After an hour playing Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds at Summer Game Fest, I can only think how fun it was to be bad at a kart racer once again. I was always a Nintendo kid, so Mario Kart was my kart racer of choice, but after decades of playing the series I've come to see the proverbial Matrix that defines the angle of your drifts and the exact preparations you need to make to avoid the most inconvenient items.
My time with CrossWorlds, though, gave me a grand vision of a world where I'm back to square one, just enjoying the rampant chaos of a party game.
Gotta go fast
I got to tour the single-player grand prix mode of CrossWorlds, which offers what initially sounds like a familiar format to Mario Kart-heads like me: a set of four races across various tracks consisting of three laps each. But there are some big twists here. The middle section of each track takes you to an alternate dimension for a single-lap excursion, and the final race is made up of a single lap from each of the three previous courses.
The finale being a remix of the the previous tracks gives a nice endcap to the grand prix, building on what you've learned from your previous laps to put it together when it matters most - and it does matter more at the end, since first place awards more points to the winner than it does in the other races.
Really adding to the drama is the rivals system, where a CPU character will be marked as your personal antagonist and regularly taunt you before, during, and after the races. It's a terrific way of both bringing more of the characters' personality into the action and making you very, very angry. I'm a pretty calm gamer as a general rule, but seeing Knuckles blow past me for the lead of the race and the grand prix, while he makes some snarky quip had me feeling the kind of rage you normally reserve for FromSoftware bosses. It makes the races feel very high-stakes.
Crash course
The action is also very chaotic, even by kart racer standards, with items constantly flying around and level-specific environmental effects kicking off all the time. You'll often be blindsided by items without much warning and no apparent way to defend against them. It's tough to tell if I'd have started to figure out how to manage these threats with more than an hour of gameplay under my belt, but it certainly seems like you can expect to be pretty thoroughly buried in a shower of item-based destruction everywhere you go.
That chaos compounds with the grand prix format, since you only spend two laps on each track, as lap two is replaced by a journey into an alternate chosen by whichever player gets to the portal first. There's a little less opportunity to reach a rhythm with each track, since you'll spend so much of your time in the middle of a race just… driving on a completely different track.
Whether or not that cranked up chaos is a good thing remains to be seen, but I'm intrigued. The problem with single-player Mario Kart is that it tends to feel 'solved' at a certain point - you take an early lead, drive out to a ridiculous distance ahead of the competition, and then never see any of the ridiculous items and shenanigans that make a kart racer, well, a kart racer.
I have hope that Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds could cure that specific issue. Will I fully jump kart racing ships with a shiny new next-gen Mario Kart World waiting in the wings? That I don't know, but CrossWorlds does seem poised to provide a very different type of experience, and one I'm excited to jump in pretty much fresh to.
