Team Sonic Racing
Developer Sumo Digital Publisher Sega Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch, Xbox One Release Out now
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Of all the company mascots to receive their own kart-racing game – Sonic, Mario, Diddy Kong, even Crash Bandicoot – the hedgehog famed primarily for fleetness of foot always seemed a strange choice. It’s not only the peculiarity of putting those red sneakers on an accelerator pedal; beyond the immediate draws of Tails and Knuckles, there’s not a particularly deep bench of beloved characters to fill out the starting grid. After all, who out there is really itching to pick Zavok or Blaze The Cat from the character select screen?
The previous Sonic racer from Sumo Digital, 2012’s Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, solved this problem by opening up its roster to include characters from Super Monkey Ball, Crazy Taxi and, memorably, Football Manager. More importantly, it washed away any lingering sense of dissonance by virtue of being a tight arcade racer wrapped up in a great gimmick: tracks and vehicles that switched between land, sea and air.
As the title suggests, the big idea of Team Sonic Racing is that you’ll never race alone. The cast of motoring creatures is grouped into teams of three, with the final result based on their combined performance. It’s easy for a first-place victory to be dragged down by a couple of behind-the-pack teammates, so you’ll need to work together to achieve shared success – a goal that’s made more attainable by a few mechanical tweaks to the basic wheels-on-tarmac experience.
The lead racer on each team leaves a neverending slipstream in their wake, a glowing golden path that allies can follow for a speed boost, cementing the old kart-racer maxim that it’s more fun, and often profitable, to be in second place than first. Spun-out racers can be revived with a nudge from a friend as they speed past. Unwanted power-ups can be traded between teammates, too, so if you find yourself out in front, laden with rockets and no one to fire them at, they can simply be passed along to a friend in need.
In truth, you’ll likely want to do this whatever the circumstances, both because trading comes with a chance of accessing heftier triplicate variants of powerups, and because it’s one of the quickest ways of filling your team’s shared power meter. Once full, you can trigger a Team Ultimate, pumping nitrous into all three tanks for a brief spell of invincibility and a speed boost. It’s a potential race-winner, especially if deployed on the final lap, and well worth steering your entire strategy towards.
Meanwhile, whether you’re playing solo or in multiplayer (online and split-screen options are both available) the game is constantly tossing out voice lines from your teammates, communicating their current status. It’s a level of chattiness that, given the traditional quality of Sonic voice acting, isn’t entirely welcome – especially as each line is also presented in a text box, obscuring the track in front of you.
At times, it feels like the game is trying to create the illusion of teamwork to hide the fact that, in reality, it doesn’t matter all that much. If you can hold your trio in a tight formation, it is possible to trade slipstreams and constantly slingshot off one other, but otherwise, about the biggest decision that teamwork adds is which path to follow when tracks diverge. Although each character is assigned a class (Speed, Technique or Power) team composition doesn’t have any tangible benefits, and knowing your teammate is in need – because, say, Tails is shouting “I’m way in back!” – doesn’t do much to affect your approach. Ultimately, the best tactic is the same as any other racer: maintain speed, avoid crashes and stick as close as possible to the perfect racing line. To quote the hedgehog himself, you gotta go fast.
It feels like the game is trying to create the illusion of teamwork to hide the fact that it doesn’t matter all that much
Like its predecessor, Team Sonic Racing is great at these fundamentals. Tracks alternate between tight chokepoints, encouraging cars to jostle for position, and wide open roads for drifting – richly rewarding both in the resulting speed boost and the sheer pleasure of it. There’s a sense that every moment spent without your finger on the left trigger, throwing out the back wheels and nudging the curve of your drift this way or that, is a moment wasted. Less satisfying is the other essential half of the karting formula: the power-ups. Your arsenal covers all the usual suspects (projectiles, in manual and homing varieties; speed boosts; lightning zaps) but that’s obfuscated by the decision to present each power-up as one of the ‘Wisp’ creatures introduced in Sonic Colors. This hurts their immediate visual readability, as you struggle to remember which power is assigned to the violet Wisp and which to the cyan one.
This contributes to a larger sense that Team Sonic Racing is undergoing a mild identity crisis. The game never manages to sell you on the idea that it has to be these characters behind the wheel, or this world under your tyres. The tracks twist and corkscrew pleasantly but, Sega-blue skies aside, they don’t do much to evoke classic Sonic imagery. It’s perhaps admirable that Sumo bypasses Green Hill Zone but, unless you’re a devotee of the past decade of Sonic continuity, the result comes off a little generic. Including a ghost-themed track called ‘Boo’s House’, for example, feels like it’s inviting comparisons that are probably better avoided.
There are areas where Team Sonic Racing can stand up to comparisons with the very best in class – namely, the joyous feel of guiding its karts around its tracks. Once upon a time, simply offering this experience beyond the walls of a Nintendo console might have been enough, but with the rest of the pack approaching in its rear-view – the nostalgia-boosted Crash Team Racing is only a month behind – a slightly muddled gimmick and dilute sense of identity mean Sonic is unlikely to outpace the competition.
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