Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review - It's great, but...

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is here! I felt a bit lukewarm on the road to its launch. Now that it's out... well, look, this review's late, we already know how much everyone's loving the game by now. It kicks ass. It's the successor to Sonic and All-Stars Racing: Transformed we've been waiting over a decade for, with a bit of added Sonic Riders DNA (i.e.: the Babylon Rogues and Extreme Gear hoverboards are back) to get the best of both worlds. It's easily the best Sonic racing game ever made, and it's another win for Sonic's ongoing comeback era. Hell, I'd say it's in close competition with Shadow Generations for the title of the best Sonic game of any genre since Mania. It's really damn good. Do you know how rare it is for me to enjoy a racing game enough to keep playing the online matchmaking after beating all the Grand Prix cups, like I'm doing with CrossWorlds? It's very rare!

Still! I do have a few nitpicks. Of course I do. If you know me, you can probably figure out what the main thing that bothers me is. But I'm mostly very positive on this game. Allow me to elaborate on the things that stand out to me here, both the ways in which it excels and the things I think they could iron out with updates or a sequel.

The gameplay

The main gimmick of CrossWorlds is, well, the CrossWorlds. You travel through a warp ring to a completely different track for the middle lap of every race, with the player in the lead either choosing the preselected track on the left or taking a risk with the random mystery track on the right. Most of the options are special tracks that are only accessible as CrossWorlds, though you'll also unlock the ability to warp to another one of the standard tracks mid-race.

I wasn't sure how I'd feel about this, but in practice it's a fun shakeup for every race, and it's impressive how easily the game is able to mask the transition without interrupting the gameplay for a loading screen. Most tracks even transform in some way when you return for the third lap, opening up new paths and adding new boost pads and obstacles to raise the stakes for the race's climax. It's pretty great. The Grand Prix mode makes up for the fact that you only get two laps on each main track by having you do a final race with a single lap on all three of the cup's courses back to back, which makes for a great finale.

It's the core gameplay here that really interests me here, though, rather than this flashy gimmick. The driving in CrossWorlds took me a bit to get used to, since it doesn't quite handle how you might expect, but the more I play it the more I fall in love with it. I went back and played a bit of Transformed and Team Sonic Racing to compare the three games for this review, and it was genuinely kind of hard to go back to those older games because CrossWorlds just feels that much better to play. And I say that as someone who used to think Transformed was one of the best kart racers ever made!

Early on, I found myself surprised by how brutal the singleplayer races against the computer seemed to be. I can win 150cc Mario Kart races no problem, but even just playing on the medium speed setting here I found myself constantly running into walls, falling into pits, and generally getting crushed by the CPUs. Fall off the track once and you'll easily drop from 1st place to 8th due to how tight the pack usually is. (I guess it's nothing if not honest about how races against real players tend to go.) Before long, I realized my problem: unlike in Mario Kart or the Sumo Digital games, CrossWorlds expects you to actually let go of the gas while drifting around hairpin turns, rather than just holding down the accelerate button forever. I actually really like how this feels, adding that teeny tiny extra bit of realism and thoughtfulness to the way your car handles. Everything clicked and my performance instantly improved when I made this change to how I was playing.

This creative choice with the controls emphasizes what seems to be the core philosophy of the racing here: to find the perfect balance between approachability and technical depth. This is far from the most complicated racing game ever made, but there's just enough complexity here to make it feel rewarding to master. Yes, this is a kart racer full of wacky items to help you catch up when you're behind or slow down the people in front of you, but there are also a lot of items with defensive uses for smart players, which makes it feel like skilled play is still rewarded more than in some other kart racers. And racing against the CPUs will certainly push you to acquire that skill—even knowing the basics, I still have to be on my toes and make good use of shortcuts and boosts to win against the tricky rival racers in Grand Prix mode, which I'm still working through as I try to get all the red star rings and beat every rival.

As part of this low barrier to entry, high skill ceiling ethos, CrossWorlds surfaces a lot of basic information for you to help you understand what you're doing. It shows you your speed, which is a thing not all kart racers do but feels helpful in a game so focused on tweaking your stats. There's an explicit timing meter to help you get the timing on starting boost just right. When you have a homing weapon the game will show you a targeting reticle to help you know when to take the shot, and it will also show you when you're in someone else's crosshairs. Even the drift boosts have a gauge that pops up to tell you exactly how close you are to each level of boost. All these extra UI elements might sound overwhelming, but in practice it all feels very helpful.

Returning from Transformed is the ability for your vehicle to turn into a boat or a plane for sea and sky sections. These too have gained a bit more mechanical depth. I particularly like that charging up in boat form has you leap into the air. In the open water you can use this to do some aerial tricks for a quick boost, but there also tend to be cleverly placed boost rings floating in the air above the water that you can use a charge jump to reach, often leading to an alternate route.

Once you get the hang of the basics, you can further customize your play style through the use of unlockable gadgets. There's a ton of variety here, with gadgets that apply to just about every aspect of the race, and you're free to use whatever combination you want within your allotted six slots. Your basic stats, item probabilities, starting items, ring bonuses, drifting behavior, traction, aerial tricks, slipstreams, you name it, all of it can be tweaked. You could spend a very long time fine tuning your selection of gadgets to perfectly complement your playstyle, or to compensate for your favorite character's statistical weaknesses. Or you could just do some silly shit like starting every race with the monster truck item to terrorize people online. The choice is yours. Again, they struck a great balance between approachability and technical depth. I'm very impressed.

Speaking of customization, racing will also net you tickets that can be spent on vehicle parts. It's not the most in-depth car building or anything, with the body just being down to a choice of a front half, back half, and wheels, but the color options and decals allow you to do a lot with it to make your car or Extreme Gear feel like your own. I've had a lot of fun making custom vehicles that feel like they fit certain characters, or recreating famous fictional vehicles (naturally I've made several Transformers), or just doing something funny like having Blaze drive around in what looks like a cardboard box. And there's a subtle social aspect to the matchmaking lobbies that I really like, where you get a moment to admire everyone's custom vehicles and say hello and honk at each other while voting on the track. It's great.

But a lot of you probably aren't here for my thoughts on the gameplay. I'm known as someone who talks about Sonic's comics, not his games. I'm invested in the cast, the worldbuilding, the weird lore and decades of continuity. How does all that stuff fare in this multiplayer party game?

A window into Sonic's world

As a lifelong fan of Sonic's colorful world and characters, I'm delighted that CrossWorlds is their best showcase in ages.

Let's start with the world. The All-Stars games and Team Sonic Racing had their share of Sonic tracks, but they mostly focused on locations from Sonic Heroes that we've seen a million times at this point. Team Sonic Racing had more returning Sonic locations, but it divided its tracks into seven themed zones which mostly felt like your typical platformer environments. Planet Wisp as the grass level, Sandopolis as the desert level, Glacierland as the fire and ice level, Seaside Hill as the beach level, etc. It felt repetitive and uninspired, the main standout being a zone set in Spagonia from Sonic Unleashed.

Here, though, there's no such rigid platformer world theming. We still have a few obligatory Heroes level themes, but joining them are recreations of iconic levels like Metal Harbor, Radical Highway, Sweet Mountain, and Apotos, deeper cuts like Dinosaur Jungle and White Cave, plus a whole cup of tracks based on Frontiers, Superstars, and Shadow Generations. On top of that, we also have a bunch of completely new tracks set in a variety of imaginative locations.

This game really feels like going on a sightseeing tour of Sonic's version of Earth, with locations that mix real world inspiration with a bit of sci-fi and fantasy. The shopping mall level has what appears to be a giant gachapon machine for full-sized cars. There's a town built out of an exposed coral reef. A quarry full of giant construction vehicles digging up colorful crystals. A Chao theme park with a gravity-defying rollercoaster racetrack. A futuristic city built into a rocky red canyon. A museum for the wonders of the world that takes its exhibits from past games. A forest of towering trees where boats travel on the elevated waterways that twist and turn between the branches. Even the obligatory Eggman-themed final track is themed as an expo for his creations, rather than your typical final fortress. It's so fun to see Sega brainstorm all these new locales where people in Sonic's world might live, work, or visit on vacation. The tracks actually remind me very heavily of the types of locations we tend to see in the IDW comics, which makes me excited for when the comics inevitably start setting stories in places like Coral Town or Chao Park.

It's the characters who really shine here, though. The main thing I've wanted out of a new Sonic game post-Frontiers was something that could shine a spotlight on the extended cast, and the hours of fun rival interactions Ian Flynn got to write for CrossWorlds do exactly that. Seriously, it's hours. There's two unique exchanges for every pair of characters on the base roster, with a different one depending on who's the player character and who's the CPU, and the compilation video of all of them is over three and a half hours long. And that's not even getting into the comments you'll get if you play as certain characters on certain tracks, or incidental dialogue you get sometimes when hitting someone with an item. It's also worth noting that with a roster this big, a good number of those rival interactions are the first time those pairs of characters have ever interacted in canon before. But even the series regulars feel like they've gotten new life breathed into them thanks to Ian's writing and what are generally the best voice performances the series has seen in a while.

Like with the imaginative new tracks, the rival interactions really sell the idea that Sonic has this rich world full of characters with long histories, established relationships, and all sorts of off-screen adventures. For more casual fans who might not even know all of these characters, this is a great introduction that totally sells what's fun about these characters. The Babylon Rogues will chew out Rouge for beating them to some treasure they were trying to steal. Amy makes Espio come up with a haiku. Big responds to everyone's taunts with blissful nonchalance. Sage reminds us that, even though she helped out Sonic in Frontiers, she's still fiercely loyal to Eggman. Vector tries to bribe Charmy into letting him win with a promise of his choice of takeout after the race, and Charmy teases him and say he's just trying to impress Vanilla. Blaze responds to everything with unflappable confidence, because as always she's the coolest. Cream is such a sweet little thing who's just trying her best that even Omega, bloodthirsty death machine that he is, doesn't want to hurt her. Even Zavok is kind of cool here, which shouldn't be surprising when Ian's Sonic: Bad Guys miniseries for IDW was the only time I've ever liked the guy. It's all so, so good, and there are still so many of these interactions that I haven't even seen.

But when so many aspects of this game are so great, and when it feels so close to perfection, its noticeable shortcomings stand out more. They're mostly minor, in the grand scheme of things, but they're worth discussing.

Presentation weirdness

First and foremost, there are a lot of little things with the way CrossWorlds is presented that add up to make it feel less polished than it should be, compared to both other entries in the genre and sometimes even previous Sonic games.

Take the character models, for instance. Longtime readers know I'm the last person to get super anal about Sonic character designs and bust out the red pen to correct muzzle curves or quill lengths or whatever. But the models just aren't very good. They haven't been for a long time. I think we all know this. They don't animate all that well. The faces look stiff and unexpressive and lack the charm of the 2D art. They have these giant, dead, glossy eyes that look awful in the short focal length closeups Sega favors. The side mouths look pretty terrible when they're firmly stuck in one position, rather than moving around the muzzle dynamically like they would in 2D. This isn't just fandom nitpicking—since it has 8.4 million views, I'm sure many of you reading this have seen veteran animator Daniel Floyd's feature length analysis of the evolution of Sonic's animation over on his YouTube channel New Frame Plus, where he came to the same conclusions about how these games are visually stuck in a rut.

Amy's a great example of this. It's easy to say Ian's writing or Cindy Robinson's voice acting are to blame for the way Amy's felt a bit off in recent games. And sure, those could be factors. Lots of Amy's lines are pretty bland ones about wanting everyone to play nice, though as always I'm unsure if this is down to Ian's own vision for the character or if his bosses at Sonic Team still don't know what they want to do with her, leaving her with a sanded-down personality. But even when Amy does get a rival interaction that gives her some more attitude, it falls flat because of how lifeless her canned animations are. Her range of facial expressions basically just come down to the position of her eyelids and whether or not she's smiling. It's no wonder people think she had more personality in Riders when you directly compare the games like this!

I feel like Sega got away with using these mediocre models for over a decade because, well, Sonic is kind of a budget game franchise. Fans might not want to admit this, but let's be honest with ourselves. Multiple new Sonic games have been released for less than full price in the last decade, and it's far from one of Sega's most costly series to produce. This is one of the secrets to its longevity. Sonic's a reliable workhorse for Sega that won't break the bank to make but is guaranteed to sell decently well. So we put up with them just looking okay at best. (Well, okay, fans always complained online, but we still kept buying the games.)

Now, though, if Sega's confident in Sonic's ability to be a big boy game franchise again and they're gonna start charging a full $70 for new games, they've gotta get their shit together and up the polish. I don't need to see Eggman's pores or every individual bristle on Sonic's head, but it'd be nice if the characters could, y'know... emote? If the models captured the charm of the 2D art more? Heavily stylized, cartoony, anime-inspired 3D animation in video games has come so far in the last decade, and these same old Sonic models and their stiff animation only look worse and worse by comparison every year. At the very least, give the models improved rigs so they can actually move their faces and use more squash and stretch, like how Sonic Prime basically just used the standard designs but animated them with a hundred times more charm. The writing's there, and the voice acting's improving, but the way the characters look is letting them down. If the Mario movie can inspire Nintendo to touch up their designs and emphasize their cartoony expressiveness a bit more rather than using the same old models from the '00s forever, then Sonic Team can do the same.

While on the subject of polish, the audio also feels very rough to me. I don't know how many people have noticed, but it's like I'm listening to the game through a shitty phone speaker, even when I'm playing with headphones. The kind of hollow, tinny quality feels the worst on songs with vocals, such as the lap 3 song for Water Palace where I just have no fucking clue what they're saying due to the mixing. The very blatant audio ducking whenever there's a voice line or a sound effect probably doesn't help. All of this makes it much harder to appreciate what I'm sure is a great soundtrack underneath the bad mixing, which is such a shame in a series known for its banger soundtracks. Likewise all of the character voices are processed in a way that makes it sound like they're speaking through a microphone on a stage or something. I don't know, I'm no audio engineer. Looking around a bit, it seems like the mid-range frequencies are cranked too high in the music's mix compared to the lows and highs, but that might be completely wrong. I just know that it sounds bad.

For an example of what I mean with the music, listen to the Sky Road theme from Team Sonic Racing, and then compare it to its new remix from CrossWorlds.

There's just... no bass! It sounds weirdly muffled! It's so dire! Why did they make everything sound like this? Why is it mixed like a damn 3DS game? I noticed this in all the preview materials and thought that it might be some weird YouTube compression or something, but no, the game really sounds like this.

For another example, listen to the original Metal Harbor theme from Sonic Adventure 2 and then listen to the new remix, and compare how much fuller the bass sounds in the original. It's like they went through and applied a high pass filter to every song in CrossWorlds.

I'm also mildly annoyed by the fact that you only get to hear the lap 1 song for each track once, whereas you hear the lap 3 variants twice in Grand Prix mode, since the final race through all three courses is set to their lap 3 music. This mostly bugs me on the aforementioned Metal Harbor, where I like the regular stage theme way more than the remix from the part of the level when the rocket is taking off. This is an incredibly minor nitpick, but I think about this every time I race on Metal Harbor. (I'm listening to the Skatune Network remix while writing this to compensate.)

But, truly, there's one complaint I have with the game that dwarfs all others. Yeah, it's time for that conversation. The thing that made me less enthusiastic for the game during its pre-launch hype cycle, which still rubs me the wrong way.

The roster and its priorities

If the game comes out and Tangle and Whisper aren't in it, but SpongeBob is? Sorry, but you're never going to hear the end of it from me lmao

thankskenpenders, June 22nd, 2025

A promise is a promise. Allow me to rant a little.

It almost feels greedy to complain about the roster here when we already have the largest and most complete roster of Sonic characters ever assembled for an official racing game. We've got all twelve playable characters from Sonic Heroes along with Silver, Blaze, Eggman, Metal Sonic, Sage, the triumphant return of the Babylon Rogues, the unwanted but still kind of funny return of Zavok and Zazz, and even a lowly Egg Pawn as a wild card addition. That's basically the entire core cast of the "Modern" era games, with the only major characters excluded mostly being those who are literally dead or otherwise somehow sealed away like Tikal or Infinite.

But I guess that's the thing. When almost everyone is here, the few remaining exclusions stand out more.

It'd be one thing if it was clear that they only had the resources for a smaller roster, but when we've already got dozens of characters with more on the way via updates and DLC, why not go that extra mile and add just a few more deep cuts? I would've loved to see some more obscure game characters who are usually relegated to the comics like Gemerl or Vanilla. If we can have an Egg Pawn, why not a few more low level Badniks, like a Motobug or a Caterkiller? Given the "crossworlds" framing and the fact that all the races are, like, VR simulations or something, you could use that as an excuse to bring back some villains like Chaos, Mephiles, or Infinite, or Classic era characters like Fang, Trip, Bean, Bark, or Honey. Think about how funny Black Doom would've been! If we can have Sonic racing alongside his long-gone Werehog form, those don't seem like such a stretch. If we can have Sonic Prime characters in the DLC, then why not throw in Sticks? Ian's been trying to bring back Sticks for the better part of a decade at this point, and we know damn well she exists in the main universe because Amy name drops her in the ending of Frontiers. This would've been the perfect place to reintroduce her!

And, of course, there's the elephant in the room, the thing y'all knew I had to harp on: the IDW cast. When Tangle, Whisper, and Surge are now mainstays of the mobile games, and when the comics literally did a big Extreme Gear race arc mere months ago, it feels like a huge missed opportunity to not include them here.

Some of you who aren't fans of the comics may balk at this, thinking the comic cast should just stay in the comics, or thinking that because they're more obscure they don't "deserve" to be included. Many people playing the game won't know who they are, so why bother? (As if every casual fan picking this up because they heard it was a good kart racer knows who the Babylon Rogues, Zavok, or Sage are.) But that's the point! I think the comic characters all kick ass, and we should be introducing them to a wider audience! This would've been the perfect opportunity to add a few of them to a console game with no actual plot so that more casual fans of the games can become acquainted with them, and from there it'd be easier to have them pop up in games with actual plots. If they went the full mile with them, this would also be the opportunity to give these characters voices for the first time. Sega's already including them in the mobile games and making plushies and action figures out of them, so why not include them here, too? Ian is literally the main writer of the games now, and Evan is contributing artwork to them! Why not let them put the fan favorite characters they created in the console games?

(There's also a small part of me that wishes the crossover nature of this game meant they'd throw us oldheads a bone and put Sally or Bunnie in the game, but I know how much of a stretch that is, so I won't harp on it. I can still dream.)

There's still a small chance we'll get some of these characters in the future via updates. There's already a custom Extreme Gear board for Whisper in the game. But I'm not holding out much hope at this point. If they do get added, they almost definitely won't have voices or interactions with the rest of the cast. They didn't even give the Sonic Prime characters voices, and they're literally just alternate versions of Tails, Knuckles, and Amy! But even a low-effort pack of mute IDW characters seems unlikely when Sega's made it clear that their focus is on crossovers, crossovers, and more crossovers.

I know people are excited for a lot of those crossover characters. Sure, I'm hyped for Mega Man and Proto Man, both of whom got really nice new models for the occasion. And some of the classic Sega characters like Nights feel like no brainers, and I'm not gonna say no to Miku, and Ichiban being there will be funny. And yes, the Minecraft minecart is fun to decorate with decals. But part of the reason why I've been excited for these newer Sonic kart racing games is that they used to only be able to scratch the surface of the Sonic stuff with only the most entry level characters and locations, and without the broad All-Stars branding they can dig way deeper. But now, when we're on the cusp of a truly complete Sonic roster, instead we're getting shoehorned crossover characters like Joker Personafive and Minecraft Steve and SpongeBob and Aang—not to mention the bevy of completely random, asinine brand tie-ins you can find if you dig through the vehicle decals. You can't put a PNG of Trip or Surge on your car, but you can sure as hell slap the ASUS logo on it. Multiple different ASUS logos! And also Alienware, and Lenovo, and Samsung, and MSi, and Razer, and...

"But Bobby," you might argue. "If you don't care for the crossovers, then just don't buy the DLC or play as those characters." Well guess what? The game is determined to shove the crossovers in everyone's faces whether they buy the DLC or not! It feels like damn near every weekend post-launch when I wanna play online, the regular online play is swapped out for a promotional festival for the latest crossover. You can't play regular races during these festivals, you can only do the gimmicky team races where you can literally finish in 1st place and still lose because your teammates didn't play for the bonus objective. If there's a new crossover map, it'll be in the pool of selectable tracks every single race and you'll play it over and over again. You also can't rank up during these festivals, as the regular progression is replaced with a limited time battle pass type thing where you can unlock free cosmetics for the crossover. (Yaaaayyyy, FOMO! If you want that shit you better get grinding, because you've only got two days!) Even the social aspect is diminished, because everyone's specially customized vehicles are repainted to display their team colors. Sorry, I know you wanted to play a Sonic racing game, but this weekend it's a Minecraft racing game.

(The fact that I've had multiple festival races where I was doing super well and getting a bunch of tap boosts for the bonus objective only to have the game randomly disconnect me from the race didn't help me enjoy this past festival either. lmao)

These crossovers feel like a cynical corporate cross-promotion move more than anything, especially when they couldn't even be assed to give the guest characters voices. We literally have the writer of Worlds Collide writing the dialogue here, but he can't actually write an interaction for Sonic and Mega Man because Mega Man doesn't have a voice. The Sega characters are here to promote other Sega games, or to maybe get fans of those other Sega games to wanna pick this up. The Nick characters are here because Sonic is a valuable film property for Paramount now, and they want to promote their other shit. The Minecraft gang is here because Minecraft is the most popular game in the world, and its movie made almost a billion dollars. This is the beginning and end of the creative aspirations here.

Sure, maybe a few more kids will buy the game because they heard that SpongeBob is in it, but it's a $70 game with a $20 or $30 season pass, depending on whether you bought the digital deluxe edition or waited to pick up the DLC later. Forgive me if I have a hard time believing that, in this economy, many people who weren't already going to buy it will fork over $90 to $100 for a Sonic kart racer because they like one or two of the guest characters, especially in a post-Fortnite world where crossover characters in online multiplayer games are a dime a dozen. I'm sure parents aren't too eager to pay that price when their kids already have plenty of Roblox games where they can see Sonic and SpongeBob interacting with Freddy Fazbear and Pomni. But also, even if this does work as a marketing tactic... as a fan and a critic, it's not my job to rationalize and validate the business decisions behind the art. I don't give a shit about Sega's profits. I don't give a shit if these crossover characters are better for their bottom line than Fang or Gemerl or Tangle, and if the buzz sells a bajillion more copies. I give a shit about the game. And it feels like a missed opportunity that all the development resources that went into these cynical crossovers didn't instead go towards more Sonic stuff. I think this shit just waters down the game's creative identity in a way that's exhausting.

Ironically, I might be less bothered by the weirder crossovers that All-Stars Racing Transformed did back in the day than I am by the ones CrossWorlds is doing with series that are all things I like. For one thing, the All-Stars Racing games were already a hodgepodge of random Sega characters that didn't fit together by design. But picks like a tag team trio of Team Fortress 2 mercenaries or one of the guys from The Yogscast or the football manager from Football Manager were so random that it was at least kind of funny. (Also, most of the truly weird ones were added later as random bonuses for the PC port. They were largely an afterthought, not the main event.) Now, though, the game is pitched as a celebration of all things Sonic, and yet the season pass is dedicated to popular characters from big name franchises that aggressively seek out as many cheap crossovers like this as possible. In both cases it's little more than an advertisement, but at least a woefully misguided, ineffective advertisement is a little funnier than a very typical one.

This is just everything now, I guess. I'll admit I'm part of the problem as a regular Fortnite player, but that game sold its soul years ago to become the big dumb crossover game. (If it even had a soul to begin with.) We don't need everything to be Fortnite, but shareholders everywhere sure wish everything could be Fortnite, so now everything is crossovers and nothing means anything anymore. Magic the Gathering is constantly pumping out licensed crossover sets instead of maintaining its own artistic identity. Destiny 2 got Ghostbusters cosmetics and now they're diluting their original sci-fi universe with a whole Star Wars expansion. Everyone gets a comic crossover miniseries where they get their turn fighting Godzilla. Beavis and Butthead and Gundam Aerial are in Call of Duty. Overwatch characters can cosplay as Team Avatar. The gods in Smite can be replaced with the Ninja Turtles and characters from Stranger Things. Sonic and Kafka from Kaiju No. 9 can team up to fight Skibidi Toilet in PUBG Mobile. Our media landscape is being Funko Pop-ified, and we're just supposed to sit here and clap every time they put two things we recognize side by side with minimal effort. It's exhausting, especially because it's so often the same things getting shoved into as many crossovers as possible. Years ago the Ninja Turtles would've been an exciting thing to mash up with Sonic as two series with so much shared DNA, but now that the turtles are a staple Nickelodeon brand getting shoved into everything it just feels like them checking another thing off the list. It's hard to get excited about even good crossovers in a world like this.

Again, overall, this doesn't completely kill my enthusiasm for the game. It's still a phenomenal kart racer, and there are already mods to add most of the additional characters I'd want on PC. But I have to be honest about my feelings here. And my feelings are that this is supposed to be a Sonic game, and I want to be a Whisper main, not a Patrick Star main. No amount of patronizing lectures about how Patrick will sell more season passes than Whisper would will change my mind on that. These crossovers are watering down what I like about this game and making it blend together with every other modern multiplayer game full of cosmetic DLC for many of these same properties.

Closing thoughts

Uh, so anyway, yeah, crossover exhaustion aside, I still really love this game overall. It's both a great kart racer and a great Sonic game. The core gameplay is a blast, it's got heart and soul, I just think it still has room to improve. A lot of my complaints could theoretically be addressed via patches, such as an audio mixing fix or a retooling of the festival structure, or via further content updates and DLC that expand the pool of Sonic characters further. With the character models, though, we'll just have to wait and see if Sega ever decides to redo them in a future game.

The other big question on everyone's minds: is it better than Mario Kart World? The fandom's eager to turn this into some kind of petty console war thing, which annoys me to no end. (It's so fucking lame to see people act like Sega's really sticking it to Nintendo and their $80 kart racer, as if CrossWorlds isn't $70 with a $20-$30 DLC season pass on top of that. Sega is not your friend! Stop tying your self-worth to whether or not normies think Sonic is cooler than Mario!) But really, it's a two cakes situation. One is a more casual experience with weaker online options, but I do like driving around Mario's easygoing open world and listening to the gargantuan jazz fusion soundtrack quite a bit, and it's a lot easier on the eyes. But I also like the more traditional, arcade-style gameplay in CrossWorlds, with its greater mechanical depth and more robust online options. That gameplay, the character interactions, and my Sonic bias are enough to give it the win for me, but I enjoy what both are doing with the genre.

For that matter, I also think there's still value in Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers, its highly technical gameplay for sickos, and its sizable modding scene. The genre is richer when we have all these different options that try new things, as opposed to endless clones of what Mario Kart has already done in the past.

Here's hoping Sega's recent hot streak continues with whatever they decide to put out next. You know I'll be there day one. In the meantime, I'll see y'all online, and maybe someday it'll be an IDW character behind the wheel.