Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed review

by SaikyoBro on Jan 22nd, 2013

Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing from 2010 is actually one of my favorite kart racers. The tracks were memorable, there was a fun, diverse line-up of racers and an awesome catchy soundtrack paired with super fast-paced racing. So when they announced there was gonna be a sequel, I was pretty excited. But having put some time into it, there’s a lot of weird little things that I’m not sure about.

First, let’s talk about the roster. The original game had 20 characters, this one has 24 (not counting console exclusives.) Not exactly a huge jump up. But don’t let that fool you, there are plenty of new racers. Just…in place of a lot of the cool characters from the first game. Big names in the Sega universe like Ryo from Shenmue, Jacky and Akira from Virtua Fighter, Billy Hatcher, and the Chu-Chus that were popular in the first game are nowhere to be found now besides cameos, and the awesome retro characters that made the roster so memorable in the first place like Opa-Opa and the Bonanza Bros are missing as well (and sadly, no Banjo-Kazooie this time around.) In their place are some cool characters like Nights, Joe Musashi, Gilius Thunderhead, and AGES, an awesome fanservice character. But once you’re past that, there are a lot of weird additions like MeeMee, Reala, Gum, and Pudding (secondary characters from Super Monkey Ball, Nights, Jet Set Radio, and Space Channel 5) that I can’t imagine a big portion of the people playing the game will even recognize. The developers say the reason for all these characters is that they didn’t have the budget to bring back every single character from the first game with a new transforming vehicle, so they made some characters they already had resources for in order to make the roster size bigger.

That’s fair enough I guess, but I don’t see why of all the characters they decided that having 6-7 Sonic characters was still a good idea. It’s also worth mentioning that the console you decide to get the game for will actually have a pretty big impact on your lineup of racers. If you buy it for Wii U or 3DS, you get a playable Mii. If you get it for Xbox 360, you can race as your Avatar. Those are fine I guess given that they’re just the system’s representation of the player, but once you get to the PC version, it becomes crazy. THREE exclusive characters! Football Manager, Shogun, and Team Fortress (yes, you can expect to be driving as the Pyro, Heavy, and Spy.)  To my understanding this was done because those 3 franchises are big on PC, but…they’re also all on-disc for the console versions. I get it, they’re mainly PC characters, but…c’mon. Characters are characters. You guys own the Football Manager and Shogun series, and I don’t see why Valve would be mad with their characters appearing on anything besides PC. It’s cool that the PC guys get a little bonus since they didn’t for the last game, but 3 characters seems like a lot. And if you’re giving them so many exclusives, tell me why the PS3 version still has absolutely nothing for itself? This is two times that PS3 fans have been screwed out of some cool bonus characters and got nothing in return.

That’s enough about the racers themselves though, as we know what’s really important…the tracks! I found them to be really…weird in this game. What I mean by that is that the concepts are awesome, they look gorgeous, they’re filled with fanservice, the music is fitting and catchy, but actually playing on them can be a huge pain in the ass. A lot of them suffer from being way, WAY too long for their own good. The Nights and Golden Axe tracks in particular can go on for 5 or 6 minutes, no joke. They’re filled with all kinds of awesome and diverse elements that I assume huge Golden Axe and Nights fans will get a huge kick out of, but not being one of those fans, I just get kind of annoyed. One cool thing about the tracks is that between laps, they’ll often change drastically. For example, on the Panzer Dragoon track, you’ll be in a car for the first lap, a boat for the second lap, and a plane for the final lap. This usually works pretty well. The tracks are from a gigantic number of games from Sega history, from Genesis, to Saturn, to Dreamcast to today. After Burner, Burning Rangers, OutRun, Panzer Dragoon, and House of the Dead are all games that aren’t represented by racers, but end up being some of the coolest tracks in the game.

The game also looks and sounds suuuuper impressive. Every character looks exactly like they should (with the possible exceptions of the bonus characters Danica Patrick and Wreck-it Ralph…they look kinda gross) and the tracks are all gorgeous and very detailed. The music consists of awesome remixes of famous Sega songs, with  Burning Depths and Temple Trouble (the Burning Rangers and Super Monkey Ball tracks) being some of the catchiest and most memorable songs in the game. The music is also full of fanservice, with songs from games like Sonic R sneaking their way in. You might notice Ocean View’s music, a remix of Toot Toot Sonic Warrior from Sonic CD, eventually starts sounding like Super Sonic Racing, and Sky Sanctuary Zone eventually becomes Back in Time. They were reaaaally looking to please Sega fans from all generations.

Now that all of that is out of the way, what about the racing itself? It’s…pretty good? I guess? The reason the first game is one of my favorite racers is because it handled like a faster Mario Kart. It felt just as precise and satisfying as those games, but it felt like it went much faster. That’s still the case in this game! …when you’re driving, that is. In the boats and planes that you race in, thing aren’t nearly as fun. Boats basically handle like slower, floatier cars. This was the intention, it works like it was meant to, don’t get me wrong. But it’s just not as fun. Why would you WANT to turn into the boat unless there’s a shortcut or something? Instead of wanting to, it’s more like a “oh my god, I really don’t feel like doing this” every time you see your car begin to transform. Planes go faster and are a little easier to control, but I actually noticed a lot of the flying parts can be easy to get lost in if it’s your first time playing on the track. The flying parts also make most items basically useless, as you can dodge almost all of them with relative ease by flipping your plane up down left or right with the right stick. Flying is usually pretty fun once you get the hang of it.

So besides the boat parts, everything is pretty fun. The items are helpful a lot of the times, but often a little TOO helpful. There’s a glove item that catches other items before they hit you and give them to you, which can be really annoying. You also get the “all-star move”, a power-up that gives you a speed boost and an attack for several seconds, in just about any place. I noticed Shadow getting his in 2nd several times over the course of playing online with a few friends. Speaking of the online, it’s…not very good. It runs pretty smoothly, but the game freaks out if you collide with another driver in a way it doesn’t offline. A lot of the time it does this really weird thing where it just turns you around and you start driving backwards, and sometimes the collision detection is so off that a car that supposedly hits you is waaaay behind you. This bug alone makes online play basically worthless, as cheap items and strange things happening when you hit another car can make a huge difference between 1st and dead last. Offline play is also a bit of a waste. Why? The cheapest AI imaginable. Like, it cheats. It just cheats. It seems like items sometimes have no effect on them, they constantly drift, they know all the shortcuts, it’s just terrible. This is noticeable even on Normal difficulty, but when you get to hard and expert it becomes borderline unplayable. So why don’t you just play on easy?

BECAUSE YOU CAN’T. The “World Tour” mode is basically a series of races and challenges that you earn stars by completing. These stars are what you use to unlock characters. By beating a challenge on Easy, you get 1 star. On normal, you get 2 stars. On hard you get 3 stars, and on the unlockable expert difficulty you get 4. You’re forced to do the majority of the missions on hard and expert, as the last unlockable character takes 165 stars. That is a LOT. If racing games aren’t your specialty or you have no friends to help you out, you’re just out of luck. You start with 10 characters, meaning you unlock the majority of them. I can’t see a little kid who sees Sonic on the cover and gets the game to race as him getting more than the first 3 or 4 of them. I’m not a racing game pro or anything, but people all over the internet are also having ridiculous amounts of trouble getting everything. When I get a game with a lot of unlockable characters or stages and a multiplayer focus, my first priority is usually getting all of them unlocked ASAP so I have all the options I need for multiplayer with friends. I’ve had the game about a month now and I’ve tried my absolute best to get the last two characters, Reala and AGES, but it’s just not worth the time and frustration. If they were fun, short challenges I could probably bring myself to try it, but like I said earlier, a lot of the tracks are ridiculously long and can go on for 5-6 minutes The other challenges are usually things like “traffic attack” where you have to avoid a huge amount of other cars or other gimmicks like that and they just aren’t fun.

The only place this game shines is in offline multiplayer, which is a complete blast. The game’s fun in other modes, but cheap AI and flawed online make it difficult to take seriously. There’s a lot of fan-service, so if you’re a big Sega fan it’s definitely something you should think about picking up, but if you’re expecting a good kart racer, I’d have to say the first game is a lot better in most aspects. This certainly isn’t a bad game, but there are so many tiny frustrations that end up turning what should be a fun, fast-paced experience into nothing but frustration. There’s a lot of fun to be had playing with friends, but unfortunately, I can’t say the same for most of the other modes. It’s only $40, so try it if you’re into kart racers or Sega, but don’t expect to be completely blown away.

3/5

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