I wrote a brief preview of Team Sonic Racing a while back, and I've had the game on pre-order from Amazon for almost a year. Finally, after a lengthy wait and a brief delay, I have been able to play the awaited follow-up to Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed. It's only sort of a follow-up though, as it's not a sequel and the play style is different than the previous two Sonic racing games. It is related in that it comes from Sumo Digital, the racing mechanics of drifting and boosting are fundamentally the same, and that many of the familiar racetracks based on Sonic properties are back again.
This isn't the same racing game that you played before. The "team" aspect of Team Sonic Racing is core to this particular game. You race as part of a team of three in a speed, technique, or power type vehicle/character. For example, Sonic drives a speed vehicle, Tails drives a technique vehicle, and Knuckles drives a power type of vehicle. The benefit of the speed vehicles is in the name. Technique vehicles attract rings more easily and can drive over rough/wet/icy terrain. Power vehicles can break through barriers, allowing for different paths in the racetracks. I quickly found an affinity for the technique characters, although you can easily win races as any character. Additionally, there are seemingly endless modifications one can make to a vehicle, from tires to paint jobs, which is enough to alter the outcome of a race with more than just style.
Items this time around are not the glove and rocket that you remember from previous Sonic racing games. This time they're all Wisps based around the characters from Sonic Colors. The different Wisps have different abilities such as boost, straight-fire, homing, view obstruction, and a mass-attack, among others. It works for the game, which seems to base itself mostly around Sonic Colors and Sonic Unleashed, with some exceptions for Sonic Heroes. Given this, using the Wisps allows for item boxes to tie strictly to Sonic games, as opposed to having generic items that sometimes don't seem to fit in with the surrounding environment.
While the game itself is put together well, it is not without its imperfections and annoyances. Many of these imperfections and annoyances are far more apparent than previous games of the loosely connected series. The first of these are the voice clips and dialogue boxes that appear during races. I really don't need one character saying to another "I thought we were friends" when getting hit by an item. These voice clips come far too often with far too much repetition to be tolerated. There is an option to turn off the voices (thankfully), and also the dialogue boxes. After just a few hours in the game, I turned off both options because the dialogue is irritating and pointless.
For a game that experienced a development delay (which could be for any reason), it sure recycles a lot of previously used content. How many times do I need to play Roulette Road or Whale Lagoon? This is the third time both tracks have appeared in a Sonic racing game, and while I love having plenty of tracks to choose from, these just seem like lazy ways to cobble the game together while keeping costs down. I definitely expected far more original content than this game offers, and it's disappointing, even at the $40 price point. While the appeal of the game is the team racing dynamic, the recycling of certain content for the second or third time is glaring. If anything, the recycled tracks should have been included on top of a full new slate of tracks, not instead of new content.
Also, the game feels a little slow. So many times in Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed my vehicle was going so fast that I could hardly tell what was going on. It was an extreme sense of speed that is second to none. This game, however, feels like driving a Geo Metro in a snowstorm. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but it does feel slow. This isn't a reason to pass over the game, but it is a complaint. Another complaint is that the tracks sometimes do not have defined boundaries. There's one part on a Planet Wisp track where the racers are placed onto a transparent pink section of track. It is extremely difficult to tell when the track turns, splits, and re-joins itself. After playing through it twice, the player can get used to it, but it causes immediate confusion. It would be better with some means of differentiation of boundaries from the track instead of one glob of transparent pink.
The core single-player is a story mode with a new villain. The dialogue is what you might expect from a Sonic game, and the story isn't much so far (admittedly, I haven't had enough time to actually finish the game yet, but I have raced on every track). Truly though, the game is good where it's supposed to be - the team racing dynamic. While racing as a team, each teammate can support each other by sending and receiving item boxes, by assisting in boosts, and in recovering players that have wrecked. The team dynamic adds a new layer to racing and can change the outcome of a race in a split second. By using a slingshot boost at the right moment, a player can improve their standing. By zipping by a teammate, a player can get that teammate back into the race. And by engaging in any of the team behaviors, a team can build its gauge and unlock a team move, which will benefit them greatly.
At $40, it may be worth purchasing the game without playing it first. But bear in mind that this is not Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing or Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed. Those are better games. But this is also a decent game. At the very least, it has split-screen, online, and single-player modes that will offer hours of fun. And it is by Sumo Digital, who have been known to do fantastic work in the past. Perhaps as one goes deeper into the game they will find more fun and less annoyance. Hopefully there will be some DLC tracks, as the core content seems a bit lacking. Regardless, if you are a fan of the genre and the previous two semi-related games, then this will be worth playing, at least for a little while.
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