Sonic Racing CrossWorlds Coming Sep. 25, 2025

https://x.com/izumi_bell/status/1890034526325445104

We know the artist behind the vehicles of this game - I gotta say, it does alot "cuter" than previously, doesn't it?

 

I never said they should be put in, just that they exist.

 

I'll say they should be put in. Skating around as Shadow using the Darkness is the closest Riders comes to being an R sequel.

 

The base game roster has 23 characters, which includes everyone from Sonic Heroes, the Babylon Rogues, Silver, Blaze, Zavok, Zazz, Eggman, Metal Sonic, and Sage.

That makes 22 characters—unless Egg Pawn counts as a separate character (which it didn’t in TSR)? Otherwise, there’s still one more we don’t know about, unless I missed someone. Not sure why they would hide just one character though.

 

I think Egg Pawn being playable is most likely the case.

 

Our first full-footage of a race

You're going to want to skip 0:12 - 0:43

This might be the fastest turn around for a Sonic game's PR since...Shadow Gens at least.

 

Wow, I didn't notice before, but those background chao are distractingly 2D and low-framerate.

 

I noticed that parts of the track that aren't the part you drive on or are expected to look at are somewhat lower-quality but I easily assume that's a consession they make to 1) make the game look pretty where it matters, 2) make the crossworld mechanic more seamless and 3) make this run on the Switch.

 

Didn't even know they were making this, just shows you how out of the loop I am these days. Not sure if I'll pick it up any time soon as it is a multi player game, maybe one day if it ends up on a sale.

All I'll say is that I would hope that it doesn't have the same online issues as Team Sonic Racing, as that really had soured the game, no wonder most stuck with playing All Stars Racing Transformed.

 

I'm pretty sure they've been using those 2D Chao since one of the Olympics games?

 

Dude this is a Sonic game, it'll go on sale as soon as you blink, we aren't Nintendo's eternal price tags here

 

Yes you are correct but it depends on the sale price for me. Sometimes it can take a few sales before I bother, such as when I picked up Origins. It really depends on my interest as I have more than enough games on a backlog to deal with, a few things that I want to replay after putting them on an eternal back burner, and there's still some games in the series that I still need to do a proper playthrough, such as Colours for the Wii, or even the 360 version of Unleashed (I had the PS2 version back in the day, did try the 360 version a few years ago but the QTEs in the flying level had put me off, long before I did more QTE focused games such as Yakuza or Shenmue).

 

Hey has anyone thought about how we're gonna need new actors for Wave and Storm since their former actors left the voice cast ages ago for this series.

 

Hey, I brought up skates in this thread not long ago

And yes, they are cooler, which is why they won't be added as nobody would then pick cars.

 

Man this game looks so pretty (other than the afforementioned spectator Chao). Now if only there were an outlet capable of uploading footage with a bitrate that doesn't absolutely massacre those visuals. Also nice to hear a bit of the music too - it's difficult to make much out thanks to the commentary but you can hear near the end of the video once the commentary is done that at least part of Metal Harbour's theme incorporates Can't Stop, So What?! (the theme that plays in SA2 when Sonic is snowboarding following the rocket launch) - I expect that'll either be part of the lap 3 theme or the entirety of it.

To put a bit of a damper on things, there are two points that bug me: gamewide, the perma-centred mouths bug me - it looks deeply wrong on a smiling Sonic and I really hope this is corrected by launch; specific to Metal Harbour, there really ought to be some humans about the place. I can understand that maybe Dodonpa's workforce is entirely made up of the islanders, but this is a G.U.N. installation so I'd really expect to see some of their staff running around or spectating the race. I do not understand why this series has become so deathly allergic to depicting generic human NPCs the way they do the islanders - best we've got since Unleashed is the G.U.N. pilot in the Shadow Generations DLC...which takes place in the predominantly human movie universe...
Sonic Team/SEGA licensing/whoever has been really good about fixing the headassery of two worlds and split timelines, but they continue to be stubborn on humans existing but almost never being seen, sometimes to the detriment of the setting (such as when Sonic and Blaze visited Spagonia in the comics recently) and it frustrates me that this is the hill they're dying on.

 

It won't be. This is how Sonic has consistently been depicted outside of the main action games for decades now, including TSR. I dunno why, but I guarantee it isn't changing.

 

I was never a fan of the characters jumping out of their karts and doing a ton of stupid shit (minus Akira an Jacky in the original game getting up and doing push ups. That ruled).

I gotta say though, the animations this time are rather nice. They always looked rather poor in the Sumo games. The whole game in general looks like a massive step up in presentation quality. I don't mean just "Graphics=Gooder", it just looks a hell of a lot more polished.

 

I realise you’re almost certainly correct, and it IS weird that this isn’t a branding thing that SEGA would insist on, but alas. At least with the PC version there’ll be the possibility of the modders giving me what I want, and besides all that it’s not a huge upset in a game where you almost never see the mouths.

 

This is the kind of lore-respect that I would never expect from Pre-2024 Sega. Cool to see.

 

Shadow Gens and this game have been back-to-back really reassuring for the future of Sonic games, visually. Especially this one. Stunning environment designs are BACK baby. Also if they're moving to Unreal Engine 5 then they should stay there, because the lighting and colors are so much more vibrant and appealing than anything the past three games were doing in HE2.