Sonic Racing CrossWorlds Coming Sep. 25, 2025

I find it impossible to put any distance between people, it's like a 3 lap melee and winning is more luck than judgement. you can try and drift the racing lines, but you get slapped about by other cars and items. and at the end you have an explosion of items in the last 3rd of lap 3, and whoever get's out of it first, wins.

i've won a couple of games, I've still not come dead last, but overall i struggle to come out of the lap 3 melee any higher than 4th

 

You hold down the drift button to charge jumps, and then you can do tricks as you've just gone off a ramp. Not the best mechanic, imo. The boating sections are all too short to take advantage of the manual jumps, and the slightly longer ones in Water Palace are littered with ramps anyway.

You can feel that the game isn't done yet. They're figuring things out.

 

Oh... once you hit rank B.

Unless you finish top 3.

Your rank drops.

 

I don't know if that's the result of some network shenanigans. I've had situations where I hit the guy in front of me with 3 different items, all with visual confirmations that they got hit, and they never stopped or slowed down. Same shit happens to me? I'm falling down several spots. It's not like they were using some Godly build either. They had a standard looking car.

I think what I hate the most is that the defensive items don't actually defend shit. I've yet to find anything to counter getting cut in half that isn't holding on to a Monster Truck.

 

We stan growth

Anyway, I've been skim reading through the thread, seen takes over on Bluesky and taking a look at all of the stages in action, trying to find gameplay from people who evidently know what they're doing (Sonic Overtime's gameplay is good for this). Takes seem to be all over the map and it's not hard to see why. Judging purely from footage, the game seems much faster than anything previously under the Racing banner (both Sonic and All-Stars), which I think is a good thing. Transformed did have a tendency to drag on at times so upping the tempo seems like the right call. Items definitely look too chaotic, both in potency and frequency. This is very vibes based but in all the gameplay I watched, players were taking lots of hits and I just don't think that's a fun time. The game looks cheap in some places but very good in others (for example, compare the character portraits and Chao crowds to the visuals of the tracks themselves), but the sound design is pretty egregious in both sound effects and music. I think the best way I can describe the music based on my viewing is it sounds like it's being played underwater (though they are goated for bringing Super Sonic Racing back into the Ocean View music). There really doesn't seem to be much impact from any of the instruments and as has been alluded to, the sound design is very overbearing and repetitive, especially given the frequency with which you're doing tricks.

Something that really struck me in Sonic Overtime's gameplay (I think their first E-Stadium race) was the handling of transitions. On the second lap, they threw a bomb wisp through the travel ring from (if I recall correctly) Kraken Bay into the third lap of E-Stadium, and that thing just rolled through no problem, with complete continuity - it's a little hard to describe so I recommend seeking out the footage, but I figure that's something that must be a little tricky to pull off well, so I'm impressed it's here rather than items just being swallowed during the warp, even if it would be rightly expected for items to have that kind of permanence. Another thing that struck me in a less pleasing way is a very niche thing, that being that Eggman's "How dare you!" line just didn't sound like him at all, and more like a staffer providing a scratch voice. Maybe this is just a quirk of the audio not being too clear and it is a very small thing but it was really jarring when it happened.

Ultimately, I think it's fair to say the game is lacking polish in some key areas, but I'm also not worried. First of all, this is a test. Second, SEGA has already committed themselves to the provision of some DLC - as I've said before, they recognise that TSR really suffered for its lack of post-launch support and I think a lot of what we're seeing with CrossWorlds is a very conscious effort to correct that. These two factors combined give me confidence that feedback on this game will be taken very seriously and that we'll see dedicated balance patches in addition to DLC. I think Blue Blood(?) is correct that they're still figuring things out but what that primarily means to me is they'll be open to substantially overhauling stuff that doesn't work, pretty much anything that isn't presentation related I expect (so I don't think the soundtrack will be replaced, no voice line changes and probably no major graphical adjustments, but god I hope they swap out those character portraits for something more modern and cohesive - let Tyson Hesse contribute a set of promotional artwork for god's sake). There's also no date hard locked for this game so SEGA absolutely has leeway to push this right back to the end of 2025 if they were initially planning on releasing before then.

Ultimately I just hope this game is given time to cook and the support it needs to really take root once out. Seems like this test is a real mixed back, but that's why such things exist, no?

EDIT: Also GOD they do actually have sidemouths in the game but THEY'RE ALWAYS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE CHARACTER RELATIVE TO THE CAMERA, DAMNIT SONIC TEAM

 

Has anyone gotten interactions between characters mid-race? As Cream, I hit Shadow with something and there was actual dialogue between the two, Cream going like "Yeah! I managed to hit you, Shadow!" and Shadow replying with "Well done, Cream." which was adorable

 

Very disappointed that Pollock is still eggman in this game. I hope he gets replaced next game

 

His terrible character aside I also think he hasn't done a great job lately. He's not great in Crossworlds but then no one seems to be. Even Colleen's Tails sounds off. Rogers better than he was in Frontiers but that's hardly an achievement.

 

I played a few races and mostly had fun, but it's been years since I played Transformed or even TSR so I have no real frame of reference for how those played. I just stuck with Sonic and didn't use any other characters but I noticed Cream was a surprisingly popular choice, which is cool considering she was absent from TSR. Metal Harbour is definitely a fan favourite track because whenever it shows up it always wins the voting, which is annoying when you want to play another track! Rainbow Gardens is pretty fun and aesthetically very nice, I kind of want to explore it on foot. Maybe it'll show up in the next open-zone Sonic game. I like how E-Stadium is essentially Green Hill Zone without actually being Green Hill Zone.

it's safe to say that Shadow continues to be popular as hell lol


I won't lie, I think @Laura is right that there's an undeniable feeling of cheapness to this game though. The broken animations are a little disappointing to see and the animation that plays when you respawn after falling off track is kinda crappy too. Feels like a step backwards from Shadow Gens' overall polish but I'm hoping it'll all be fixed before release.

The switch from Hedgehog Engine to Unreal Engine feels very visible to me. One thing HE was great at was lighting and global illumination which is why I noticed this game's less than stellar lighting in certain areas. It's especially noticeable in the Water Palace track if you look at the back of Sonic's spikes or the white Wisp's eye. Sonic has this glossy look to him it reminds me of Heroes. I'm so used to modern Sonic Team games having good lighting that this took me by surprise lol. Again, hopefully it'll be spruced up before launch.


Overall, it's pretty fun but definitely rough around the edges. I think I might enjoy this game more with items turned off. Will be interesting to see how the finished build improves on this.

also, shoutout to this NPC who is frozen solid

 

>Galaxy Force comes up in the Crossroads Rotation
>It only gets picked if I'm leading
>Monster Truck cucks me everytime

​

 

That is Studiopolis' decision whenever we like it or not.

 

depending on how far ahead the release is, it's not unheard of to have takes re-done before release - a thing that has happened with Sonic before (literally all of Knuckles' lines being redone before Sonic Adventure came out). some games even re-do takes as part of updates (FFXIV does this).

also, if the music and sound effects are really loud, that will really affect how voice lines will sound in-game.

 

While the point about retakes does stand, it is worth noting that the voicework for this game is probably a lot older than...at least the most recent bout of Mike being terrible online.

 

Yeah material rendering is very subpar almost like there’s no PBR at all or at least isn’t being used on characters to match their look in the HE games. Seems like they focused on capturing the look of Sumo’s last game rather than elevating it like updating some dated aspects of it like character and vehicle lighting. Really hate how garish the metallic paint looks here and in TSR.

 

Despite the games many faults. I've grown ro be quite fond of it. Good lesson in not making knee jerk reactions to initial play thoughts.

 

I had similar sentiments when I first tried SRB2 Kart, but I learned to get over it and accept it's unique differences and master it.

I know a common complaint is the short length of the tracks, but honestly I'm enjoying that so far. The game has a ton of turns and jumps, and the changes to the boat and plane segments require a lot of quick inputs to get the best out of those segments. The APM is a hell of a lot higher than the Sumo games. Chaotic on the track and chaotic on my pad.

 

While I can't play the game myself since I have literally every platform besides the one It's on, I'm not sure if I'm a huge fan of the sound design in all of the footage I've seen. The driving sfx, especially for the drift, are very light and cartoony, which I gotta say I'm not a huge fan of compared to the heavier, more impactful sounds the sumo games had.

The game is also very loud in general, watching races it just seems like the voices, sfx, and music are all competing for my attention at once rather than being balanced like sonic team's usual audio engineering. Is this less of an issue when you're actually playing? Its been super distracting for me watching streams of the game and such so I'm worried about that aspect.

 

Just like Sonic Colours Ultimate? This must be an oversight for that engine, maybe.

 

SCU and this are running on different engines. SCU was a modified godot, this is UE. They aren't using a different audio engine either, this games using CriWare, just like their HE2 games.

 

I'm just saying the sound mixing is flawed as if multiple channels play the same sound effect all at once. Just my theory.