Team Sonic Racing™

good racing game

get this before you get crossroads

Great and fun game for local multiplayer

love it

not the greatest racing game or the most fun at times during certain challenges, but for what it does provide, it's pretty enjoyable. turn your brain off and steer. it's sonic racing... don't EXPECT a masterpiece

also, i can race as silver so that's a plus for me !!!

Boring,If you like Sonic characters driving cars, I highly recommend Sega All-Stars Racing (2013).

This game is good 👍

This game is not bad, & I still want to finish it, but I don't want people to get the wrong idea. Transformed is much much better in almost every way. I would recommend you just buy Transformed. This is coming from someone that bought both of these games on sale recently, & I have no nostalgia or recency/hype bias.

The speed you get in Transformed blows this one out of the water. There is momentum that you can get from hitting boosts, drifting, tricking, etc, that just isn't present in this game. It doesn't matter how many boosts you hit, you will always fall behind if you pick a slower character, which becomes frustrating quickly, & when you play coop, it means whoever picks the speed character is very likely to be first.

There are a lot of details that are missing which seem small, but add up for an overall lesser satisfaction rating in Team Sonic Racing. For example, in Transformed, the camera would zoom out quite a lot when hitting high speeds. This would make you feel like you were zooming through the track. It was exhilarating. This game feels much more like Mario Kart, in a bad way, where as Transformed feels much more like Crash Team Racing. The boost sound was also much more powerful in Transformed, & I feel the amount of speed you would gain from getting a drift boost, has been dramatically reduced for this game.

The difficulty also feels way too annoyingly hard. It's not a good challenge like in Transformed. A lot of the difficulty just comes from other teams getting the 'team ultimate' power (which makes them invincible for a short amount of time), & passing you up no matter what place they are in. This means you constantly have to work with your team, & if even one of your team mates are AI, this sucks. However, it doesn't really matter how well you work with your teammates to build your team ultimate, you will still get dragged down far too often, & in a lot of ways, it makes the game feel less skill based.

Speaking of the annoying difficulty & being less skill based, in Transformed, being hit by an item did a lot less to completely kill your speed. In TSR, if you're hit with any item, or if you touch a stage obstacle (which there are many), it will slow you down for a cringe inducing amount of time. My girlfriend put it like this "it almost doesn't even feel like a racing game sometimes, with how often you're brought to a complete halt". I completely agree.

I haven't even mentioned yet that most of the tracks are just remastered tracks from the other 2 Sonic All Stars games, & the fact that the game no longer has transformations. Transformations (both with the stage transforming & vehicles transforming) made the game feel fresh every lap. TSR feels like much more of a standard cart racing game.

A couple positives. The music is much better than Transformed, honestly, it's amazing. Following the yellow trails is also a cool idea, however, it means that the other character's special abilities will be negated if they're in first since they need to have a play-style that allows their teammates behind them the ability to follow their yellow trail. If the person in front of you is a speed character, which is usually true no matter what, you're fine, but if you're in front as tails, & you try to go through the dirt (since you can take huge shortcuts with no slowdown as tails) you're going to screw your teammates.

A lot of people who review the game positively either had recency bias, are children that just support everything Sonic, or have never played the past games. I'll admit, it's not a bad game, but when their last game was so dramatically better, I would recommend you just buy that, & if you're really itching for more, know what you're getting into. If you're coming from Transformed, the drastic decrease in gameplay quality in all of the finer details will slowly start to eat away at you. I can still enjoy it to completion, but I can't stop wishing I was playing through the whole game with the same engine from Transformed.

It has me really hoping that Crossworlds shifts to be much more like transformed, but I'm not sure. I'm still seeing a lot of lacking in the details with Crossworlds. The sense of speed looks to be similar to Team Sonic Racing, & a lot of the items seem very OP, even though not as bad as TSR. Here's hoping they took more from Transformed than just the Transformations. I was very excited after finally playing Transformed, that I have a new very fun cart racer (it became my favorite, whereas before Crash Team Racing was my favorite), I just hope that it's not going to be the peak forever.

ohhh beat it with friends

My initial hatred was overblown. Not great far from it but it's ok. Campaign could've been much more. The team mechanic is cool but not fun enough to carry a whole game. Tracks were horribly repetitive and uninspired which kills its replayability.

5.5/10

i just don't like the music

A lot like Mario Kart, great game

I recommend this if and only if:
- you played and liked Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, and you want something similar but fresh
and
- you're okay with a cast of only Sonic characters

Otherwise just play S&ASRT, it's honestly miles (no pun intended) better

I love dis game

Somehow SEGA keeps making worse and worse racing games with the graphics and music only being the areas where some improvement is made. The car racing games peaked with their first entry "Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing" which is kind of baffling. While the game does look great and sound great what actually matters, the racing, has gotten worse yet again.

The AI is rubberbanding like mad and it just feels like it constantly cheats, how the hell can Big the cat casually drive past me as Sonic with maxed speed states on my car AND me having over 200 rings??? Things like this completely ruin the experience but it's not the only way the AI ruins things for you since you race as a team. In the story stages you have to pray that your teammates get good positions so you can fully complete each stage, there's nothing fun with you having driven perfectly and finished first while your two teammates are in the last and second to last positions.

Another annoying thing about the AI is that they just can't shut up, they keep saying the same cringy shitty one-liners and they are quite the chore to listen to the 200th time. Imagine if we had a normal funny sports commentator like in the first racing game instead. Sonic's and the others' characterization is so incredibly cringy and one-dimensional. Tails is the autist, Knuckles is completely retarded, Amy is , Rouge tries so hard to talk like a whore, and Shadow is an edgelord. The characterization is a complete failure and so is the story, why even include a story if it's so bad that it negatively affects the game?

They also made the ultimate ability generic and boring, in the previous games you had these unique cool animations and transformations, but here they just added some random yellow fire, blurred the screen, and increased the fov.

The online races are completely nonexistent.

Only buy this game if you want to play through all Sonic's racing games and while it's heavily on sale. Charging more than 10-15$ for this is a scam

If you think this is a good racing game then you seriously need to play more racing games.

Might be the worst sonic racing game to be honest. The CPU is weird, if you play against bots the teams almost always finish one after the other for example if in the first race of a grand prix green team is 1st 2nd and 3rd they will almost always be first second and third the rest of the grand prix. The order in which a team finishes a race seems completely predetermined and similarly if you have CPU on your team they always seem to finish the race in the bottom 6 so no matter how well you do they throw the entire grand prix for you. I like the concept of teamwork in a racing game but making it so you HAVE to rely on your team to get your ultimate in order to stay in first is discouraging at best.

Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo This game fucking sucks compared to SASRT boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Crossworlds if it was on steriods...and not good ones

Whomever though locking progression behind drifting trials was a good idea needs to be fired

you can play as vector. the game is more fun if you see it as a team based game rather than thinking you need to get first every time.

Pros
- Having teamates in a race is a neat and interesting concept.
- There is Japanese voice acting!

Cons
- In adventure mode, you have to win one of the challenges in order to play the next race. That is really dumb. Why is adventure mode rigged that I have to win everything?
- The graphics are awful. At 1440p it looks blurry.
- No ultrawide support, just a tiny box.

It's visually overwhelming, I don't particularly like racing games, I'm ambivalent about the IP. The story mode and dialog say, "a game for babies" but the difficulty is absolutely brutal. I'm not sure if the developers are unreasonably good at racing games, or rushed the balance in a fit of apathy but you have to drive nearly or completely perfectly.

That said, I forced myself to play through it and it won me over a bit, though that may have been Stockholm syndrome kicking in. It's not my speed but the nieces and nephew like it and now I can crush them even harder. I'm a good uncle.

Dodonpa

Not great. Definitely not as memorable as Transformed and is a step back in many ways.

Fortunately, it appears the devs agree as the latest, CrossWorlds, appears to be heavily inspired by Transformed. Maybe wait for that one. If you can't, look up Transformed and play that one instead.

As a game, Team Sonic Racing is alright. I would honestly say I prefer Transformed over this game, mostly because of the larger character roster and track variety. This game only has 15 characters who are all unlocked from the start, with Team Eggman being unable to be used in the story. Characters being divided into classes, I wasn't too big a fan of, as the item system is affected by it as well. Certain classes have exclusive Wisps, with the Power type characters having three exclusive Wisps. Why they did this, I don't know.

The story, however, is awful. It can be removed entirely and you'd miss nothing. The story cutscenes are just character stills with talking, Eggman doesn't even put his plan into action until the end of Chapter 6, and even then, Eggman and his team suck at racing. Amy was more of a threat to me in the races than Eggman's team was until Chapter 7. Speaking of Chapter 7, three tracks, Turbine Loop, Dark Arsenal, and Thunder Deck, are all locked behind Chapter 7 and are NOT in the Grand Prix.

On the subject of Team Adventure are the events themselves. There are a lot of Team Races, which take advantage of the major mechanics of the game like skimboosting and passing items to team members, but outside of them are solo events like the Daredevil events, Ring Challenges, and Destruction + Eggpawn Assault events. Daredevil and Ring Challenges absolutely suck. Easily the worst part of the story, since they borderline mandate perfection to even get the needed silver medal to pass them. Ring Challenges are arguably the worst since you're on a timer and the only way to get more time is to collect rings while drifting. Why only while drifting? It feels like a dumb restriction.

As for Destruction and Eggpawn Assault, I have no real problems with them. They're nowhere near as unforgiving as the previously mentioned events.

This game feels like it borrows a bit from Mario Kart 8. Like that game, vehicles have three different parts that adjust your stats, but unlike Mario Kart 8, the way to obtain parts is via a gacha system called Mod Pods, which you pay 10 Credits (in game currency you earn from completing races) for one. Bonus Boxes, however, are in the pool of Mod Pod items, and Bonus Boxes only last one race, even if you're doing a Team Grand Prix in the story or a Grand Prix, so they're only really useful for single races. They range from things like getting three of an item instead of one or starting with a certain item or having better boost.

Because we only have Sonic characters, we only have Sonic tracks, and some are borrowed from the previous two Sonic racing games. However, because the three Eggman tracks aren't included in the Grand Prix, there aren't even enough tracks in the game for 5 unique Grand Prixs worth of tracks.

Now, am I saying Team Sonic Racing is a bad game? No, but I am saying the other two games are better. I'd still say Team Sonic Racing is worth the playthrough if you can snag it during a sale, but I probably wouldn't buy it for full price.

Something

Great racing!

Very fun game! Sometimes at a certain stage of gameplay lag becomes unbearable, but very fun to play.

As the title implies, this is a Sonic kart racing game. The main gimmick are the team mechanics, which are pretty fun with human players.

I would say my main gripes are not being able to adjust options while in multiplayer lobbies. (You have to back out to the main menu.) I also had some stutter issues when too many particles were on screen. There is no particle-specific toggle, so I have to turn down all graphics which is annoying given it otherwise runs fine. The multiplayer "ready up" function seems to be pointless as the host can start the race regardless of "ready" status.

But the game itself is pretty fun. If you can rope some friends in, it's still worth picking up during discounts. Especially if you never played any of the previous Sonic & All Stars Racing games.

A major disappointment compared to Transformed

Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed is one of my favourite kart racers of all time, so a sequel to it was definitely something to get excited about. After playing it for myself, I was left wondering what even happened with this one.

Control is similar to Transformed with very similar drifting and stunt mechanics, so it shouldn't take you too long to get adjusted to this if you've played the previous games in the series. However, even on the highest difficulty, it feels slower than Transformed and you can't boost through grass unless you're playing as technical characters like Tails, not even with a boost wisp.

So many game mechanics from Transformed are either cut or watered down. This game has no planes or boats, only racing cars on land so there's a lot less variety in the gameplay. Even Mario Kart has bikes that play slightly different, and not having them here was a missed opportunity to bring back Shadow's iconic bike from 2005's Shadow game.

The item system is a major downgrade. Triple items have been nerfed - in Transformed, if you pick up a triple item, you could fire them all at once by holding the button, which is no longer possible here. All items are wisps from Colours and aren't as fun to use as the firework, drone or blowfish were. The rhythm wisp, the worst wisp from Lost World, is even worse here as it's meant to be the blooper from Mario Kart but covers so little of the screen it's basically useless against competent human players.

Drifting and boosts were also way better in Transformed compared to this. In that game, performing stunts while drifting grants you a boost as soon as you land, allowing you to chain boosts together. Here, landing stunts during a drift increases your boost level that only activates when you stop drifting, which greatly lowers the skill ceiling and makes the game feel even slower.

The main gimmick of this game is teamwork, which I really hated. You don't win by being in first place - you win as a team by having more points combined than any other team, so it's entirely possible to lose the race because your teammates aren't doing very well, which happened to me a few times. Team Ultimate replace the All Star moves and are incredibly unbalanced - what was meant to be a catchup system for struggling players is now something you have to work for, and it's so easy to abuse during races by passing items to your teammates back and fourth the entire race to fill up the gauge quickly.

Sonic & SEGA All Stars Racing had 21 characters. Transformed had 24 (30 on PC). This game only has 15 characters and are all unlocked from the start, with no characters from any franchise that isn't Sonic, which I know this isn't a SEGA All Stars racing game, it's a Sonic racing game, but even 2006's Sonic Riders had unlockable guest characters from other SEGA franchises like AiAi, NiGHTS and Ulala playable so this character roster is still a huge step backwards.

The track design was quite underwhelming, too. This game has 21 tracks, but 9 of those are re-used from previous games meaning there are only 12 original tracks in this game, 4 less than Transformed. Some of the new tracks feel like clones of Mario Kart tracks - Sand Road shares a lot in common with Dry Dry Desert from Mario Kart Double Dash, Hidden Volcano's starting section rips off Bowser's Castle from Mario Kart 8, and Sky Road could be easily mistaken for Cloudtop Cruise from Mario Kart 8. This game has no battle mode at all.

Ocean View from Transformed returns in this game, and the lack of the transforming mechanics really show how much they added to that game and its tracks. What was a great introduction track is now one of the blandest tracks in this game without the boat section on the 3rd lap. That was the best part of Ocean View and it's nowhere to be found here. The re-used tracks and uninspired original tracks really show how creatively bankrupt this game is.

Graphics are okay, but are a huge step down compared to the previous game. Despite releasing 7 years earlier on less powerful hardware, it looks so much better than this game does even on the highest graphics settings. I even experienced a few frame rate drops during gameplay making it even less pleasant to look at.

This game has a story with full voice acting, but every single cutscene in this game is just told through static text boxes and still character images. Nothing is actually shown to you; it's all told through these text boxes making it really hard to care about what's going on which makes the presentation look bad. Even being a spinoff racing game isn't an excuse, as Diddy Kong Racing on N64, Crash Team Racing on PS1 and Sonic Riders on PS2 are all racing games with fully animated cutscenes and voice acting.

The story mode is also just a copy-paste job of the World Tour mode from Transformed, and while it isn't without its improvements, it's mostly a downgrade. You can get all 3 stars in an event simply by meeting all the requirements on any difficulty instead of stars being determined by difficulty. There's only 2 stars for the solo challenges instead of 4.

The Mod Pods are by far the worst unlock system of all the Sonic racing games. You unlock new customisation parts by spending 10 tokens obtained from playing the game, but you can't just choose which parts you want; you have to win them at random. There are no micro-transactions or paid loot boxes in this game, but it does feature quite a bit of grinding to unlock everything especially if there's one part in particular you want.

Car customisation is decent, at least. You can customise the colour, vinyl and body parts of your cars to your liking making each vehicle feel personal and unique. Even this aspect of the game could've been so much better than it is, as there's no way to add individual parts like spoilers, rims or bumpers for more extensive customisation.

Hope you're not playing this game for the online multiplayer, because the servers are pretty much dead with nobody playing. A big part of this is the matchmaking system - in Transformed, you can join lobbies with a race in progress, but here, you can only join lobbies that aren't in the middle of a game. No wonder why the online quickly died shortly after release; this alone killed any chance of success this game could've had, and no update was released to address this issue. I tried finding a match for this game, but to no avail. Meanwhile, I'm still finding matchmaking games for Transformed to this day.

If you have friends, good luck trying to find their time trial records on the leaderboards as this game doesn't have any way of comparing your times to your friends, yet another feature Transformed had that was removed here so now your only option is to find their times on the global leaderboards, which is especially painful for one of this game's achievements.

If you own a PC and are looking for a good kart racer that's much better value for your time and money, here's the store page for Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/212480/Sonic__AllStars_Racing_Transformed_Collection/
This review was mostly a comparison between Transformed and this game, but even on its own merits it's a mediocre kart racing game that's bargain bin fodder at best. I wasn't really a fan of this one, and can't recommend that you pick this one up when other far better games in the genre exist. If you own a Switch, just get Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for you and your family or friends; there's far more content, more characters, more tracks and far better game mechanics at a much better value. For XBOX or PlayStation console owners, CTR Nitro Fuelled is also a way better alternative.

Sonic Racing Crossworlds has been announced which is looking much more promising, so there's even less of a reason to play this in the near future, even for the most diehard Sonic fans.

Very Fun, Go Fast

I'm a sucker for Sonic and racing games, so I'm biased. This game is absolutely awesome and has banger music. The tracks are fun and stylish, and I like the different routes some of them have. Despite some people disliking being forced to choose between boosts and item boxes, I think it ups the ante and helps with the fact that the game is otherwise quite easy even on the harder difficulties. The tracks can be repetitive sometimes, but the mirror tracks make that more bearable. It's not bad at all seeing my favorite tracks more than once in the story, anyway. The worst and most unbearable thing about this game is having absolutely horrendous teammates; no matter how many times I offer item boxes, skimboost and slingshot my teammates, they always fall behind. (Looking at you, Knuckles.) It becomes even more frustrating while trying to get the keys on survival races. Also feels like this game is glazing Team Rose HARD. Despite that, I'd still say it's pretty great and one of my favorite games.

mario kart: sonic edition

oooh, the Mazing!

Team Sonic Racing was a big hit i really loved playing it and the online racing thing was fun playing with other people was the greatest thing ever some players were mean but i loved this game UwU

it gets repetitive as hell with the constant repeated track themes but it's a pretty damn solid racing game

transformed clears however

fast

I love playing this game so much with my gf.
It's like a kart racing game with great graphics, requires skill and mechanics, and really satisfying gameplay!
I just wish there was more!

I like the cars, mods, etc, but drifting feels off. Probably the second best kart racing game on PC, the first being Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed, but that's because the latter is really good.

GOTTA GO FAST

I seriously want to like this game so badly. I'm only writing my first review because I think this had the potential to be a much better game than it ended up being. It's a simpler, more grounded racing experience compared to All-Stars Racing Transformed, which many see as a bad thing but I really don't mind it because that game was a bit visually overstimulating to me. The tracks all have many different pathways so you're constantly choosing if you want a boost or an item box. It controls wonderfully, the character interactions during a race give the game a winning personality and honestly, when the game lets you have fun you do have a lot of it.

But there's just some things that have been included that don't seem to have been balanced so well and they mess up the experience, chief amongst them being the Team Boost mechanic. When you play single player on the higher difficulties the opposing teams tend to just sit on their Boost until the last possible second and boost past you, and there's nothing you can really do about this unless you have a Team Boost waiting as well. So the races aren't entirely about how well you navigate the course, it's about who can fill their Team Boost meter quickest and most frequently. Since the rubber banding is pretty obvious in this one, and the items are incredibly frequent, it's hard to build up a significant lead and then you'll just have Big the Cat blitz past whatever lead you had on the final corner anyway. As the mechanic is, it feels unfair, and I hope it's re-tuned in the sequel, perhaps making it so you can't just sit on your boost all race until you want to use it.

Secondly there's the challenge missions. If you're going for all Platinum medals, sometimes the challenge can feel rewarding to complete, and sometimes it feels like it's a bit too much. You only barely get enough time to achieve the Platinum target, so the margin for error is often very small and your run needs to be essentially perfect. I can usually get Gold, but I'm sitting 7 stars short of having every star in the game. A few of those I can recognise as a skill issue, but there's a couple where I just cannot see the path to winning. The Target game is the worst offender, since that seems to come down to crossing your fingers and getting lucky with your missile spam. More of my playtime has been spent on these than on racing and honestly, they're just not that fun.

Finally I've really got to mention the roster. A Sonic focused racing game is fine by me because, quite frankly, I never much bothered playing with any of the non-Sonic characters in Transformed so I don't really mind that Amigo and Wreck-it Ralph and Danica bleeding Patrick aren't here. But if they ARE going to just have Sonic characters, then why is the roster so small? Why are there so many glaring omissions? There's no Espio and no Charmy, and yet Vector gets shoehorned into a team with Blaze and Silver. Cream's been booted off of Team Rose in favour of a bunch of Chao. This would have been the perfect game to see the Babylon Rogues make a return, too. I'm not saying any of these characters are required, because of course they're all very niche, but the roster's very stripped back compared to Transformed and I'm not really sure why.

I am accentuating the negative only out of frustration for what I do think had the potential to be a much more enjoyable game, were the team mechanics only better balanced, the challenges were more fair and the character roster was a bit more robust. I'm not much into playing online so I can't possibly comment, but reading around it seems it's pretty dead. Hopefully with the sequel announced the developers see what worked and what didn't in this title and we'll have an improved experience in the next game, and I'd recommend anyone on the fence with this one to sit tight and check out the next one instead.

(First comment ever, so sorry for the language, typos and all. Feel free to add/correct any thoughts.)

I give a thumbs up for this game, but I have really mixed opinions.

The reason is that I, growing up with some Sonic racing games (like Sonic Riders, Sonig & Sega All-Stars Racing), can only compare this game to older ones. It is clear that it took inspiration from them, either in maps or music. Which is really awesome! But here’s why I have doubt at times.

What I liked in Team Sonic Racing:

The soundtracks are really amazing, giving back the vibe and pace of the racing itself (if that makes sense). Absolute bangers.

Upgrading the gear. Quite useful.

They still kept the different Types for the racers (just Technique instead of Fly).

It has a story mode (Adventure Mode), and it’s really interesting. The voice acting is on top as always.

The Team Race is absolutely cool! You can earn much more Credits from that, and its techniques actually helps the other teammates, not just giving a gameplay like “we’re in one team and that’s it.”

Altering the appearance not just with upgrades, but in painting and material as well.

Voice acting in the game, with the different lines, is just so good.

However…

What I did not like / What isn’t good at all in Team Sonic Racing:

The online matchmaking is broken – as much as I have heard. No one was in the queue when I waited for a game. I also have heard that the online game by invitation somewhat works. That’s no good.

The Boost is really short-lived. Like in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, the longer you drift, the longer you will boost up. Here it’s only useful if your racer’s boost is upgraded to near maximum or just simply using the Team Ultimate. But in any other case, it’s barely useful.

The Credits only can be used for Mod Pods. You can get Bonus Boxes (to add more chances for different Wisps), Performance Parts and Car Cosmetics. It’s okay, but the fact that you cannot have the chance to buy all these by themselves in a shop, is weird. Just this Mod Pod, that’s all you can buy, and pray to get something good.

There are other characters what I/other players miss from the game. Like a Team Chaotix or Team Babylon would have made much more sense than the Chao or Zavok. These two felt so random, especially to deal with Espio and Charmy as “Vector is her to just get some extra cash”.

[*]Another small notice, but I kinda miss that there's only one music for one map, and not being able to choose between soundtracks. Not a big deal, just mentioning it.

In short,

This game is fun to play, the story and the normal races are great, but sooner or later it will get repetitive, especially by the not-or-barely-working online mode. I’d say if you’re a Sonic fan, you should definitely give it a try, but it’s definitely not worth the 40€. Buy it cheaper.

32:9 support! Thumbs up!

Do NOT buy this game. Excessive loading times and the game will occasionally hang before races start and never progress. Steam refused to refund even with 50mins of play. Thanks for nothing

Very fun kart racer that feels distinct and is not just a mario kart clone

Despite what quite a few of my fellow Sonic fans would say, this is some of the most fun I've had in a Sonic racing spinoff title, and I believe it's one of the best. (Getting this in before Crossworlds, lol.)

vector my fav lalalaalallaaal

This game really had potential but is way incomplete. I still have a little fun now and then but it's getting repetitive due t o lack of options and customization.
So only buy it on heavy sale or if you're a Sonic fanatic.
SEGA only did the very strict minimum to call it a full game imo.

Dead upon arrival, killer soundtrack though.

good game, wish each racetrack was different imo instead of having 3 racetracks for one area.