Hello Mobians.
Here's my review of Sonic Racing CrossPromotions.
General gameplay
It's okay.
The controls are a little slippery, and you're unnecessarily punished for cracking into walls. You're already taking a very suboptimal path if you're hitting walls, there's no need to fuck the player twice.
The worst part of the gameplay is knowing where to go. This is a recurring problem in Sonic racers but it's especially bad here due to see below.
The second worst part is the completely unbalanced items. I'm sure Sega rushed this game, they rush every game, but did they just not test these goddamn items?
The paths are way, way too narrow for these huge fucking cars. The only vehicles I like are the boards. They goddamn fit the tracks. They shoulda made Sonic Riders CrossWorlds instead.
Polish
The strongest aspect of the game is the track visuals. There are lots of detailed set pieces slammed all over the place. I like the ice palace and Pumpkin Mansion insofar as theme and decorations.
But this is a doubled-edged sword, as many tracks neglect art and design in the pursuit of gud grafisks. It's hard to tell where the fuck the next part of the track is. At any time the game is either a blur of bland, muted colors, or a seizure lawsuit in vivo. Even Pumpkin Mansion, the best track, is a claustrophobic mess with poor lighting and complex shadow patterns that prevent you from processing the goddamn world around you.
Everything that is not the race gameplay has considerably worse polish than the race gameplay. For instance, if you get a bunch of unlocks all in a row, they're presented to you as awkwardly and sloppily as possible.
The racers themselves are the least good thing about the races. There aren't expressive stunts and animations like recent Mario Karts, because the cars are way too big and the characters are sealed away in them like coffins. Yet another reason to prefer the boards.
Oh, and all the artwork they made for this game is boring. It's just the characters sitting in their cars strewn about a straightway. No interactions, no interesting road layout, no nothing. Awful promo art.
The CrossWorlds gimmick
This adds absolutely nothing to this game and may actually be a detriment.
In some games like Mario Kart yes I'm required to make that comparison, some tracks have a story; the course changes from one lap to the next, however mildly. But in CrossWorlds, Lap 2 is in a secondary track. There would only be a two-stage story, and you'd be even more disoriented than you are already in this psychodelic clusterfuck of a game. So they didn't do that, and Lap 3 is no different from Lap 1, so far as I can tell.
The secondary tracks themselves are generally underwhelming compared to most primary tracks (other than the really shitty ones), and the primary tracks don't have as many or as interesting routes to take as they might if they were one looping course that didn't need to interpolate worlds together.
There's no purpose or appeal to the guest characters except as part of Sega's solution to "save Sonic" by selling out and turning him into Fortnite. Like yeah, cool, this is the last meaningful appearance we'll ever get of Mega Man I guess, from one dead series to another.
The effect for moving through a rift, and especially seeing another racer exit one such as in Pumpkin Mansion, looks really bad.
Rivals interactions
Nothing else about this game makes me straight-up angry. Disappointed? Confused? I just start laughing? Sure. These dogshit rivals interactions make me unreasonably furious. They're the super form of shit if it used the Shit Emeralds. They have no right to exist.
The writing for these interactions is the worst writing the main Sonic games have ever had and I am not fucking exaggerating. At least the Meta era had fucking stories. The vast majority are memes and callbacks, and the remainder are pretentious, or out of pocket, or just plain cringe. Professionals didn't write these lines. The guy who did the Morbius trailer wrote this shit.
The animations are also unacceptably sloppy, with characters often finishing a line and then continuing to stand there and gesticulate for several seconds like it's Sonic '06.
It's understandable that DLC characters don't have lines. It's not so understandable that base cast rivals still say something, only to be met with awkward silence.
It is disgusting that everyone is spamming these shitty rivals interactions all over social media and not one of these fucking morons notices how unprofessionally bad they are. This is because modern Sonic fans grew up on weebery and TikTok, so they have no clue how natural speech and body language work, in addition to most of them being tourists who only care about memes & cheap callbacks so they can feel like fans of a currently trending thing, through osmosis.
All in all I rather don't care for them.
Music
I don't get it.
When promoting an upcoming game, wouldn't you show the good parts?
So why did they give us nothing but rancid trash music and then the game's actual soundtrack is fine?
Hell a couple tracks are actually great.
Sega really can't fuck anything up bad enough for plebes to care, can they?
In closing
3/5. It's... fine, but it has strong blemishes and nothing special to make up for them.
Sega and the fans are desperate to spin a Mario-killer out of whole cloth. But this hype is nothing but hot air, and just like rigging the election and lying about everything under the sun won't save Trump from Epstein's ghost, fake Steam reviews, bribed real reviews, and lip service from near-human creatures with no thoughts or opinions of their own, won't help Sonic escape Penders's ghost. There is still no great game behind the facade, and Sonic is just as dead as he was in 2009. He's just on very expensive life support that everyone but Sega is paying for. And if Sega doesn't chip in in a way that matters, then by 2030 Sonic will still pop out of existence like the AI bubble.
What do you mean Penders is still alive.
Johnny gets laughed out of court
Johnny Gioeli, the vocalist of Crush 40, suddenly decided he wanted to ensure he had the rights to Live and Learn after there was a big movie with that song in it.
The court patiently heard his arguments, nodded, and then reminded him that for about two decades Sega had repeatedly and highly visibly used the song and never credited him with any ownership or paid him any royalties. They literally wrote down two decades in bold and italics in the final judgment. This is the judge-ly equivalent to slamming your desk with both hands and shouting incoherently.
Anyway, it turns out that here in the US, when you agree to a contract, or two contracts, that specify who gets copyrights, you get 3 years to notice the contract is not what you wanted and dispute the allocation of ownership. 3 years. Not 30 years.
So Johnny got demolished worse than Cream in the CrossWorlds intro and he's never gonna get those damn copyrights.
The last step is to get Luvs by the way.
