This isn’t even to mention the game’s content-rich single and multiplayer options featuring 15 characters, from classic icons, such as Tails, Knuckles, Dr. It adds an engaging and rewarding metagame to a skilled player that may be far ahead of the competition in first place, subconsciously knowing that their party members falling behind will affect their victory, and even if it isn’t entirely your cup of tea, there are plenty of modes that can be played traditionally. This also works in tandem with ‘skim-boosting’, in which after a character is hit with a projectile or item mid-race, a party member can drive past them and help them boost out of their initial slow-down.Īt first glance, this appears as a gimmick in an attempt for Team Sonic Racing to differentiate itself from the other titles in its genre, but my fears of this were quickly laid to rest when I noticed just how fully committed the game is to this mechanic throughout. To ensure this, the player must constantly keep tabs on their teammates, communicating with them mid-race by offering them item boxes and ‘slingshotting’ off them, in which the player follows a trail left by the team member furthest ahead of them, giving a quick boost on exits and allowing them to surpass the teammate and vice-versa. This means that the goal of each race isn’t to simply achieve first place but to instead assure that your two other team members are also performing well, as simply abandoning them can possibly lead to an overall failure. What I’m mainly referring to is Team Sonic Racing’s titular ‘team’ mechanic that sees the player matching up with two other characters (four teams of three), each race and working as a unit to lead themselves to victory. Tightening its focus once again, it’s clear that this time the team’s intentions are for more than just merely playing around with the kart racing genre, instead Team Sonic Racing is a full-on experiment to see how far developer Sumo Digital can push it, and the results are certainly excellent. That brings us to Team Sonic Racing, Sumo Digital’s third outing with SEGA’s branding and ditching the wider scope of the company’s history entirely for a game focused on one franchise and one franchise alone, Sonic the Hedgehog. SEGA had tried bringing Sonic into the racing genre with earlier titles such as Sonic R and Sonic Drift on the SEGA Saturn and Game Gear, respectively however, Sheffield-based studio Sumo Digital had instead perfected bringing their IP into an excellently designed kart racer. Thankfully, as they continue to prove, SEGA does what Ninten’don’t’, or in this case ‘didn’t’, when they released Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing in 2010, a multi-platform marvel that acted not only as a brilliantly competent and fun kart racer but a wonderful love letter to SEGA’s history, including characters from titles such as Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Virtua Fighter and strange guest characters, like Banjo and Kazooie, depending on the platform, and later building upon it with Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, an even better sequel that cut down on the broader SEGA fanfare in place of tighter design and focus and the introduction of transforming vehicles and stages, re-contextualising just how versatile the team at Sumo Digital are. Mario Kart 8 is a masterpiece and easily the best game in its genre-defining franchise, so beloved that the Nintendo Switch port (released three years later) currently remains the highest-selling title on the platform. The reasoning for this is fairly simple: Nobody does kart racers quite like Nintendo. Since the release of Nintendo’s Mario Kart 8 in 2014, the genre has more or less remained quiet, with the odd shameless tie-in, such as Nickelodeon Kart Racers or Garfield Kart, peering its head out as easy space within a fairly basic and fundamental video game genre.
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