, make that all of Egg Cup.

 

Yeah, it certainly doesn't get better. Carnival Night and Death Egg feel like they are designed to be anti-fun. Lost Colony would probably be fine if they did away with the elevator thing.

 

Ehh slight spoiler territory but there is one particular companion that had an additional purpose even pre-patch. That companion is + - the Mystic Melody from Sonic Adventure 2   and quite a few unlockable characters have an unlock condition where you use the 'look behind' feature with this companion enabled to unlock them.

A small video showing how to unlock the companion is here, and a list showing what characters you can unlock with the companion is here. Spoilers obviously! The second link also contains some spoilers for some unlockable tracks as well that aren't tied to this companion.

I will say I absolutely love the unlockable system and it gets better the more I play. It's very much akin to Kirby Air Ride but Ring Racer's Purple Boxes (Chao Keys) are much more plentiful and not locked behind any particular challenges, which is a huge upgrade. It means a player no longer has to do a challenge they may or may not struggle with to get a chance to 'skip' another challenge for an unlockable. The infinite quantity also means you won't run into a scenario where you run into a nasty challenge you wanna skip but can't since you used up your chances already. It's not exactly a free pass either since you have to play the game to earn more Chao Keys. It's really smart design overall and a step up from it's inspiration! At least, I assume that was the inspiration here.

A lot of the challenges also encourage track exploration which kinda brings me back to how Diddy Kong Racing had the hidden Keys in Adventure Mode or Mario Kart 64's recreation of Peach's Castle. I enjoy when racing games decorate tracks with stuff like that. Provided it never really gets in the way of confusing the player during a regular run, they provide some additional incentive to revisit tracks again under a new context. A lot of race tracks also look super pretty and it's nice to have an excuse to admire them, especially in this game's case.

Really the only track I've felt is 'eh' so far is Rumble Ridge. The shortcut bounceback makes that one shortcut near the start smack dab in the middle of the track kinda nasty and I'm not a fan of the spikes that smack you shortly after that unless you stop and ride the conveyor belt up. The 'heat wave' effect also feels a bit too intense in my opinion, but I assume there's an option to disable that. Green Hills' 'high ramp' shortcut near the starting line also has me a bit confused, but the rest of that course has grown on me.

I'm up to the Barrier Cup now at this point, but the 2.2 patch is making this a lot more fun to play really and I'll probably see all the tracks out at this point. I really appreciate the work that's gone into this.

 

Man, what the fuck is up with the slipstream mechanics. It feels so unintuitive to release your drift to activate it and I have no idea how to make it extend past first activation. Wouldn't it be better if it worked like drifting in Twinkle Kart/SA2's racing levels?

 

I played a little more in intense and I can not stress enough that giving the AI frantic items is bullshit. The patch notes say "there's a big difference between losing some lap bonus and the whole race" and then the 2nd or 3rd place AI activates invincibility as soon as it taps you at the end of the 3rd lap and smacks you into the stratosphere.

Unrelated, but despite GL Legacy supposedly being broken it's the better option because the game kind of runs like ass in software renderer. I can hit over my Monitor's Refresh rate in GL Legacy mode while the FPS just dies from things like instawhip in software. Probably because with Open GL it actually uses my GPU. To get it to even approach 165 fps in software I have to Vaseline that shit up with a low resolution while I can use the highest with GL. It must murder the CPU pretty bad in Software because I have a Ryzen 5900X.

 

I swapped to the GL Legacy renderer as well and the performance is so much better.

So after playing through all the available cups (I assume there is something after getting all the Super Emeralds) I can safely say the worst piece of track design is the 14th special stage. It's just so bad. The special stage concept has some merit (albeit flawed execution in places) but that last one is just shite.