Sonic Racing CrossWorlds Coming Sep. 25, 2025

Mario Kart's open world might not add much but is super fun and the challenges and missions allow you to practice some of the mechanics of the game (super jump, driving on walls, etc).

 

I guess the question is just whether those things rely on the open world itself. Missions and challenges can be done on closed courses, and at least from the looks of it (again, I haven't played it yet) it doesn't seem that MKW's approach would be all that different if it gave you objectives on separated maps. The only idea I can think of for how to make it involve the open world itself would be challenges and missions that deliberately cross between tracks of the world, and if there are any of those, I haven't seen them.

 

Maybe. World is pretty great so far, even if the open world is a bit contentious it really does have a lot of solid content in it, and the world is extremely well realized.

Depending upon execution I can see Crossworlds maybe having tighter mechanics and being a bit more focused.

 

My expectation is that both games will happily dominate a particular niche (Mario being an open-world kart racer and Sonic being an arcade kart racer) and which one would consider better largely depends on which kind of game they prefer.

 

Crossworlds is definitely the more traditional
Kart racer, even considering all of the new things it brings to the table. It's not going to have the depth of the Mario Kart's new mechanics regarding its wall riding, grinding and the insane new trick system either. In fact, I find it really sad that SRCW removes barrel rolls when flying and drifting when boating whilst MKW adds both (and adds in the charge jump to boot!). Oooof, wrong move SEGA.

All that said, SRCW is so much more focused that MKW. The amount of time that you spend on boring intermission courses in MKW is kind of unforgivable. 24 racers is too chaotic as well. And whilst the new mechanics are insane, the skill ceiling feels dauntingly high. I'm finding that online is stressful more than enjoyable.

The two games ultimately operate in two corners of the same space. Any Mario Kart game will always command a larger audience, no contest. But they can co-exist easily. As long as Crossworlds is decent and SEGA get the word out effectively, it should perform well. It's happened in the past other Kart racers pitted against Mario Kart, including Sonic, and it can happen again. My only concern is the price point. I know it'll get price cuts sooner rather than later, but it still leaves a very bad taste.

 

With all the new tricks, rail grinding, and wall riding systems, Kart World looks more like what an On Foot Sonic racer should have been.

 

Honestly. And frankly I feel like the way the world is set up as an open world, but there’s still meaningful fast-paced level design, would absolutely work for a Sonic game.

 

Can you imagine an open world Sonic game with a trick system, rail grinding, and wall running?

Man. That would be great and also unique.

 

Would definitely be a new frontier for the series for sure.

 

I would argue that the days of 100% banger Sonic OSTs ended when Shadow came out, which is a bland-ass OST with a handful of even remotely memorable songs. 06 and Unleashed was great, Colors had some bangers, and then Lost World and Forces might as well not even exist for me with how forgettable both of those are. I think Frontiers + its expansion OST is among the best of all of the Sonic soundtracks, it's got the orchestral, it's got the electronic, it's got the best vocal rock themes in the entire series. I thought Shadow Gens had some bangers too, but I strongly prefer Ohtani's electronic direction to Senoue's.

here's the thing though, Sonic has always very pointedly stuck with contemporary sounds. Sonic 1 & Sonic 2 are late-80s pop (listen to the og Sweet Dream if you can even find it on YT and you will realize how vintage it is), CD had the New Jack Swing (which is either awesome or comically dated, or both! depending on who you're asking), Sonic 3 had the whole MJ debacle, Sonic R had the eurodance which was popular at that time, Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 outright sampled, or used the same sample packs as, other electronic artists at that time*, and the industrial genre used in Shadow's levels could be heard in movies that came out around that time (The Matrix came out in 99). Sonic 2006 literally came out a year after Pendulum's Hold Your Colour became the biggest drum & bass album ever and just so happened to have multiple drum & bass tracks on it**, which continued with Unleashed and a couple of Colors tracks. Frontiers in particular has a lot of songs that fit at home in the current JP electronic scene (stuff I affectionately call "sound game music"), which also happens to be what the Yakuza team is cooking with their soundtracks.

To be entirely honest I can't even really....grasp.......what 90s Sonic tunes would be like without just going back to New Jack Swing again. Which, I wouldn't be complaining, but the main reason why that genre died in the first place is because all the releases sounded the same. I don't even want to imagine what a Crush 40 grunge track would sound like lol, and modern Sonic tunes already have tracks with breaks in them.

* live and learn intro synth jumpscare
** and of course that absolutely dated remix of Sweet Dreams with A-Kon on it at that time where A-Kon was popular

I can absolutely go without spong and steve, but adding in more sega characters is 100% fine with me. Yes, even though Miku is technically owned by Crypton Future, Sega develops their games lol

this art goes so fucking hard

it is far more standard practice to re-use models between games, or tweak them instead of starting from scratch, especially when the design and art style is staying the same. now...I would absolutely kill for a Sonic game that looked something like the Sonic Adventure art, or barring that, hell, the stuff in the miku art above would be extremely cool to me.


Anyway, $70 is annoying, but extra annoying because I'm not sure how much sauce this game is going to have. MonHun Wilds was $70 and it completely upended the established scope for that series. Mario Kart is likely $70 for that exact same reason. I can't say I've seen anything super groundbreaking in CrossWorlds yet along those lines - even the "quickly swap between different levels" was a selling point for the $60 PS5 Ratchet and Clank game years ago.

But also, god knows how good the netcode of this game is. It's been ages since the beta, does anyone recall how well it ran online? I don't remember hearing of it being a clusterfuck, but, like, in the Smash Bros hype cycle no one really talks about how absolutely dreadful online play is for that game. The lack of a fleshed-out single player mode kind of caps its appeal for me, but that could change if the online play was good.

 

Mario Kart is $80 which is unprecedented and why it's controversial, while 70 is the standard price nowadays, you don't even need to justify it

it was surprisingly smooth especially with how terrible TSR netcode was, fast matchmaking and easy to play, no issues there

on the other hand, there were some unsynching issues, as in , you play a different race than what an opponent do, it's not obvious when you play the game itself, but sometimes when comparing footage between 2 persons of the same race you see the difference, pretty sure it was covered in a video in this thread by badnick mechanic i believe

 

I’m thinking there could be Crossworlds Plus after awhile. That includes all the DLC characters and be at least a little cheaper of course. That’s what I’m hoping for.

$80-90 is too much imo so I don’t mind waiting. I’d get the game regardless because I love Sonic but I personally only really care about the TMNT at the moment as far as the extras go.

There’s supposed to be more characters that are free right? I hope they nclude Ristar. He cameos in the first Allstar Racing.

Edit: I’m reading he was in Transformed. I have it. I don’t remember that. I don’t have the first.

 

I love remembering numbers lol, but yeah, the point I'm trying to make is that people will complain about higher price points but will still end up buying the game (in droves, in the case of MonHun), in no small part because the hype for the game being Super Mega Ultra Huge/Cool/Different outweighs their dislike of the price tag. I don't really see that with this game and I think it will be a higher obstacle to surmount than those games had.

Edit: that said, I don't think this game will be a bomb - the crossovers will definitely get the kids excited I think - but I also wouldn't be surprised if Sega does some Square-Enix-like grousing about how it didn't make All Of The Sales they wanted.

 

https://x.com/CrossWorldsJPN/status/1934400533709942908

500 different interactions.... and 1000 Voice recordings....

 

This does make it very hilarious in hindsight that we had someone a while ago claiming the voice acting was the reason TSR had such a limited roster.

 

So I may have screwed up the maths on this since it’s really not my forte, but picking any two characters out of the base roster of 28 seems like it allows for 378 posssible rival combinations without repetition (I imagine these would be part of the “interactions” number). Not sure where the rest of that 500 is coming from, but it seems the rival system is really going the distance on fan service and I think that’s brilliant.

 

I think there's actually two interactions per combination depending on which one is the player and which one is the CPU Rival. So playing as Sonic and selecting Shadow as your rival would give you a different interaction than playing as Shadow and selecting Sonic as your rival. Multiply 24 base characters (i.e. including Super Sonic, but not including Werehog or the Prime cast) by 23 possible interactions, and you get 552, which lines up with what we've been told.

Assuming that to be true, adding in Werehog, the Primes, and the other Sega reps, that'd mean the number of interactions would increase to 1640. Throw in the season pass characters, and that number balloons to 3080, 5 1/2 times the number of base roster interactions. And suddenly, the absence of DLC interactions starts to make much more sense.

 

Its certain far more effort than I've seen from Sega, and its in a spin off.

This is the type of stuff that gravitated me towards Arc System Works' fighting games, the unique character intros and interactions.

Very pleased to see this series adopt that approach