Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds (2025)

Sonic Racing: Crossworlds delivers. It's fast, it's crazy, it's fun.

While it doesn't offer the same polish and production values as Mario Kart World (yeah, I got this far before making the comparison), it's focus on good, memorable tracks and very SEGA-esque drift-heavy arcade racing makes me prefer it. The drift mechanics took some time to get used to and the gameplay feels really chaotic at first but, after a while, things start to gel. Once you get in the swing of things, pulling some crazy drifts and fast laps in the fastest class feels great. Tha game also has pretty nice progression, where doing different game modes unlocks you different things. For example, doing time trials opens up new tarcks from past Sonic games to listen to during races.

Also, the game has some nice original ideas. The big new thing is, of course, the "CrossWorlds" mechanics, where you do one lap, then teleport to a new track for the second lap, and then return for the third lap to a slightly different variant of the track you started in. It's works quite nicely, and makes races more varied. Then there's the badges you can equip, so you can make a different "build" for your races. The game also has a "rival" mechanic, where your character gets a rival for each cup you play. Basically this amounts to your character and the rival thrash talking to each other, but there has been quite a lot of effort put into the interactions between different characters. Also, while it's not a totally new thing, it still feel kind of novel to switch between a car, a boat and a plane during the races.

To top it off, the soundtrack of the game is immaculate, and the game doesn't look too bad either. At least the Switch 2 version is pretty solid. The game also has some pretty cool cross-over DLC characters and tracks with various SEGA and non-SEGA franchises (although the DLC characters are completely silent).

Recommended.