Sonic Racing Crossworlds is honestly so much better than I admittedly had anticipated it to be as someone who was extremely cautious and I’ve been playing it for what feels like 3 days straight now. However as a longtime fan of this series, I have some nitpicks as well as actual criticism for it too, but thankfully I’ve found myself enjoying it more thsn not as of right now. This is yet another scenario where I wish I could do a review with a mixed button instead of positive or negative, so I’ll separate the positives and the negatives into their own respective sections.
Starting with the positives; The game is very arcade-y in it's approach and feel. It's genuinely really fun and I’m glad that people are enjoying the crossovers, and I really hope that this game ends up having a long support cycle and content updates. The music and the gameplay are both good and it’s not too bad with its replayability for a bit, but it can get very repetitive and old very, very fast. Sonic has had plenty of good racing games over the years, like all-stars racing transformed for example and I'm glad that this is doing pretty good critically, but not all of it's ideas were executed well or even perfectly.
Next come the problems with the game. While undoubtedly fun, the game is not worth the $100 CAD at all, which is why I’m very thankful that I did not buy it at full price. It lacks voiced dialogue for the DLC characters and has a severe lack of other SEGA characters that are non Sonic ones as well as more obscure sonic characters that never ever get utilized in any sonic media almost ever. I’m okay with this game not being SEGA all stars racing, but why not just include the characters from those games here too? Especially the SEGA characters. We have a more sonic characters than non sonic characters sure, but it also would be nice to have more characters that don’t get to appear often. I’m still interested in the crossovers though of course and I’m looking forward to the Evangelion one but there can and really should be a good balance between the two but Sega will be Sega. I’m really, really not a huge fan of some decisions like locking nine and the werehog behind the season passes since they don’t seem worth it at all and do not trust buying season passes for games. I’ve been seeing people hailing Sega for not being Nintendo or EA despite them being extremely greedy themselves and delisting games to market new ones and getting into using genAI, on top of that, while fun, it still does'nt feel like there is nearly enough content to come close to justifying that price tag. The game may not be bad, but it would be nice for more people to realize SEGA’s greediness at times.
Not to mention, there’s a game mode where you unlock super sonic and his car, but him, the car AND MOST ANNOYINGLY the car parts that come from the car super sonic uses can ONLY be used in the single player Grand Prix.
I really want to recommend this game for others and even buy some of them copies as gifts through steam, but in order to do that with actual confidence; I feel like the price tag needs to be lowered considerably.
