Sonic Racing CrossWorlds Coming Sep. 25, 2025

It's so fucking funny once you hit the final lap everyone goes on agressive ape shit mode.

 

What might be interesting is if items had "use it or lose it" time limits attached to them. The more powerful the item, the shorter the window.

Monster Trucks are probably intended to help players at the very back of the pack catch up. Instead of giving them out by place, give them out by distance behind first, or the next player, and then only make it available for, like, 4 seconds.

Once you get Monster Truck, use it in the next 4 seconds, or it's gone.

Weaker items could be available for more time, even up to a whole minute (which is a millenia in a kart racer like this).

Keeps people from hanging onto everything until the end game and spreads the chaos more evenly across the match.

 

This footage is fantastic! It exactly shows what I've been arguing in my video script.

Whist I've got other examples, this is the first one from multiple perspectives.

 

So last night I booted up my copies of All-Stars Racing, Transformed, and Team Sonic Racing. Played a bunch of races with different characters, while occasionally switching back to CrossWorlds, and I think I finally understand why I'm not enjoying this game as much.

The entire game is reliant on drifting as a mechanic to turn. In all three past games, I was able to complete laps around tracks without touching the drift button once. Occasionally I would have to take my foot off the gas, but overall the game allowed someone who isn't familiar with the Kart Racing genre to jump in and complete some races.

CrossWorlds on the other hand, you can't even make it around the first corner of most tracks without drifting. I even went out of my way to max out my handling, and it still feels like I'm fighting the controls just to make a corner. This lack of steering compounds when you are coming out of a drift at an off angle. Unable to correct in the ways I am used to, I usually crash into a wall or fling off the course.

I also hate what they did to the trick system. Just the fact it's on the Left Stick without any activator button. Even All-Star Racing had you press drift in order to activate a trick. But even then it feels soulless not having a failure condition for mistimed tricks.

While I see people complaining about the Drill and Monster Trick items, I'm more confused at the lack of consistency. Grabbing a few items from original All-Star, combining them with TSR's Wisps, and adding in a bunch of non-Sonic related junk feels odd. I was down with the concepts of Wisps in the previous game, but items like the Slicer, Slime, and Weights feels like a lazy 90's Nickelodeon nostalgia bait. Meanwhile I feel items like Omochao, Dark Chao, and especially King Boom Boo are the weirdest conceptual stretches I've seen in a hot minute. I don't know what I would have wanted, but I'm more shocked nothing from Transformed seems to have been borrowed.

I find the gear part upgrade system to be overly complicated for this type of game. It's already hard enough when playing 4-player Mario Kart to get casuals to select their Wheel/Kart/Glider combo without taking forever. And now you want to give them even more options? This feels like a set-it and forget-it type of thing for me... Unless there is such a mission or challenge mode that encourages me to switch things up.

Talking courses.... I gotta say it. I HATE the CrossWorld idea. It removes any uniqueness from each course, and instead cutting 2/5 of that play time and giving it to another, randomly selected course. I selected Metal Harbor, I WANT METAL HARBOR. I don't want to divert to Kraken Bay with its awful boat drifting jump BS. And it is the fact that its random that really does it for me. I would LOVE for there to be a Career or Mission mode that has pre-determined CrossWorlds. Then I can go through in a curated order, and get an even mixing of courses. DID YOU KNOW? I only had two races during the entire Beta Test where I went to Sky Road! I was shocked when I first loaded into it because I figured I had experienced all the content by the time I hit B+. I just hope that whatever Time Trial mode there is, it let's us race the standard courses without the Cross Worlds. Inversely, I want there to be a course that is just all the CrossWorlds lined up one after another in a giant loop.

Lastly, does anyone know what was up with the Kart selection when selecting characters? There was the 5 Karts I made, then them again with a wrench icon saying "Create" or something similar, but I never figured out what the game wanted me to do. Also was annoyed I couldn't delete a car when I accidently made a 5th car.

I feel like I won't be picking this up at launch, and instead waiting a year or so for a drop in price, a nice sale, or ideally both.

 

Goodness that final lap was a sight to behold ahaha, so many monster trucks./ You yourself even got a truck into a drill into another truck! The items are so nuts from the looks of things haha

 

I will say, Sky Road was super disappointing compared to the Team Sonic Racing version. Trying to do all the things that got you crazy air and all the tricks you can pretty much always throws you out of bounds even though you can 100% make it back on the course.

 

There has to be some item distribution buff on the last lap or something because it gets nuts. I know the special capsule pops up in lap 3, but there's no way every 12 racers is hitting that and hoarding it. And it's not like everyone is holding on to their God items to bust out on the final section either because the combat is still going non-stop.

I wonder how many people are using the 3 items mod.

 

Been a hot minute, hello, I'm an adult now!

Can't wait to see Sage doing flips

 

Yeah, exactly. That's the only thing that got me into the the upper ranks. And then at the last minute, all hell breaks loose. It's fun, but it's also way too much.

 

Setting aside complaints about items and chaos (I haven't played the beta), the core gimmick of CrossWorlds is completely unappealing to me. But it has reminded me that I never finshed Transformed, so I should get on that.

 

I don't think I really clicked with Transformed, didn't seem as fun as Mario Kart

 

I'm not sure how I feel about the Crossworld gimmick, I think it was fun to randomly go headfirst into a new track and it keeps you from getting too complacent in tracks that you're already good at, but then the novelty kind of wears off quickly. Would be cool if elements from the crossworld you went to in lap 2 made their way into the main course in lap 3 but I don't know if that's even realistically possible without fundamentally changing the game lol.

Also they're sending out the survey now, I just did it. It's a few multiple choice questions and then they ask you to elaborate on why you made those choices. You can't go back and change your answer once you fill out a certain area so think carefully!

 

I'm surprisingly disappointed with the music. Everything sounds like a downgrade when compared to either Team Sonic Racing or Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed.

 

To anyone with criticism about the Music, Renders, or Gameplay of CrossWorlds I would HEAVILY recommend that you look into doing the emailed survey before March 5th. If you want any improvements, THIS IS THE BEST OPTION TO GET THEM

 

I love the Crossworld gimmick personally, but it has a major drawback that I mentioned in the survey. The Crossworlds are tiny. Obviously they've got to find some way of balancing the Crossworlds across different maps from the the early and later levels, but I just feel like they don't get a chance to breathe. You can really get a feel for it in the ones inspired by tracks from previous games. Sky Road was one of my favourite tracks in TSR, which is split into different sections. These inside include a quick jaunt through the city and being launched into the sky, the eponymous sky road itself, a vertical descent where the track forks and weaves around itself and a final stretch down on the ground where you go through the dungeons of the city. In Crossworlds, all you have is the road in the sky portion with a brief bit of flying beforehand.

My survey feedback talked a lot about course length, lacklustre music, sound effect and UI overload and disappointing implementation of boats and planes. I forgot to mention the lack of penalty for failing tricks though. And obviously I really hammered down the point of item item balance.

Positives were stable performance, character selection, drifting, visuals and overall fun factor.

 

I'm going to stress the item balance and audio mixing. Realistically thats the most they are going to do before launch.

 

Yeah... I can't see them doing much of anything in regards to track lengths and layouts. I actually think that the track layouts themselves are fantastic. Very dense, very fast and very engaging. Most importantly perhaps is that despite all the visual clutter, the tracks themselves never become confusing. They've been designed very well. I just wish that they leasted longer. They're too short.

 

In the likes section, I put that I liked the music

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I used up a majority of my dislike comments in regards to Item Balance though.

 

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Fool! You've doomed us all.

Although I criticised the music, specifically my that the soundtrack was bland compared to most Sonic games and that I disliked the choir voices, I also pointed out the over-use of sound effects that completely drown-out he BGM in the races themselves. Like item re-balancing, that's another thing that's easily a realistic fix, unlike lengthening tracks and overhauling the soundtrack.

 

this is the best sell for me than literally anything else I've seen of the game so far