Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Review - Motion Minus Poetry
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds opens with an utter blast of energy. Bright colours fizzle across the screen as drums set a racing beat beneath a swift tapdance of guitar cords that leads right into a vivid, fast paced opening video. This is modern Sonic – slender character models that nonetheless look a bit like they were formed from rounded balloons; the inked angles that existed briefly during the initial transition to 3D long since left to dust – for both better and worse. It’s about speed and chaos, attitude, decent melodies, and really, really bad lyrics.
Seriously, what the heck is up with that? Why is this a thing with Sonic now? Granted, the vocal songs from the original Sonic Adventure were hardly poetry, but at no point did they feel like they were straining to compensate for the lack of an instruction manual. The opening song here literally explains picking up golden rings, before going on to whip out multiple refrains of the actual words ‘sonic racing’.
Sonic raaaciiiiiiiiiiiing!
In this case, I suppose, you could argue that it’s a throwback to the original 3D Sonic racing game – Sonic R on the Sega Saturn –, which is still in GoaT contention for having passable enough music with absolutely terrible lyrics forced over it. Heck, the ultimate song from that game briefly blasts over the race in one of the later courses in this one: everybody’s super-sonic raciiiing!
If this feels unfairly hyper-specific, it probably is. But it is also worth noting that the brief audible homage to Sonic R is one of scant crumbs of acknowledgement of the first (and many would still argue finest) decade of Sonic games that is present in CrossWorlds. Another is in reference to the Sonic CD opening song*, the lyrics to which (Toot-toot, sonic warrior!) are so beguiling as to actually be oddly infectious in their own way. The only visual fanfare that I spotted (and to be fair, in the chaos of the races, it is wholly possible that I missed a thing or two) were screens projecting Green Hill Zone from Sonic’s original Mega Drive outing around the first course.
This first course is hardly themed around that zone, mind, but this doesn’t matter in itself. It kicks the whole experience off with festive fireworks and uptempo music that sets, what is, a pretty excellent tone for a game like this to begin on. It is worth noting, though, that no single course has a core inspiration that predates Sonic Adventure 2. That first decade, man, severed and tossed away like a gangrenous limb.
This is, again, for better and for worse, modern Sonic through and through; better elements from the past be damned.
The most important bit of history, though, is that these Sonic quasi-cart racers have always been pretty good. The first, and especially the second, were actually very good. The team racing gimmick from the third didn’t stick the landing quite so well, but even it was a decent enough game.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds very much has a gimmick of its own, and if there were some doubts during the initial reveal videos, there should be notably fewer after several hours of play. As much as it sounds like some word-salad from a game name generator, CrossWorlds is very much a reference to a gimmick that goes hard, and that works well enough that it may deserve thinking of as a proper feature: each track will literally cross into another world for a spell.
It works exactly as advertised. At the end of the first lap, whoever is in first place is confronted with two portals, leading to two potential different places (one often being a randomised); once the choice has been made, everyone’s second lap is set to this new stretch of track before returning to the original (often in an altered state) for the third.
Not only does this work exactly as stated, it really does work a treat. CrossWorlds thrives on chaos, and having a track that was at one point a highway at night, suddenly turning prehistoric and forcing racers to dodge around a T. rex only adds to this in arguably the best way possible. The total track count at launch is a respectable 24, with an additional 15 different zones for these moments of teleportation. Of course, doing some winning in the standard grand prix will eventually net regular tracks being thrown into the teleportation bag as well.
Take a drink, because I kind of want to state again that this game absolutely thrives on chaos. Because it absolutely bloody does, to the point where possibly the only reason why Chaos this isn’t the post-hyphen title is because it’s already spoken for. Looking at things wide and long term, this is absolutely a boon for the game: you want your cart races to be raucous, party-friendly, fast-paced affairs where it feels like anything could happen at any given moment and nobody has full control. That said, this does create a short gauntlet with regard to getting there.
Frankly, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds can be straight-up mean.
Playing late one night, I felt the frustration bubbling up. It was a familiar infuriation; feeling unfairly picked on is a Mario Kart staple, one that inevitably rubs off on all of its clones. In the name of micro-scale science, though, I opened my phone’s notepad app and kept a very simple record over the following ten races: if I lost either first place or a lead over my direct rival on the absolute final stretch of the final lap, I marked it with an X. Anything else, win or lose, was an O.
The results? XXXOXOOOOX.
Fifty Percent. Fifty. Fucking. Percent. That is a frankly absurd rate for a game (never mind one that will end up being played by a lot of grade schoolers) to just absolutely grief the player. Sure as shit, the five circles didn’t represent counterweight fairytale finishes of my own.
You may have noticed a slight wrinkle in the conditions I set for the note-taking, that being that I didn’t have to lose first place, specifically, so long as a specific rival got in front. For the most part, this is CrossWorlds’ somewhat cleverly acknowledging something that happens in the genre anyway (another character in any given tournament almost always being better than the rest of the pack), and putting a picture frame around it. You will always be given a rival, who has a default difficulty level that can be raised and lowered, who will almost certainly finish podium for each race of a tournament. It’s a neat little trick, and the lure of playing as Super Sonic is dangled as bait to encourage players to take on the full core cast. Strangely, tough, once I decided to bump the difficulty up, I honestly found no meaningful difference in the challenge.
What made me finally grow brave enough to do this? Probably Sonic Racing: CrossWorld’s most enjoyable, and likely unbalanced, feature: gadget plates. Effectively, various buffs can be assigned to a plate and then selected for any given race. Multiple loadouts can be prepped, and slots – and eventually more things to slot into them – are unlocked with playtime. These perks do things such as slightly increase a stat (speed, handling, etc), improving the likelihood of drawing certain items, or even shortening the recovery time from taking hits.
As you might imagine, I somewhat favour sets using that last one.
Frustrating as it might be for CrossWorlds to rubber-band everything to shit early on, things like these plates, to say nothing of basic experience and mechanical familiarity, do gradually salve the frustration. It’s just a shame that things can feel so unfair out of the gate, because the carts do, if nothing else, feel generally fantastic to control.
Sure, even simple tricks like air flips, and the way that the drift works a little differently on landing, sea and air take a bit of learning. To say nothing of which item does what. But the immediacy of the racing? Pretty much spot on. There’s a good variety to the courses, too, be you familiar with the games that birthed them or not, with split paths and sneaky shortcuts aplenty. Rings (which, when collected, gradually up your maximum possible speed), items and boost pads are sprinkled liberally. The end result? Absolute chaos, the type of which would likely be perfect for a pizza night.
This is only elevated by frequent visual fizz and spectacle; CrossWorlds can, at times, visually betray its cross-generational building blocks with moments of rough geometry and some shockingly blurry textures, but it is seldom anything other than stimulating to look at, and it whips by at a steady clip. At least on PS5 Pro. Mileage here may vary with other versions.
With so much stimulation on screen during actual races, if you want to really learn the tracks, you’ll probably have to practice, the option for which is mercifully clearly selectable within a series of menus that lead to an assortment of modes. Most of these are simple team races with an added gimmick (such as collecting the most rings) that gift bonuses, but they still offer some variety, and it’s not like there’s anything like a shortage of content.
Never mind that more is coming. Some of it is appropriately Sega-focused (considering how uncharismatic some of the wider Sonic cast is, including the likes of NiGHTS, Joker, and Ichiban, is hugely welcome); other bits smell a bit of promotional crossover deals. But, hey, there’s a very real chance that any SpongeBob or Minecraft content could still be excellent.
If nothing else, the ground here is fertile. There’s a great cart racer at the core of it all, in some ways overstuffed and unashamed, but one that is nonetheless making an earnest effort that makes it difficult not to love its silly little heart. Current-day Sonic sickos will lap it up, and so long as they can be convinced to give it a few laps, there’s every chance that plenty of people who aren’t will gleefully drink from its cup, too.
* Or, if you want to get, you know, real about it: Green Hill Zone from the Master System version of Sonic 2
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds was reviewed on a PS5 Pro with a code kindly supplied by the publisher.
