Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds

The net code is terrible. All racers you see are actually only generalized areas at where the real racer is. All other racers are just bots that rubber band to the racer they are mimicking position occasionally. This means: -you can not bully a player off the track and can only be bullied. What I mean is if you smack a car into the grass on a turn, you will probably notice that they don't lose any speed, get back on the track and are even creating a larger gap between you because the real player on their client was never hit at all and the bot on your client side will now just rubber band to where the real player kind of is. This also means that if a bot gets caught on you and gets further away from the position it is supposed to be mimicking, it will get more and more aggressive rubber banding priority and you often times will get completely pushed usually into a wall and held for several seconds as the ai absolutely fails at its job while making it impossible to do anything but wait until the ai gets unhooked from your car. Some people might know mario kart characters like bowser and donkey kong being good at knocking around smaller characters. Not so in this game. Other dumb things being offensive items basically being useless because the person you hit in your game is rarely ever actually hit in their game. It is honestly better to use a green punch glove not locked onto anybody and shot to bounce about a few times because it is more likely to hit the real player than if you shot the bot interpretation of them which often time will just look like the other player shot their glove at nothing on the other players client. It is absolutely garbage net code. -item chances and item no chances are determined by your placement in the race and only a certain amount of items can be in play at once. So a common form of racing is going slow in the first lap to bag powerful catch up items and defense items and then passing by everyone in the end of the second lap to last lap while holding onto the items as long as you can. So if you are in last place and there is a massive gap from you to even 11th place and all you are getting is boost wisps, that is why. -drift mastery is the only competitive racing. Seriously, I don't understand the design choice to give what is already the best and fastest way to race a on demand invulnerability making it the only meaningful way to front run in a race and not get punished for it, but the devs thought it was a great idea. So if you aren't a master time trial drift racer, you are really only competing for 4th place. Is a two separate racing game of the cans and can nots.

Not Sonic R but I guess it will do

I really don't know how so many people like this game. If you want a game where the AI constantly punches you in the nuts with absolutely ridiculous rubber-banding, items are completely unpredictable and chaotic and miss your enemies even when they visibly show as hitting, and you will probably lose every single race going from 1st place to last place in the last corner as every CPU enemy shoots every item on the track at you, then this is the game for you. I guess this is the souls-like of kart racers and as it happens I'm super ultra not here for it.

I really wanna like this game but, looking back at its predocessor, Sonic: All-Stars Racing Transformed, this is just a cheap copy with a visual upgrade. If you wanna have a good Sonic racing experience go back to All-Stars, it deserves the attention more than this hollow cash grab.

Love this game, but it crashes a lot, the game was working fine, but the new classic sonic update broke it, whenever I try to launch the game it gives a fatal error and says "cashdrump written to program files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SonicRacingCrossworlds\UNION\Binaries\Win64\ue4ss| its genuinely so freaking annoying I preordered it and bought the dlc only for it to crash whenever a new update happens

Had my doubts at first (as somebody who doesn't regularly enjoy racing games, and Mario Kart was always just a casual party game to me), but the game really grabbed me by the balls. The only reason I even entertained buying this game was because of the 50% off sale, and I'm glad I did. I started with the singleplayer content, which is like sure, whatever. You got 4-round Grand Prix races, individual races with optional gimmicks, and time trials. Harder difficulty rivals do NOT play around. There's quite a few challenges you can do, which is nice Everybody raves about the rival system and how the characters talk to each other with unique dialogue. In reality, it's 2 lines they'll only say to each other at the beginning of a singleplayer grand prix. Have fun initiating... 506 grand prix races to try all the permutations. (or just watch a video) Multiplayer is where it's at. High cortisol gaming at its finest. You'll grind through ranks E- to A+, and then the Legend rank rat race begins. At this point you'll be matched mostly with other Legend ranks. It's fun fighting against other good players, seeing their loadouts, cool skins. Occasionally getting 1st place. But the unfun parts sting. Getting absolutely chain-smoked by a barrage of powerups/items thrown at you. You can lead the race from the beginning, then get thrown all the way back to 12th position and never recover because it's the last lap. Or barely scrape by, approach the finish line in top 6, and get literally flattened by monster trucks speeding onto you from behind, watching as everybody zooms past you at the very end. It's all part of the game though. Of course, it's your duty to manage the items you get and use them wisely, defend yourself, but getting the useful ones is still a dice roll. Although, only like half of my races are lost like this. The other half is due to my mediocre skills at the game. The gadget system is interesting. You get 6 slots to fill with various upgrades/tweaks to your vehicle, ranging from a minor increase in stats to completely changing the feel of your vehicle. It's fun to try them out, find ones that suit your playstyle, and there's a whole science to making good loadouts (or "builds") that work well. (or just take the #1 meta loadout everybody's using) There's tons of hidden/unexplained mechanics, shortcuts, strategies and depth in general to this game, with lots of YouTube videos that delve into them. It's a little annoying that they go unexplained in-game, and it also takes time to fully internalize all of them. There's some FOMO involved, like a preorder-only character (Werehog), and in-game "Festivals" that give u unique limited items for competing in them (titles, decals, gadgets too I think?). It's whatever. Yes. It's okay I didn't get the limited-time Red angry bird sticker. And I may never ever get it. I'll be fine. 🥹 There's DLC too, 30 bucks for some mostly mute characters (missing voicelines) and new maps. Even without it, the maps are playable in multiplayer, although the characters and their vehicles aren't. I don't find anything too interesting from the DLCs. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the game. Really addicting, fast-paced and exhilarating time sink. It's very satisfying to slowly get better at the mechanics and controls. I haven't used my controller this hard in ages. Runs on Linux very well. Crashed only once. Had some weird audio but it got fixed recently.

i really, really didnt like it. i LOVE sega, i love cart racing, i didnt really play sonic but i do not not like it. but this feels so weak at that insane price tag of 70€ at release. every track feels the absolute same, especially because every single mesh and sprite looks like ue (unreal engine). everything has the same boring, default unreal engine look. and i think bc it was made in unreal engine, every track feels like some fanmade custom track. as if someone said "let me put some grass here, let me make a ramp here, let me put a windmill there and voila the track is finished". nothing feels impressive, i just run down the track, it feels so boring. every track feels the same and i remember in mario kart how every track felt 100% unique and different from the other so it shouldnt be bc kart racing is just racing. i dont recommend for 70(!!!!!!!!!!)€. for 10€ this would be ok.

lazy developers don't add voices to the DLC characters that you PAY for. Their excuse is that it would bE toO mUcH wORk to make that happen, so none of the DLC characters have ANY voice lines except for Miku somewhat because they just gave her special treatment.