It's funny you mentioned grind rails because Dash 2 and Forces Speed Battle both have grind rails, but despite Dash continuing to add new features weirdly grind rails were never added, not even to the new set pieces. I wonder why.
Lost my Dash progress to a fuckup with Google Play Games. To me it's just useless as hell to go on. My progress involved having both Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, who will never return to the game, and both had an exclusive overpowered power pellet item, and an absolutely insane high score that I probably spent nearly a half hour on. Similar case for Sonic Dash 2 and with that I was even more upset because I prefer it. The worst part is I have the actual save file but it won't let me use it because it thinks I'm a different person. Rail grinding doesn't really add anything to Dash's formula. In fact it only really takes away another method of having an obstacle. In Speed Battle it's fine because it offers speed in exchange for the ability to dodge other's traps. You'd have to do something like a single player Speed Battle with pre-built levels to make it make any sense.
Bumping and double posting because I'm like 6 months late on the worst news imaginable (not really I just didn't know the depth of the matter until now) but Sonic Dash has swapped over to using a "Cards" system, similar to Speed Battle's. The marketing for the update boasted about how you could unlock characters "faster than ever", but the reality is this update is all about making money and hindering progress on that front. The way it works: Instead of having chests that you win and unlock like Speed Battle, the individual cards themselves are something you can find on the track and earn. Sounds fine enough, right? Well, instead of the cards just unlocking characters and disappearing once you have all you need, like the old Tokens format, not unlike Speed Battle you need to have more cards to be able to spend your rings on upgrading the characters. And if you don't have cards, you can't actually upgrade characters. Some don't spawn on the track at all, and they're all tied to an artificial rarity system. The only other thing this effects is the real-world price of whatever amount of cards is required to unlock the character, which for an Epic character like the current-running Infinite, is $19.99. An absolutely ridiculous price. The final similarity this system has to Speed Battle is the fact that you can't obtain any more cards after a certain amount of plays, like how Speed Battle will stop giving you victory chests. Which is for sure a downside because of their limited events creating just that extra bit of artificial scarcity. I only need 3 cards for Infinite and I can't just run one more game until I have them. I have to wait until what the game considers to be "tomorrow". Also, I hope you didn't want to upgrade all your super-exclusive event characters like the Angry Birds, Sanrio, Pac Man, Movie, Danimals or LEGO, because you can't do that. My bitching will do nothing but I just felt like I needed to make people aware of how they further ruined the game instead of just making Sonic Dash 3 and leaving it alone.
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T UPGRADE EPIC RED ANYMORE That is busted what the actual fuck. Was there any QA???
Technically speaking, it's the intended effect. If they release a limited time event like that then you won't be able to upgrade them beyond what you could get when they made them available. (Which is scummy, but the idea isn't exactly to make a fair game) It's just a huge bombshell to anyone who might have been hoarding those characters and has auto updates or something enabled. I guess this is just a fair warning for those that haven't played in a very long time and might decide Surge is really the reason to start playing again. Also note that Andronic seems to have been given the same treatment even though he was given to all Android players anyways. The reason this doesn't count is for the reason Sonic Dash+ doesn't count, because they're kind of the same game in practice, aside from the few differences, from what I understand of both.
Sasuga, Hardlight. I'm so fucking over SEGA's mobile efforts at this point. They're so flush with insipid greed and predatory practices.
