I got an e-mail in my promotions tab – not a tab I spend a lot of time browsing. But, for some reason, there I was – in GMail – looking through promotions.
SONIC RACING CROSSWORLDS!
Hey, I love me a good mascot racer! I haven’t gotten the latest ones for the Switch 2 because…. I don’t have a Switch 2, and don’t plan to get one at this point. I may think differently when Pokemon Legends Z-A comes out, but we’ll see. To be super honest, I’m not sure when I last actually bought a kart racer. Maybe Mario Kart 8 for the Wii?
It’s tough when iconic kart racers like Super Mario Kart and Sonic Riders still exist.
But the real problem with playing retro games, aside from the difficulty in finding a way to play them (it’s not that hard; most of these older games are available on modern systems through their game stores) – the real problem is that once people buy these games, they’re done buying them!
And that’s where Sonic Racing: Crossworlds comes in. This is a problem they have solved. They solved it the Wizards of the Coast way.
See, back in the olden days, the days of knights and princesses and myths, the trading card game Magic: the Gathering, a game where players – Plane Walkers – stride from land to land battling with others of their strange kind via the medium of cards. There was a storyline, characters that would come and go, with their fortunes rising and falling with each expansion.
Then came the Walking Dead collaboration. Purists screamed – their heroic games would be littered with television characters! But then came Last Airbender, Final Fantasy, Warhammer, Spongebob Squarepants, Jurassic Park, Doctor Who… and now MtG doesn’t have a plot or storyline, and people just buy the boxes as collectibles, never really intending to play the game.
Fornite was once a game where you built structures to fight off waves of monsters, now it’s some dude in a banana costume and when I watch my son play, it looks like they’re playing Futurama meets the Hulk. And, there’s a “no building” mode to take away the one unique mechanic Fortnite had going for it.
I saw that e-mail in my inbox, and got pretty excited. New kart racer – YES, please. Sonic! Definitely, the blue guy is having a renaissance these days, makes sense SEGA would lean into it. They have lots of characters, a super deep bench.
I scrolled down…
Um, Mega Man? Does he race? Is this something he does?
I started getting a little bit nervous. Scrolled down some more…
Oh look, it’s Sonic’s hoverboard from that game I played, Sonic Riders for the PS2! Worth a look, so I followed the link to the game’s Steam page.
“Ready, Set, Warp! Race across 24 tracks and warp to 15 CrossWorlds with Travel Rings, a unique gameplay mechanic that transports the iconic characters from the Sonic and SEGA universes into new dimensions. Use unpredictability to your advantage as you change the landscape of each race!”
Unique gameplay mechanic? Wasn’t “Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart” entirely based upon that exact mechanic?
(Yes, it was).
I kept scrolling.
I’m not sure when “season pass” became synonymous with “game content we have ready to go but are going to charge you for, again and again.” It’s not new to Crossworlds. When I was a kid, a season pass was something you bought to the local swimming pool or ski lift. It was, you know, tied to a season. And then, in videogames like the Diablo series, it marked a special period of time where you could play under special rules and try new things.
Now, it’s just “here’s more stuff you’re going to need to buy if you want to play with other people”. I watched my son go through this with Call of Duty. A new season pass would drop, and suddenly he couldn’t get in matches because they took maps he didn’t have. So he’d have to buy and buy and buy. When he stopped playing CoD, he had filled up the entire PS5 drive with CoD DLC and had to buy an external drive for the overflow, just so he could play with his friends.
This is when I got a little bit unreasonably angry. A premium-priced game that would have Sonic racing against Pac-Man and Steve from Minecraft if he paid for the privilege. This is also when I downloaded the demo.
Sonic Crossworlds Racing is a good iteration of your standard mascot kart racer. The controls are simple – simpler than Sonic R or Sonic Riders. The “Crossworlds” mechanic is fun. The game is fast-paced, but not so much so that I got lost in all the light and noise. The special attacks and boosts are fun, and you can level up your ride.
If this game were half the price, I’d buy it, and I’d buy the DLC because, why not? It might be fun to race Patrick and Squidward for the crown when the Spongebob collab drops. I don’t even play MtG anymore and I have an – unopened – Terra Branford Commander deck in a place of honor on my bedroom bookcase!
But at $90 for everything, for a season pass that just promises more season passes to buy in the future, I have to say no. Not today. I still have thirty years of kart racers that are just as good, many of which feature Sonic and his friends, I can play. It’s just too much for, in my opinion, too little.
I’ll put it on my wishlist, though… when it hits $40, I’ll take another look.