I really don't see the hype with this game. Team Sonic Racing and especially Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds blow this game out of the water and it's not even close. I'm sure that'll upset a few people, and you know what? The truth hurts.
[b]Positives:[/b]
[b]-Great Music[/b]
This game, for all of it's faults, has an amazing soundtrack. I could listen to the music for Burning Depths, Graffiti City, and Ocean View all day. Even the menu songs are great, and it's a very rare case where this game surpasses CrossWorlds, as I've modded a lot of the music in that game.
[b]-Car Physics[/b]
In contrast to the boats and planes that feel god awful to control, the standard cars feel really responsive and fun to drive. I wouldn't say they feel quite as good to control as the ones in TSR, but they're solid and I don't really have any complaints.
Err... I guess there's one complaint I have. It's when I see all four of my tires on the ground and the game goes... [spoiler]STUNT FAILED STUNT FAILED STUNT FAILED!!![/spoiler] but that's an issue with the boats too so.
[b]Negatives:[/b]
[b]-Bad Tracks[/b]
I'm going to list off every good track in this game. Ocean View, OutRun Bay, Graffiti City, Shibuya Downtown, and to a lesser extent, Rogue's Landing. That's 5 of 21 tracks, barely short of 1/4 of the tracks being good. Most of the tracks are bogged down by extended boat or flying sections, and since those control awfully, it makes racing on those tracks feel terrible too. The only reason I even considered Rogue's Landing to be good was because the visual set-pieces on lap 3 are stunning.
Tracks like Dream Valley, Adder's Lair, Graveyard Gig, and Burning Depths (in spite of it's incredible music) are awful to play, and most of the other tracks are mediocre at best.
I also did not care for Race of AGES. The main driving section feels uninspired, the flight section requires almost no input from the player beyond holding the accelerator, and the boat section has these annoying electrical fences to dodge, which is hard to do with how difficult it is to reign in the boat controls.
[b]-World Tour[/b]
I'm going to preface this by stating that I 100% completed World Tour and got AGES' Console Mod. You can see proof [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3723843439]here.[/url] I personally found World Tour to be very boring. For what's supposed to be a racing game, there's a significant lack of racing going on here. For every Normal / Battle / Boost Race in World Tour, there's like 5 missions where you just fly through rings, or hold the drift button, or spam boosts. It's just not fun. It's an issue shared by Team Sonic Racing's "Team Adventure" mode, and something I'm personally glad was dropped in CrossWorlds in favor of the far more fun Race Park, which is actually focused on racing.
[b]-The Roster[/b]
This game has a terrible roster, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Nobody cares about Football Manager, Ulala, Amigo, Gilius, Joe Musashi, etc. Then you have extra-insulting characters like Wreck It-Ralph (if you're going to add a character from this movie, why not Vanellope? She's literally from a racing game in the movie.), Danica Patrick which who even wanted her in the game, and Simon from Yogscast. I was so offended by how bad this roster was that almost my entire playtime was spent exclusively on Amy and Tails. People like to complain about CrossWorlds' roster, but you guys don't know how good we have it these days. I'll gladly take Joker, Ichiban, Miku, Spongebob, and Steve over this slop any day of the week. The TF2 guys are cool and all but I would've preferred Ellis from L4D2 with his car being Jimmy Gibbs Jr.'s stock car, which transforms into a helicopter for flight sections, and Virgil's boat for boat sections.
[b]-Items[/b]
As someone with over 500 hours in CrossWorlds and has seen firsthand how cancer our items are, I would gladly take what we've got over what this game has. While this game lacks the abundance of homing items that CrossWorlds does (aside from the Drone, what it has in exchange are projectiles that are so fast, they may as well be hitscan. You also have extremely annoying items like the Twister which flips you around and inverts your controls, and All-Star moves that give your character access to a special ability at the cost of being forced into... flight mode.
[b]-Boat and Flight Controls[/b]
This is the big one. This game's core gimmick is how certain sections of tracks transform your car into a boat or a plane, but the controls for them are atrocious. For the boats it feels like the slightest movement of your stick left or right is going to send you careening into a wall, while the planes feel like you're trying to reign in a horse that's actively being mauled by a racoon. They aren't fun or satisfying to control, and more often than not I would book it as fast as I can to the closest spot that would transform me back into a car.
All in all, I'll say that this game didn't age well. I'm sure when it came out it was very fun, but I personally just don't like it. The boat and plane gimmick was better executed in CrossWorlds, both TSR and CrossWorlds had better items, tracks, and rosters, and I'm amazed the online is even still active to an extent.
