Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds may not have Mario Kart World's Metacritic score, but it does come on multiple platforms, with cross-play for maximum karting carnage. Sonic and his many rivals from across Sega canon are available to race on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, Switch, and Switch 2 with players able to challenge each other across all of them.
The fourth installment in the Sonic Racing series, this is the first to come with cross-play. Launching with the feature proved difficult for Sonic Team, as Takashi Iizuka, Sonic series producer, told Dengeki Online (translated by Automaton).
"The Sonic series has always been pushing for multi-platform support. We've always been providing players with playable environments across platforms like PC and Switch, even when it comes to our regular action games," Iizuka explains. "But implementing cross-play was leagues more difficult."
The Sonic Racing games consistently being multi-console has made the lack of cross-platform play a little glaring, especially for 2019's Team Sonic Racing. The dev team worked with the arcade division at Sega to finesse the necessary technology and infrastructure into the game, ensuring its viability.
Besides creating a wider audience for Sonic's four-wheeled Mario Kart rival, it helps for matchmaking, since it helps protect against beginners getting stuck in races with experienced drivers who'll leave them in the dirt due to lower available players. According to Ryuichi Taki, CrossWorlds' producer, the positives simply outweighed the negatives, even if it was more work.
"If you want to secure a sufficient number of players [that are on a similar level], breaking down the walls between platforms undoubtedly helps. That's also one of the benefits we saw in cross-play, and the decision to implement it was made quite early on," Taki says, adding: "It was an incredibly down-to-earth process that took an insanely long time to complete."
Laborious it may have been, the results are worth it. GamesRadar+'s review from Justin Towell calls it, "a very playable, well-designed racer that should only get better with time."
