It’s strangely satisfying when you send some rockets to your 7th place chum and see their ranking climb a few moments later.
Thankfully, you have at least some say in your partners’ progress thanks to the item transfer mechanic, which lets you offer up any power-ups you collect and send them to your partners in case they need them more. This could potentially lead to frustration: nobody likes a game where you can do the best that’s expected of you and still lose. It’s all well and good taking the chequered flag, then, but if your partners trundle in at 5th and 7th while another team puts in a solid 2nd-3rd-4th performance, the other mob will get the win. Whereas most races fit the usual leaderboard style points system (15 for a win, 12 for second etc), this time the winner isn’t the racer who finished first, but the team whose combined points total is highest. It’s a bold move, and one that doesn’t entirely pay off in all the ways Sega and Sumo may have been hoping.Īs the name suggests, the main gimmick in Team Sonic Racing is the ability to race in teams of three. Now we have Sumo’s third attempt, and rather than taking the ‘Sega Superstars’ theme even further, it’s instead stripped back much of what made Transformed so unique in favour of a ‘safer’ karting game solely focused on Sonic the Hedgehog and his mildly-annoying chums. Its clumsily-named sequel Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed was even better with its morphing vehicles and ‘living’ tracks that changed each lap, it may not quite have been up to Mario Kart’s lofty standards but it certainly took the genre further in terms of innovation. Very few developers have perfected the art of arcade-style handling like Sumo, and its first attempt at a Sonic karting game – Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing – was a surprisingly fun speed-fest that paid tribute to Sega heroes past and present. If anyone’s shown it’s capable of this, though, it’s Sheffield-based studio Sumo Digital.
It’s all well and good releasing karting games on Sony and Microsoft’s consoles, but it takes a big old set of Sonic Spinballs to try launching one on Mario’s home turf.
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