Earlier this year we got to play Sonic 4 with its retro-inspired gameplay and its pared-back view of the Sonic universe. In Sonic Free Riders all of his friends and enemies are back in full force.

Free Riders, at its centre, is a kart racing game. You race against other characters from the Sonic canon and you collect weapons along the way to throw at them. It has speed boosts, collectibles, power ups and huge jumps. The unique aspect lies in the control system.

The player stands, as if on a virtual hoverboard. Lean forward to speed up, left and right to steer and face head on to brake. You can make jumps by literally making a jump and if you get the timing right your on-screen character will perform tricks and earn you more Air power to help increase your speed.

Unfortunately, the controls don’t often work as you expect them to. The issue isn’t that the Kinect sensor is misjudging your movements; rather that the game is endlessly inconsistent in how it interprets those actions. What once caused you to turn in a graceful sweep will now make you jerk harshly to one side and lose all momentum. On the next corner you might try to smooth your actions and the game will not notice you leaning at all so that you slam into a wall. The same inconsistencies are rife throughout all aspects of the game’s controls.

When you get a race where it all seems to click this can be a really enjoyable experience. Leaning into a turn and watching Sonic gracefully glide around it before you jump off a ramp, pulling stunts all the way to your landing is a joy to behold. Add to that sequence a well-timed flick of the wrist to launch a successful missile at an opponent and you might feel like this is a wonderfully inspired take on the karting genre. Unfortunately, these positive experiences are hugely outnumbered by the negative ones.

The most attractive game mode will be Grand Prix where the player is presented with a selection of challenges ranging from collecting a number of rings to just winning a race. Usually this concept would be welcome but the crippling inaccuracies in control make the objectives an often-frustrating target for your simmering fury rather than an attainable goal you will strive for.

Despite some really rather clever track design, encompassing shortcuts and alternate routes, the game is rarely enjoyable because of the way it fails to interpret your movements. The dropped weapons and obstacles become almost impossible to avoid without slamming into another wall. The frequent confusion shown on screen when the game thinks you’re facing right even though you’re actually facing left is reminiscent of Kudo Tsunoda’s now-infamous “Bam, there it is” moment on stage at E3 in 2009.

Even the sections of certain courses where your hoverboard changes form don’t present enough of a difference to compensate for the shoddy controls. Some courses contain sections with alternate control methods, such as swimming, and although these are a nice trick to change up the control method and give the action some variation they’re not enough.

Collecting rings over the course of a race (by holding out your arms in the appropriate direction) allows you to buy new equipment in the store. You can upgrade your board for a faster or more manoeuvrable one although they won’t save you from the control issues. Interestingly, you can also purchase parts which give you special abilities. This ties-in with the impressive track design in that certain parts will give you certain abilities (like grinding) which are more beneficial on certain tracks than on others. Your board will only take a limited number of these upgrades so you will have to constantly consider what is best based on your knowledge of the tracks.

Pros:

• Great track design.
• Upgrades add a sense of strategy.
• Visually decent with a good sense of speed.

Cons:

• The controls are simply abysmal.
• Constant retries after failure due to awful controls are infuriating.

Sonic Free Riders had potential. There is actually a very good take on the karting genre buried beneath the over-saturated Sonic styling and the hovering vehicles. Unfortunately the lack of any consistency in the control system renders this almost unplayable and completely negates any of the good aspects of the game. If this was pad-controlled it would be scoring comfortably above average but as it is we can’t, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone but the most ardent and patient Sonic fans.

Score: 3/10