Thoughts on... Team Sonic Racing

There's a new Sonic game out, so I'm going to talk about... the one that came out three and a half years ago. Because it's only $10 now!

As the title will let you know, Team mechanics are a big deal now. You can draft behind an ally to build up a boost. If you get spun out, an ally driving by will boost you and give you some speed. You can gift item boxes to allies, regardless of you two actually being anywhere near each other! When these features come together, it's an awesome experience that makes you feel really good and feels very "Sonic-y". The other 90% of the time, the features are pointless at best and a hindrance at worst. Try to draft behind an ally and they slow down so you bonk into them and it takes away your speed. Try to give an item to the ally in the back and the one next to you will take it. Need to get back up to speed, well, your allies are nowhere near you, so too bad. When you get boosted, your kart bursts forward in a straight line, but you can't steer during it, so sometimes your partners just boost you into the wall. Your allies also have normal collision and some times they really want to be in your lane, so your own allies will be trying to shove you into a wall and fight against you trying to recover. If they wanted to make Team races just one event or a special mode, sure, but it isn't a good feature set and doesn't support a full game.

Characters have classes, but unlike the Mario Kart style "Light, Medium, and Heavy", you get the stat variation but each class has a fairly meaningful unique ability. Speed characters do an AoE after drifting, which can knock away some attacks if you time it right. Tech characters can collect items from a slight distance and don't suffer a speed penalty from driving over rough terrain. Power characters can drive through small hazards without slowing down. I personally always went for Speed characters, except on some challenges. Because it's a racing game. Speed's kind of the thing. Playing another other class just feels so sluggish.

You can't customize your team, though. I'd understand the need to have one character of each class on the team, but at least let me pick which of those characters I use. If I want to play as Metal Sonic, I'm stuck with Zavok as Power. But if I want Omega as Power, I'm stuck with Shadow as Speed. Sonic's team is the only one that has a good enough character in each slot. It's going to come down to personal preference but the cast... Major letdown compared to the previous games. Silver? Big? Zavok? How did all these lame characters make the roster? Okay fine, maybe there's some reason the non-Sonic characters had to get cut, but in what world is Vector a suitable replacement for anybody?

Winning each race is usually pretty easy, but a lot of the side events and challenges are stupidly hard. One makes you drift into rings around the track and another makes you drift around star poles, and neither of those events are fun and the score requirements are unnecessarily high. There's another where you have to dodge around flying robots on the track and drive over specific spots to score points. It's not "fun" or different enough from a normal race. The only one that comes close to being fun has you smashing Robotnik's Egg Pawn racers, either using items or just bashing into them. These events are a lot easier than the others and the silly violence helps make it more frantic than the usual races.

A lot of the challenges just depend on luck. I went in with the usual "I'm going to get all the challenge stars" mentality, and by the end of the first chapter, I had already abandoned that. By chapter 3, I was in "I'm going to try each challenge once". And by chapter 4 of 7, I was already just doing the minimum to beat each chapter. For a supposed co-op game, you have to come in first to beat the challenge on most stages. I found myself grumbling at my partner for slingshotting around me at the end of a race so they came in first and I came in second. My team still won, but that "come in first" quest turned a fun moment into an annoyance. Know your place, Tails! You are second banana! The "don't spin out X times" one is dependent on how many homing attacks enemies get and whether they decide to be aggressive or not. Anything that relies on your AI partners to perform well is just a ludicrously bad choice. Yay, my progress is controlled by something I can't affect. No matter how many items you give them, sometimes the AI just blows a race. There's a challenge to collect rings and you get hit with a Lightning on the final lap and lose all your rings so that's blown.

The main "boss" races to finish a chapter are cups where you race 4 tracks in a row and even these have a big luck element. You can finish in first on every track but if your AI partners are blowing it, the scores get very tight. I give them every item I get but they still finish in 7th from time to time. Glancing over to see Sonic in first, AI Tails right behind me in second, and then AI Knuckles in 12th hurts.

The game really stops being enjoyable in the 5th/6th chapter. By then, Amy apparently attains godhood and becomes practically unstoppable unless you specifically focus on taking her out. Her speed and acceleration go through the roof, she's deadly with weapons, generates her Ultimate super fast, and knows every shortcut. A few bad finishes by your AI partners in a cup and you're toast. So much about this game screams that it's made for kids and then they make the story mode complete frustration near the end? But then in the last chapter, game gets super easy again, outside of a single race. You no longer have to race against the regular opponents, there’s only one “real” challenger per race at the start and only three (instead of nine) in the last race, you can destroy the filler enemies just by bumping into them, and there’s no cup race. Robotnik is a cakewalk after trying to deal with Amy.

There's some light story as you progress through the chapters. It's light, but silly enough to be fun. No “spoilers”, but the game’s twist only works if every single character is the dumbest person alive. And they are. Very much so. I also love that everybody immediately mistrusts the new character. It's oddly genre savvy for the cast of Sonic. And everybody is straight up racist against tanukis. 

There's something really wrong with a lot of the voices though. Hearing Knuckles and Shadow speak. Ugh! I'm guessing it's the cast from Boom doing the voices? Boom Knuckles's voice fit the character because he was a big meathead type on the show, but having the big meathead voice coming out of regular Knuckles is just bad. And Shadow is beyond parody at this point. He's trying so hard to sound tough and with that awful voice, that it becomes funny, but then wraps back around to being terrible again. Stop talking, Shadow. Just... go away and bring back Nack. He would be a far better partner for Rouge and Omega. I know I'm pretty out of the loop on this, but what happened to their Adventure voices? I remember Adventure Knuckles and Shadow being good, but now I'm afraid to go back and check on that.

The soundtrack though, so good! There are some really good remixes of Sonic music. The Sandopolis music is already fantastic, but turning into a fast paced version is just so much fun to race to. Even the awful theme song and cheesy opening video are fun in that "oh no, somebody let Crush40 back in a studio" sort of way.

The racetracks are fantastical in a way that Mario Kart rarely commits to. The themes are interesting, there are creative hazards on the tracks, and they really have the feel of Sonic stages with loops and hills. There are a number of areas where you can drive up the walls or rotate the track so you're on the ceiling, but the game is good about rotating the camera with you, so your controls stay consistent. It also creates a lot of nice risk/reward moments where you can take a more dangerous route to grab some extra item boxes or paths where you have to decide between boost pads or items.

While the tracks are fun, there really aren't enough of them. You hit repeats in the same story chapter, then you move to the next chapter, aaand it's a track you've already raced on. It doesn't help that some of these tracks/versions of them appeared in the previous games too.

Everything looks great, but it's hard to see on some tracks. There are lots of extreme hills/turns where you can't see what's next, or two areas cross and it's hard to tell what's a path or not, or the road is made of a glittery material that's partially see-through. Even just hazards on the road can be hard to pick out. It's going to take you a few laps on several courses to figure out what's road and what slows you down. The mini map off to the side is only so useful and lousy readability only punishes human players. It's not an obstacle the CPU deals with so it makes things feel extra unfair.

Unfortunately, Wisps are back and used instead of real items and they too are hard to read. The colors are similar and only two or three of them have distinct shapes to pick out in the heat of a race. What a huge setback from previous games where they used actual objects. I hated the Wisps before and this isn't helping, Sega.

The CPU does your standard kart racing cheating. Lots of rubber banding. Even if you use your team's super boost together, the computer can catch up a few seconds after you're done. The computer has weapons whenever it feels like it. Your team always starts at the back of the group each race. No matter how good of a boost you get off the starting line, the computer accelerates faster and pulls out ahead. 

Outside of the races, there's some minor customization for your cars, but you unlock upgrades through loot boxes. And you can get dupes due to consumable items that usually let you start a race with a specific item. The gear for your kart feels pretty pointless. It's the "raise one stat but lower another" type of deal and those don't work for me in kart racers. You might have one race where the computer never touches you so you wish you brought in more top speed gear. Another race will have the computer be super aggressive and top speed is pointless and you needed acceleration. It's kind of hard to even notice what difference the stats are making. Is a 10% difference in boost meaningful? How does the defense rating actually work? Beats me! If you try to look at the manual, it just pops up a QR code and tells you to scan it with your phone, so the game doesn’t seem too concerned with you knowing either. 

It seems like people REALLY don't like this one compared to the previous racing games. The "complete chapter 1 of the story" trophy has a less than 22% collection rate. It's the weakest of the three most recent Sonic racers, but it's not THAT bad. There are some questionable design choices, readability is poor, the weapons are bad, the cast is pretty mediocre, it doesn't have much content, it has loot boxes, and the whole team mechanic is lousy, but... Hmmm... Kind of wrote this into a corner here. Look, sometimes you just want to play a fun kart racer with good music, fun tracks, and goofy characters! The story is silly fluff but it has some funny moments, Dr. Robotnik is a lovable jerk in the spin-off games, and Metal Sonic is in it and playable (but his stats are worse than Sonic’s! Booooo)!

The game kind of feels like an early draft that they made way too polished. What's good is nice and super cleaned up, but there are a lot of core mechanics or smaller design choices that should have been thrown out on first testing.

What was wrong with Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing? I just want more of that with new characters, tracks, and challenges. Transformed mucked it up with the boats and planes and the lousy challenge mode. And now TSR mucks it up again with the team mechanics and lousy challenges. I guess we’ll try it again in the future, but judging from the reception on this game, we may be waiting a while.