Sonic The Hedgehog having a racing game series makes perfect sense. He’s supposed to be the fastest thing alive, after all.
The 1997 game Sonic R interpreted that to be a foot race, where you play as different characters all running around a track except they control like floaty boats. The developer team known then as Traveller’s Tales still left a legacy with that title, that lyrics of that one song is the headline quote of that after all. But it was no Mario Kart.
So when another British developer, Sumo Digital, took a jab at a Sonic Racing game decades later, they did made one.
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, the 2010 racing game, may a mouthful of a name, but it showed that Sega can do what Nintendo did. The transformative sequel, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed released in 2012, cemented the idea that kart racers can race on sea and air just as they do on land, something that influenced future racing games including the online racing modes in GTA Online and even Mario Kart.
The follow-up to that, Team Sonic Racing in 2019, strips away the guest stars of past games, ranging from three mercenaries from Team Fortress 2 to the… Football Manager from… Football Manager, and focused the cast to just Sonic and friends, enemies and frenemies. But that didn’t get much love from fans and critics.
Which brings us to the latest entry of what we should call the Sonic Racing series.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is made internally by Sonic Team this time, interestingly uses the Unreal Engine, and has a new central gimmick: racing across different worlds. Which also meant bringing over the extended cast of guest characters into the series.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is a high-flyer of an arcade kart racer, full of relentless action and tension where every three-lap race can be anyone’s to win, and lose, right until the final stretch.
It’s both a chaotic mess that can feel entirely random, yet still requires skill and game knowledge to consistently take the chequered flag.
As a result, it’s one of the more compelling racing games in a year stacked with racing game releases.
Presentation
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds looks pleasing to the eyes. The environment has this soft edge effects that makes it look cosy, inviting and almost like a diorama at times.
Character models look as expected: consistent, detailed and animated. These goobers just won’t sit still when driving in the kart. Sonic and friends (and enemies and frenemies) will glare at each other when racing side-by-side, pull sick poses when doing air tricks, have a hand up ready to lob an item when they have one and just generally be emotive. You know someone is driving that car, or riding that Extreme Gear (hoverboards, in normal parlance).
It’s not like you can stare at the characters for long, as there’s a lot going on in a three-lap race of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. From the dazzling environments to the sensory overload you might experience when just about all the 11 other racers start lobbing items around and they’re all within striking distance. The screen is always busy, but not overwhelming outside of very specific conditions. It adds more to the adrenaline rush if anything.
Speaking of those dazzling environments, the courses you drive around in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds are certainly some inspired design. All of them riff from the worlds Sonic and friends (and ene—you get it by now) have been across the many Sonic The Hedgehog games. The first time I pass through some of the Travel Rings and go into some random track, I was left agape at what a beautiful surprise it was. The tracks range from throwbacks to first three Sonic the Hedgehog games seen on screens at the start of E-Stadium to a track inspired by last year’s Shadow Generations, part of Sonic X Shadow Generations.
Plus, familiar tracks from past Sonic Racing games also appear, albeit heavily changed. You would recognise the likes of Ocean View, but now music for that stage is a remix that incorporates everyone’s favourite song from Sonic R: Everybody Super Sonic Racing.
Which leads to my next point: the music. The sound team at Sega has always been on point in regards to producing killer, memorable tracks, and the same goes to Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. A lot of them are remixes based on existing music, sure, but they all fit so well together here despite being sonically different. The music at Wonder Museum goes funky jazz, while the one in Radical Highway brings back that 2005 heavy metal edge when video games went emo. If I didn’t know where the music from Sand Road was straight out of a Shin Megami Tensei—that eerie electronica that can make you equally uneasy and move your feet to boogie is something else. The remix of “Flowing” used in Cyber Space had me did a double take thinking of that fantastic mashup by BotanicStage somehow landed here, but no, it’s a different remix. This one has a sax solo.
The music variety is diverse yet all sounding cohesive. It helps that the way music is mixed in and out flows well, and each of the have a final lap variant that amps up the excitement.
And if that’s not enough, there are even more songs in the soundtrack that you can enable by going through the jukebox. At the time of this review, the collab songs featuring everyone’s favourite Vocaloid-singer-idol-race-queen Hatsune Miku as well as music from Minecraft are available to replace any of the music on lap 1, lap 2 or final lap of any track. And expect more to be added in future free updates and paid DLCs.
The racers of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds also have light banter with each other as well as some short quips on the tracks they raced in. It’s been a long while since I see character-based racers swap pleasantries and unpleasantries with each other pre-race and mid-race. When did SSX 3 came out? Expect SSX 3 style of banter too, the characters don’t constantly yap, they are much less vocal actually. The bar for character banter in racing games is so low that this 2025 title just reach the bar set from a 2003 game. (It’s been a hot minute since SSX 3 came out, huh?)
Unfortunately, guest characters which are not part of the base roster of 23+1 characters don’t have new voicelines, let alone character banter and interactions. Miku just uses quips from her large, near-infinite bank of voices heard when she’s emoting. The three characters from Sonic Prime (paid DLC as part of the Deluxe Edition) only make clanky metal noises. The three characters from Minecraft make use of Minecraft sound effects when an emote is used. Other than that, no dialogue.
It’s a shame, but I get it. The base game cast has voice lines not in just English and Japanese, it’s for five languages. And as silly as it may be, I don’t think the dev team is looking to hire a French VO for Persona 5 Joker or an Italian VO for Ichiban Kasuga. Would have love if Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds go all in and make this crossover have direct interaction with the Sonic and crew, but alas.
But what the dev team did went above and beyond is how the customisable Machines (vehicles) look like. Each Machine can have parts mixed-and-matched with other Machines, so long as they are of the same type. Some of them look wildly different but yet the seams that connects the front bumper (i.e. the front-half of the car) with the rear bumper blends in so well together. Each combination has some extra detail added, changed or tweaked so that they don’t like a botched cut-and-shut car but totally intentional blend of two different car designs. It’s incredible to see. Even the guest Machines follow these rules to some extent. Though I suspect blending in the boxy half-cuts of the Minecart from Minecraft is way too much work and it’s funnier that it’s just a slab rectangle that doesn’t flow. And they’d be right, it’s hilarious.
Performance-wise, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds can run a solid 60 FPS, at least that’s what my eyes perceive, on the PS5. The game offers performance and quality graphic options, but a racing game like this it’s better to focus on more framerate. It makes you feel like you’re going faster, at least to some folks like me. There are no issues of textures not loading/streaming far enough.
The UI is okay, the main menu can be a bit cluttered, but button presses are snappy. It’s weird that you can only customise gadgets and machines at specific screens, not while starting Grand Prix mode. And I don’t like that when you can go into these menus while waiting for matchmaking but you’re booted out of them as the game loads in the lobby full of players. The fire vectors and sound effects accompanying the Rival system is fire, though. Like it looks blazing hot. As in they’re executed extremely well and leaves a strong impression.
As far as presentation goes, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is excellent, with room to still improve should Sega is willing to splurge a bit more on voiceovers and storytelling.
Gameplay
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has you and 11 others race in a three-lap race.
It’s always a three-lap race, and that ties to the core feature of the game: the titular CrossWorlds. At the end of Lap 1, whoever is in the lead get to decide on which of the two different worlds the race should continue on. At first, it you will be teleported to one-off, linear tracks that only exist when you enter Lap 2. Later on, the game expands to feature other normal tracks. By Lap 3, you’re back at the initial track, but with the layout transformed and change as you make it to the finish line. The spirit of Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed is well alive in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is an arcade kart racer, which means that it also have power-ups and items. The items here fit most of the trappings that Mario Kart and other influential kart racers have set. The game even has two different flavours of the “Blue Shell” designed to slow down the racers in front, and two flavours of the “Bullet Bill” which allows backmarkers catch up to the pack. Throw in a few defensive items, the occasional mines and a few ones that can directly attack anyone in front and you got yourself a full arsenal of kart racer items.
While the CrossWorlds track-changing gimmick is neat, what really gives Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds its edge is how frantic the racing is due to item play. Things get chaotic quickly and tables are being turned at every…well, turn. You can be dead-last at 12th after missing the sweet spot start but after using a few items you’d be back in the mix, leapfrogging half the field by Lap 2. But you can also collapse and lose all that position just as you exit the Travel Ring to start the final lap where everyone else starts to leapfrog you.
Hey, it could be worse, races can be won and lost right at the final straight. Who knows if someone who was way behind managed to catch-up to be in contention for the win and still carry that cheeky Monster Truck item and wreck everyone’s race. But who knows someone else had play a blinder Dark Chao item that resets everyone’s item, even granting new items for the itemless racers. There is so many ways a race can go about it’s not even funny.
At first, I chalked up as Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds being a game of chance with how random any race can go. That’s my impression after playing the various public playtests pre-release.
But no. It’s not random, because I have been able to consistently lose. It took about 80 or so races in before it clicks, before I see there’s a method to the madness, in that you can be skillful at racing this.
And that’s where gadgets and machine customisation comes in. Like most kart racers, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds lets you freely pick a character and vehicle (called Machines here) each with varying stats. That’s new to Sonic Racing, but not kart racers in general.
What’s new is the gadgets, passives that can significantly alter your driving style. This can be as simple as making the drift gauge fills up faster so you don’t need to drift too long before you charge your boost, to entirely new abilities like spin drift, where you swirl your vehicle around like a master of Spinjitzu (or a spinning top), hitting other racers and have them lose speed should they touch you mid-drift.
Some of the gadgets can have cool synergies. Like that spin drift, pair it with a ring thief gadget and you’re not only slowing other people down when you hit them, you’re making yourself faster with more rings in hand which enables you to reach higher top speed. Spin to win, baby!
Gadgets let you race as wild or as conservative as you can, there are also passives that adds flat bonuses to stats if you don’t want to be bothered with messing around with the game’s driving mechanics.
But messing about and finding the right combo of gadgets is the fun thing about Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. And it’s probably the only way to make you consistently not finish last. You’ll need every advantage you can get when races at higher difficulties (or when playing online) are usually immensely close.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has a form of single-player mode, the Grand Prix. Here, you must complete a series of seven Grand Prix, each featuring three tracks in a four-race championship. Each GP has a designated rival you must beat. You can choose who they are from the cast of 23+1 base game roster, and the difficulty.
It’s no nemesis system, not even similar to how Grid (2019) and Grid Legend’s nemesis system works. Rather, Rivals in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds will always have the stronger AI—they’ll likely be ahead and drive the fastest in the field. Oh, and they’re the ones you trade banters with.
It’s a simple system, which also highlights a common complaint I have with racing games where the AI drivers are not competitive in nature and that a natural pecking order will form among them. They are not many championship rank swings across the Grands Prix I played. It’s usually me, the Rival and one random character that’s consistently close to us.
Single-player races also a little less chaotic to any online racers, which is a breath of fresh air.
But I have this suspicious feeling that the AI opponents will more consistently target you instead of who’s out in first place. I have had many occasions where I’m sitting in second, behind my Rival, waiting for the right time to lob a good item before somebody in the midfield throw something at me, and the Rival gets away scot-free. Not enough of King Boom Boo being thrown out, or any items that can slow first-place down, really.
And the opponents in the backmarkers and midfield positions don’t get to use enough of catch-up items to really shake up the field. Essentially, the single-player Grands Prix at higher levels shakes out as a punishing experience. Any mistake and that’s your trophy run over. Sure, you can restart each race, but it costs you in-game currency, and winning a championship with one leaves a mark, an asterisk, on that trophy you collected, taunting you that used assists to earn that one. Oof.
As far as the driving physics goes, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds shines when you’re driving good. How good you can turn is determined by the handling stat, and it’s very noticable how a beginner-friendly Machine with high handling can just turn in with ease while lower-handling ones will understeer and must drift through the bends. The drifting physics is a tap-to-drift one—as you’d expect from a kart racer—and it doesn’t lock you to an angle, there’s some wiggle room to move around mid-drift. You can chain them with counter drifts should you wish to not cash out the drift gauge despite having to turn the other way. It feels skillful, even rewarding. Which in turn has led me to feel so satisfied with a race even if I ended up mid-pack. A good race for me in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds isn’t necessarily coming in first, but to not make mistakes and nail all those turns. Because turning around feels so good and rewarding.
That said, the physics and most of the gameplay works when you drive well. If you end up in edge cases where you fall off a track, or hit the wall square, the game just doesn’t handle them well.
The former can result you in respawn at a very bad spot that can lead you to fall off again, repeatedly. The Rainbow Road-esque sequence at the end of Galactic Parade, and that one left U-turn with a no-wall warning at Chao Park are good examples where you can see a racer go into a fall spiral.
For the latter, the game physics just couldn’t decide if you should turn left or right and will bounce the car repeatedly until you eventually face the right direction. These sorts of foibles costs more time than having the car respawn back on track, so that can suck. Consecutive counter drifts gets diminishing less handling as it’s harder and harder to steer, maybe that’s intentionally done so but it does expose a bit of the jank that would otherwise would not be seen if you’re just really good at driving.
Another thing I don’t feel too hot about Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is how some of the item mechanics work. Some items can be thrown behind, but there’s no in-game indication of what they are, you just have to learn. Throwing items to the back is not something I can reliably do. You need to look at the back and then throw the item out, but I usually lift the look back button early (I need to see where I’m driving!) so it usually whiffs and got thrown to the front instead. I also find it annoying that items that target certain positions would lock to the racer even when they drop out of that position before the effect triggers. I’ve been in second place where the alert for the Weight item goes blaring, but then got hit by other items as the pack closes on me on the finishing line dropping me to fourth, and only then the Weight drops, halting me from moving right at the checkered flag and I ended up even further back. Woe is me. I remember in NASCAR Rumble and Rumble Racing that it was a legitimate strategy to simply brake and slow down to avoid being in first place, I love that trick. But who remembers those games these days. The best defence is to save those Shields for a rainy day and pray a Dark Chao isn’t played.
I know, those are more nitpicks than anything. I have to dig that deep to find things to criticise Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. The gameplay in general feels great and exemplary of arcade kart racers. The three-lap race format with evolving tracks is fun, but the core handling physics and the potential of gadgets really what makes it shine. Even if you don’t hop online, the single-player experience (or local multiplayer with up to four players) is just as fun, albeit in a different way.
Content
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is packed with content. The base game has 24 tracks spread across 7+1 Grands Prix, with a cast of 23+1 racers and a good number of Machines you can customise.
The single-player Grand Prix mode has three different speeds, and completing all seven GPs unlock the fastest speed, appropriately named Super Sonic Speed. And if racing at the speed isn’t challenging enough, there’s also a speed class where the tracks are all mirrored, flipped laterally, as in a right turn is now a left. A classic trick for arcade racers to bump the track count is to have the same track run in reverse, but with tracks in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds won’t work in reverse, so this is a smart, lateral move. A bit gimmicky but it really is a new challenge having to look at the same track in a new perspective.
There’s also Race Park mode, where it turns into a team-based race mode where doing a specific objective awards you bonus points, enough to turn a last-place finish into a dub. Think Forza Horizon’s team-based races, but with the added touch of having to do arcade racing shenanigans, from tapping other teammates (the lines that point and link other racers in your team is a nice touch) to hitting as many times with an offensive item.
Not only that, there’s also a Time Trial mode with online leaderboards. Even if you are not the person who train and learn a track this way, there’s a good incentive for doing this: it unlocks new songs for the Jukebox. The first reward for this is that heavy metal tune from Sonic Frontiers, Undefeatable. That song on YouTube alone has 41 million streams, and you know that song goes hard in racing games. What a carrot to put on a stick.
The “CrossWorlds” in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds isn’t just about those Travel Rings. Online play also allow cross-platform play, including cross-platform lobbies so you can party up with friends on other platforms.
My experience online has been decent. Connection errors are rare, and never happened while in the race. Though some of the hit detection seems like a hit-or-miss. I don’t think I ever got to hit someone with a Drill despite going through other players, but Monster Trucks smash players consistently.
But beware, the players online are killers. If you don’t store items for the inevitable chaos of the Final Lap, you’ll definitely going to be left in the dust after getting smattered by so, so many items. Having Monster Trucks right on lap 1 is proper troll move that I kind of respect, but being bombarded at the final straight leading only to to drop mid-pack? Yeah, that’s Sonic Racing. You better learn how to defend yourself, or better yet, learn how to be a Late Surger yourself and only pounce for the lead when it mattered.
But if you’re no tryhard, and just wanted to have fun, racing online is great!
From time to time, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds will host a limited-time event, a Festival. So far, there’s been two Festivals, the Hatsune Miku one and a Minecraft one. It’s a bit formulaic and too grindy in all honesty. You have to play a lot of races just to get some exclusive sticker. You’ll get more of the in-game currency playing single-player rather than go online during Festivals.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds isn’t a game I expected to see a livery editor, but there is one, albeit very limited. I love that there’s a 2D projection so you can clearly see where the sticker is in relation to the Machine, which fascinatingly makes it easier to apply decals on the side of a rear wing. There’s a lot of sticker variety too, even from named brands. Almost all of them gaming brands from OEM PC makers are here. AirAsia is here, continuing their ongoing partnership with Sega. Various Japanese brands are here too.
Unfortunately the decal limit is very stingy, and you can’t layer the decals on top of each other. It didn’t make sense at first for me, but I get it. It’s a E for Everyone game. Online interaction is limited to pre-canned emotes and voice lines. Custom liveries, which you can bring online, has to also be limited otherwise they need to have a moderation team ready to ban anyone from making a long cylinder between two spherical shapes so that no one sees them. Makes sense. But that does mean the only itasha you see is from people putting large Hatsune Miku stickers.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is poised to have more content down the line. The new racers may not be feature-rich as the base game cast, but seeing more crossover characters coming to the game should be enticing enough for folks to come back every month or so and try out the new content, free or otherwise.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is loaded with content already at launch, with a strong post-launch support already in effect. How far we will see the game continues to receive content remains to be seen. But the wild, wacky fun you can have racing online alone should give it a long life, should the game not tinker too much with the existing formula.
Personal Enjoyment
I love racing games, but it’s been a while that I play kart racers. I didn’t grow up playing Mario Kart, ands still barely touched the series, so my exposure to the subgenre are old, forgotten, niche titles. NASCAR Rumble. Rumble Racing. Looney Tunes Racing. Yeah, I don’t even play the more popular non-Nintendo kart racers. Heck, I passed over Blur, the one kart racer with actual licensed cars, for Split Second. I play a lot of racing games, even arcade ones, just not kart racers.
So it’s nice to finally get a good taste of a modern kart racer without having to go buy a Nintendo console (not that I’m against the big N, just never had the budget to get an extra console). Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds more or less evoke the formula of the kart racer, as I come to understand them through limited exposure to Mario Kart and more from titles the series inspired.
And you know what, I get why it’s so popular. It’s easy to pick up. It has tons of unassuming depth. And there is a way to beat the randomness.
But I’m also glad that Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds doesn’t entice too many folks to go full competitive tryhard. You can, you get to be on top of the online leaderboards for your efforts. But I can have fun just by doing my thing.
I admit that during my 10+ hours spent playing the game for this review, I did find the rubber banding effect that keeps almost all 12 racers within a second of each other frustrating. One simple mistake can send you from third to second-last place, with the flipside being just as possible. Yet it doesn’t come across as totally random.
I’m no big Sonic nerd, so a lot of those voice lines are just flavour to me, but I bet fans of the series and its lore (it’s serious enough that there’s a lorekeeper involved, as per the game’s credits) will love what they see and hear in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds.
While I have a good time with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, I’m not fully enamoured by it either, through no fault of the game. But I’m stoked to see what other collabs the game will get later on. It would be wild to see this game to have a real person as a racer. I mean, Ichiban Kasuga is a real person, right? In the cast of cartoon characters, he’s the most real of the guests so far. He got a social media account, even.
Verdict
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds takes a new turn with arcade kart racing series, but haven’t left any of its essence. In fact, one can see this as the series heading back on track.
The three-lap race format with changing tracks is a fun yet rather innocous gimmick. But what truly makes Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds shine is the fundamentally fun driving physics, the wild item play that keeps the grid close and tense, and seeing all these characters from different worlds driving through beautiful, wonderous scenery.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds doesn’t quite leave the competition in the dust, but just like any race in the game, it’s still in contention to be the best in the grid.
In a year with a staggering number of good racing games released, arcade or otherwise, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is keeping pace with the best.
Played on base PS5. Review copy provided by the publisher
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
In a year with a staggering number of good racing games released, arcade or otherwise, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is keeping pace with the best.
- Presentation 9
- Gameplay 9
- Content 9.5
- Personal Enjoyment 8.5