The year was 2012, and I was living in an unremarkable share house with a couple of my best friends in coastal Rockingham, Western Australia. As a household of gamers, we were forever hunting for couch multiplayer games to kick back with on evenings and weekends. Unfortunately, the PS3 and Xbox 360 were arguably the beginning of the end of the split-screen experience – at least for a period of time – so we had to take what we could get.
Enter Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. While my housemates were understandably skeptical about getting into one of many we have Mario Kart at home situations, especially when we did in fact have Mario Kart at home, I’d enjoyed its predecessor, Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, enough that I felt confident introducing it into the rotation. We lost many, many nights to Transformed.
Which is all to say that I’ve been patiently waiting for a return to the thrills of Transformed for over a decade now. We did get Team Sonic Racing in 2019, which was a fun enough racer with some neat gimmicks around racing as a squad of three, but that’s not what I craved. I wanted a return to what had made the prior game special – vehicles that could flick between land, sea and air mid-race and tracks that took advantage of this by shifting and changing with each explosive lap.
And look, this is already starting to feel a bit too SEO-optimised preamble before an online recipe for my liking so I’ll cut to the feeling. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds not only brings back Transformed-style, multi-discipline vehicles, but it takes the evolving track idea and pushes it into high gear with one of the most important gaming innovations of this generation and every generation before it – portals.
My friends, we are so back.
Gentleman, hedge your hogs!
I was lucky enough to spend a solid few hours with Sonic Racing: CrossWorld’s ‘Closed Network Test (CNT) this past weekend, after throwing my hat in the ring for access following the recent, full reveal of the game at a PlayStation State of Play, and I have good news. Portals, those magical, swirling gateways between worlds that were invented specifically for 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog feature film, already feel like a clever compromise between introducing a new hook and recapturing the best parts of Transformed.
Content-wise, the CrossWorlds CNT (yeah, you know how I’m pronouncing that) contained about what you’d expect – a handful of tracks and a smattering of the characters that’ll be available in the full thing, all playable in the most basic, online quick race mode. A small morsel of the entire dish, but enough to get a good taste of what to expect.
The track selection felt like a decent mix of relatively basic and more complex layouts, with some familiar themes/locales and some fresh ones. We’ve also got a rough confirmation of character counts with nine to pick from in the CNT and a total of 28 character slots visible in the selection screen. That’s quite a sizeable potential roster for launch, and with the network test sampling already including some deeper cuts like Zazz from Sonic: Lost World, I’m excited to see who else is in store.
“Rated PEGI-18”
This is an arcade racing game though, so the most crucial learning from the CNT was always going to be how the on-track driving and action feels. And I’m happy to report that it kinda rips. While it was never as gentle and easy to slide into as the Mario Karts of the world, Transformed always had a great driving model, and so far CrossWorlds is continuing on that legacy nicely. Drifting and drift-boosting in particular are satisfying at a base level and offer plenty of reward to those that take to the practice skillfully.
Interestingly, this game also allows for some added tweaking to character builds with Gadgets that apply effects like improved slipstreaming, more lucrative coin collecting and even extra levels of boost generated by drifting. These take up several slots – sometimes multiple at once if it’s a particularly useful Gadget – out of a total of six, and there are a heap of them, so I’m excited to see how much I can personalise my racing style in the context of the full game. Unfortunately I can’t speak too much to the differences in individual characters that were available in the CNT because I spent the entire time with my boy Sonic. I could see a lot of rival racers favouring some of the tankier characters and vehicles, which might make sense when we talk about the power-up situation.
Obligatory screenshot of me crushing it
Vehicles, though, offer a nice amount of customisation. They fall into a few typical archetypes for things like speed, power and so on, but it looks like there’ll be quite a few different components to unlock and mix to give your ride the exact look you want. The paint options are surprisingly comprehensive with tons of different colours and an exhaustive list of paint finishes
But it’s the track designs here that I’m excited about above anything else. The most successful part of Transformed was how its tracks would evolve, lap by lap, so that no one go ‘round was the same, and racers were constantly moving between racing on land, on water and in the air.
While CrossWorlds doesn’t appear to have the shifting and changing environments of that game, what it does have are those portals. These appear at the end of every first lap – all of the races in the CNT were only two laps long, which I’m unsure about – and send everyone onto a completely different track without breaking the flow of the race. You could go from flying around ocean-bound air carriers to a flaming volcano, or from a neon-soaked stadium to an equally neon-soaked casino, with seemingly no boundaries on which pairs of tracks interact, aside from which of two portals the first-place racer decides to drive through.
Obligatory screenshot of me crushing on Amy
I enjoyed this transformative new idea quite a bit in the couple of hours I spent with the CrossWorlds CNT. It’s in the spirit of that legacy game that I love, but also adds an extra layer of unpredictability. No matter how well I’d learn a particular track or how I felt about it, there was always the promise of a surprise, second track. I can only imagine that sentiment is going to ring even more true once I’m playing the full game with its entire track selection.
If I had a criticism during the CrossWorlds CNT, and it’s one that a few folks I’ve spoken to share, it’s the frequency and mix of power ups in races. This is a trap that most arcade racers that aren’t Mario Kart fall into, desperate to nail that perfect balance of items that Nintendo’s series has honed over many years, but wary of too closely aping it.
CrossWorlds’ solution seems to be to include obvious facsimiles of all of MK’s items and a portion of its own ideas on top. It’s simply too much, and the actual item designs don’t have strong enough silhouettes to be quickly recognisable in the heat of the moment. Coupled with the fact that item boxes are everywhere on tracks and things can get too chaotic too fast. Hopefully this is something that Sonic Team addresses from CNT survey feedback before launch.
Overall, I had a ton of fun with this early look at Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, even within the limited bounds of a single online mode and restricted track/character selection. There’s a lot left to be curious about when it comes to the full package – the wider roster, track selection and mode offerings are all still a mystery – but I’m ready and revving to go when the game drops later this year.
Sonic Racing: Crossworlds launches on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Switch and PC later in 2025.
