Team Sonic Racing

As the progenitor and king of Kart Racing, Super Mario Kart is allowed single-console iterations with minimal disparity. Sega’s attempts to do the same with Sonic—a being literally defined by speed—are as variable in quality as they are in style. Sonic Drift had more in common with Out Run than Mario Kart while Sonic R was a wackadoodle foray into bipedal sprinting and obtuse pop melodies.  In the hands of Sumo Digital, Sega eventually found stability in 2010 with All-Stars Racing and an All Time Top Five Kart Racer with its 2012 sequel, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Team Sonic Racing, once again from Sumo Digital, has the unenviable task of creating another entry and closing a de facto trilogy with Team Sonic Racing.

At a basic level, Team Sonic Racing conforms to the model of a mascot kart racer. Up to twelve characters board four-wheeled vehicles and compete in three-lap races to the finish line. Courses are littered with boost pads and item pick-ups. The latter, in the form of Sonic Colors’ versatile Wisps, contain familiar offensive firepower like straight missiles, a homing missile, turbo boosts, and rotating spiked balls. Characters spout familiar catchphrases and odd traces of modernity—Sonic assumes poor play is a result of texting while driving—as they pass each other on the course. Drifting through corners and curves, identical to its Mario Kart inception, is a skilled maneuver than can provide a turbo boost is performed successfully. Simple aerial flips risk crashing out but reward with a boost.

Team Sonic Racing could also be defined by what it does not have. Gone is the Sega-wide influence on courses, themes, and characters. What was once a diverse wonderland of beloved IP—Transformed had impressively faithful courses for Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon, and Nights—has been cast aside in favor of a pure Sonic & Friends experience. Logic may reveal that Team Sonic Racing’s targeted audience wouldn’t recognize any of these relatively ancient characters and instead chose to focus on an active brand. This makes sense, but it leaves Team Sonic Racing with an insular aesthetic and a limited focus. There isn’t a whole lot of Sonic, let alone good Sonic, to go around.

These limitations permeate Team Sonic Racing’s characters and content. Early aughts Sonic games were often criticized for including too many of Sonic’s friends. Team Sonic Racing goes to the deep end of the bench by drafting Silver the Hedgehog from Sonic the Hedgehog’s 2006 disaster/revival and Zavok from the inspired but flawed Sonic Lost World. Big the Cat shows up and wants to go fishing or find Froggy. Shadow drops by to monologue about the ultimate life form. Vector the Chaotix Crocodile is there too. Despite some curious banter from Dodon Pa, Team Sonic Racing’s new character and narrative premise, it functions as another way to relive familiar characteristics from Sonic’s rich history.

Team Sonic Racing’s twenty one courses suffer from environmental ambiguity. Each one is exquisitely rendered and aesthetically pleasing. Sonic Adventure’s iconic whale flip through rainbows, phantom pink highways carry karts across treetops, and Sonic Heroes’ tribal iconography are all gorgeous and recognizable. Ocean View, Roulette Road, and Pinball Highway all move over from Sumo Digital’s past Sonic Racing games. The issue is few courses break out of otherwise indistinct desert/ice/jungle/fire environments. Sonic’s signature flourish, pinball and casino themes, stand as the only instance of genuine character. It’s puzzling to see Sonic Mania’s original zones or any of Sonic’s more eccentric level themes left off Team Sonic Racing’s slate.

The solution to Team Sonic Racing’s obstacles lies in its title; team racing. Solo racing is available through exhibition races, but the Team Sonic Racing’s campaign and multiplayer options are designed with cooperative play in mind. Teams each have a speed class (some kind of AOE shield that eliminates projectiles), technique class (isn’t hampered by mud, water, or otherwise dampening surfaces), and a power class (breaks through pesky barriers). Team Sonic Racing’s five teams of three are intended to work together to ensure the whole team, as a unit, competes for the top spot in a race.

The interplay between team members is Team Sonic Racing most visible novelty. If a teammate is in front, they will leave behind a yellow trail that another team member can follow to receive a major speed boost. With enough speed, they can also “slingshot” ahead and create a daisy chain of accelerated passes. Grazing a paralyzed team mate—when attacked by projectiles in Team Sonic Racing the vehicle comes to an infuriating complete stop—will also launch them right back into full speed competition.

Another of Team Sonic Racing’s curiosities comes with its Team Ultimate ability. Team actions like Slingshots and Skimboosts build the Ultimate Meter visible behind the car. So does the exchange of items, a neat mechanic where you can offer an unwanted pick-up to your partners. Building this meter leads to an option perform a Team Ultimate, which briefly plows your vehicle at maximum speed across the course. Its time can even be extended by making contact with the hapless opponents who may be in the way. Filling the Ultimate Meter serves as a metagame for each race and it eases the frustration of punitive projectiles or inexplicable AI domination.

Team Sonic Racing’s single player campaign is organized into Adventure Mode. Similar to last year’s Mario Tennis Aces, adventure mode is a series of races intercut with dialogue sequences between two or three members of the Team Sonic Racing roster. Told with motion graphics, each lasts about a minute and serves to reinforce character tropes and propel the “why are we all racing here?” plot line. Some challenges don’t offer any story sequences and some repeated sequences I had already seen. In either case, the default option (pressing X to access the race) skips the sequences entirely. You kind of have to opt-in to the story by pressing square.

Seven Adventure Mode worlds introduce three courses at a time and host a series of challenges inside of them. Team Races and Grands Prix, which contain four successive team races, dominate the seven available challenges for each zone. They’re joined by three types of Solo challenges. Included are Daredevil challenges, where the player must race and drift through the red-shaded side of star poles and Ring challenge, where time lasts as long as the ring’s you’re able to snag. A particular gas is Eggspawn Assault, where the player must obliterate scores of Eggman’s robots on the course with tough collisions or a replenishing supply of rockets. Survival races, where a percentage of the racers are eliminated with each lap, round out the list of alternative challenges.

Progression is fairly open. Each race has a series of assigned goals. Completing these goals, which include challenges such as coming in first, winning as a team, or collecting set amount of rings, earns stars for each race. Movement through adventure mode is gated by a star total, although Team Sonic Racing wisely makes the choice to gate extra challenges behind high star totals and simple progress behind low totals. You can also earn keys in some races by completing even more demanding objectives (like set lap times, despite Team Sonic Racing offering no race clock). Despite earning a bunch of keys, I have no idea what any of them do.

All of this is in service to Team Sonic Racing’s in-game economy. Performing well in a race leads to a payout of credits, and the selected difficulty multiplies those credits by up to 1.25. Credits can be spent on Mod Pods, which are loot boxes. Inside most Mod Pods is an item box that you can consume and use as your first item in the next race. Slightly less than half the time you’ll receive a part—engine, tires, livery, tail flaps—for each racer’s kart. These parts can push acceleration, boost, defense, handling, and speed sliders up and down a few tics. Legendary parts seem rarer and are gold in color. I didn’t care about any of this and think loot boxes are a peculiar blight upon this era of gaming, but at least Team Sonic Racing isn’t begging for real money at any point.

Team Sonic Racing’s most puzzling facet is its disregard for a consistent play experience. There were races where I made no mistakes, fed items to my teammates and didn’t place first. There were also races where I was pelted incessantly with projectiles and sometimes I won…and sometimes I lost. Occasionally I would do very well in a race, but my teammates would turn in an awful performance and this would happen. Other than the solo challenges in Adventure Mode, which are rigidly judged without many variables, Team Sonic Racing, at least against AI drivers, doesn’t have much use for the application of skill. Even on normal difficulty, my finishing position often felt arbitrary.

While Team Sonic Racing’s AI offers plenty of resistance, there’s an ambiguous lack of friction in its performance. Engine noise is barely audible and contact with the racing surface seems imperceptible. These vehicles could be billed as hovercrafts and I doubt anyone would notice. Maintaining a physical connection to the road allows the player the grapple with physics and learn how to drive cars. Driving in Team Sonic Racing feels more like sliding a wet bar of soap up the end of a bath tub. It’s fun but there’s no real nuance to any of its control.

Kart racers have always thrived on chaos. A dozen wacky characters surrounded by boost pads and insane items isn’t a traditional racing game and shouldn’t be held to the same standard. I understand that. Team Sonic Racing’s take on this theme, however, seems off-kilter and out of balance. I didn’t feel like what I did mattered. In the last two levels of Adventure Mode I didn’t even bother with the extra races because I just wanted to finish the proper game. Being surrounded by pretty lights, glittery colors, every Pavlovian-pleasure-generating sound known by human ears buckled under the weight of a racing game that somehow didn’t have much use for racing. Team Sonic Racing is like being at an amusement park where most of the good rides are shut down.

This could be mended with a strong multiplayer component. Unfortunately, despite showing up at three of the assigned times listed in our press document, I never found an online match against another real person. I did play with another person locally via split-screen. Team Sonic Racing’s frame rate took a hit, as did Team Sonic Racing in general when my wife asked why on earth we were playing this instead of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. I thanked her for her time and resumed Adventure Mode.

It’s disappointing to view Team Sonic Racing as a follow-up to Transformed. A Sega-spanning kart racer at the tail of the last hardware generation enjoyed its diversity as much as its style. It clash of personalities fit neatly beside its transforming vehicles and sacred source material. Team Sonic Racing, releasing at a similar point in the hardware cycle, bets the farm on Sonic’s world and uses its team mechanics to try and pull ahead. It doesn’t make it. Even at its $40 price point, Team Sonic Racing doesn’t go anywhere you haven’t already been.

While Team Sonic Racing makes a statement with its collaborative squads of racers, its identity is lost in the amorphous complexion of a conventional kart racer. Worse, its gorgeous locales and myriad customization options aren’t quite enough to support a despairing imbalance between luck and skill. Silver the Hedgehog’s presence is one of many indications Team Sonic Racing is burdened with deadweight and light on inspiration.