Sonic is heading back to the race track this September, giving himself the handicap of having to drive a race car to compete with a wide set of opponents, with a new dimension-hopping twist for both the races and the full game roster. But racing doesn’t always have to be so straight forward, and we went hands on with Sonic Racing: Crossworlds at Gamescom to check out the new Race Park modes.
Throughout this latest hands on, the arcade kart racing was completely on show. The handling is tight and snappy, the drifting is more sideways, and as you pull tricks while grabbing some airtime off a ramp, the car will flip in any and every direction with wild abandon. It’s got that oft touted Sega style to it, and you could absolutely imagine this game appearing on arcade cabinets…. if those were still really a thing.
Taking a half step away from the main Grand Prix racing, Race Park provides a bunch of additional team-based modes, to go alongside the core racing experience. Playable online or offline with challenge bots to face off against, you do still have a standard 12-character race mode available to you, but there’s also the option to have that with all items at their highest power, if you want races to be more chaotic.
What’s more interesting is having the lobby split down into two teams of six or three teams of four, each then with various additional objectives and goals. Your team’s score is a combination of points for finishing position and how well you do at those additional goals – in a Eurovision style, the final total sees the racing score added first before the objective score is lumped on top to, quite possibly, flip the result around.
For the three team modes, Ring Grab is the more straight forward, as you do your best to follow the strings of coins laid out through the stage and gather as many as you can, but Tap Boost is sure to be much trickier, as your prime bonus and task here is actually to race closely with your teammates, bumping into them to give you speed boosts and hopefully propel you to the front together. On the two team side of things, you then have Shoot Out to push the combat angle a bit further, and Dash where you need to hit as many boost pads and boost rings as possible. You can also fiddle with these modes even further, if you want, with the ability to create custom ruleset beyond what’s on offer by default.
While dipping into these various modes at Gamescom, we also got to play some newly revealed tracks, and one of these really, truly stood out to me. The standard form of a Crossworlds race will see you do one lap around the chosen track before passing through a portal to an alternate world for the second – the choice of this is handed to the first placed racer – before returning to the original track in a somewhat ramped up form.
This was most obvious to me in the Wonder Museum track, racing through a history museum with countless exhibits for the first lap, but with a grin spreading across my face when returning for the third lap to discover everything had come to life, Night at the Museum style. It’s a really fun track, and I hope there’s plenty more inventive gems to find throughout the rest of the game.
The other surprising element will be the depth of customisation offered by the Gadget Plate, giving you modifier gadgets to slot into place to boost or tweak everything from speed and acceleration, to item counts, how boosting works, item types and more. You can save these in loadouts, so you have quick access to a time trial build, a team mode build, something for different racers and karts, and on. It’s an aspect that we’ve really only had the lightest touch on, but has potential for the full game.
Is Sonic Racing Crossworlds going to be able to shine as brightly as a certain plumber’s karting escapades? You’d doubt it, but I certainly appreciate how different it looks and feels. This game is trying to put its own stamp on the genre, the visuals are right out of the classic blue sky Sega arcade game style, the racing is fast and snappy, and the customisation potential for the Gadget Plate is crazily broad. Adding various twists and spins on the core racing is just the icing on the Sonic-shaped cake.
