Sonic Racing Crossworlds beta is Mario Kart 8, not World, but for arcade sickos
It’s messed up that just a couple of newsletters ago I was tricked into referring to Mario Kart 8 as “perfect”, because I spent hours this past weekend playing an arcade racer that seems set on nitpicking Mario Kart 8 (not World!) and improving on its all of its concepts. Sonic Racing CrossWorlds thoroughly applies hardcore, detail-oriented arcade design to arguably the most crowd-pleasing video game ever made. It’s not for everybody, which is also what makes it for somebody.
When I talked about Mario Kart World, I mentioned the crossroads between refining a winning concept and the greater risk of a genuine reinvention. And of course, after over a decade on the same game, Nintendo had to make a transformative sequel.
But Sonic Racing CrossWorlds taps on Sega arcade expertise— according to PR Sega Rosso, the arcade Initial D dev, helped out— to tweak a lot of the same systems and concepts present in Mario Kart 8 for a hardcore arcade audience. I was reminded of some of the vague criticisms Masahiro Sakurai indirectly made of Mario Kart in his explainer video for Kirby Air Riders. In fact, I think CrossWorlds checks a lot of those boxes.
In this game, you drive faster, corners are tougher, enemy attacks merely slow you down rather than bring you to a full halt, and while there are some handicaps, players who stay in the back don’t magically get shot up to the front of the pack.
The pleasant feeling CrossWorlds gave me, I realized a few online races in, was that my own skill and performance actually had something to do with whether or not I won or lost. The computer “rival” character kicked my ass my first few races, until I got the hang of things. But once I got my head around the game, I consistently smoked him. The same went for other players online: as I got that perfect lap going, they started to disappear behind me. If you’re an arcade racing fan, or if, very specifically, you are one of the many hardcore Mario Kart players I’ve seen who are completely disenchanted with World… this might just be your game.
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The demo we got consisted of just three tracks— the equivalent of a first Grand Prix in Mario Kart— and a pretty wide range of playable characters and vehicles, each with quite distinct weight, speed and handling. For my sessions I stuck with Sonic in his car— takes a while to get going, fastest-in-game top speed, medium weight car that handles comfortably— and Amy on a hoverboard: lightweight, cornering and drift god, low max speed that loses hard on a straightaway.
One of the things you notice right away is that the parameters— speed, handling, acceleration and so on— are right there for you to play with: unlike the vague indicators in Mario Kart, you get to see numbered stats that give you a solid idea of how the character/car combination is going to drive. I’ll get to it in a moment, but one of the fun parts of the game is tinkering with your build for genuinely unique gameplay.
Right away, the game feels more slippery than Mario Kart, but that’s control kicking in. You can take a corner wrong in this game; freedom— and the ability to screw up— have been placed back in your hands. Racing and cornering are in the same drift-boost style as Mario Kart, but with a little more precision involved: it’s possible to over or under-do it.
“CrossWorlds” in the title comes from the lap transition: after the first lap, the race leader chooses a second track to teleport into for lap 2, and after that the game reverts to the base track for the final lap. I noticed that in the demo, the base tracks seemed rather purposely serene (a stadium, a shopping mall) to emphasize players warping into what frequently looks like an amusement park thrill ride. The warp tracks I encountered included stuff like a pirate ship setting where you had to dodge a kraken’s tentacles, or a Galaxy Force homage where you’re dodging dragons made out of lava.
This system injects some randomness into repeat versus races, because the second lap is always going to be something different. By the same token, the track you’re racing on changes the layout of rings, boost panels, and items on the final lap to ramp up the speed and intensity. You learn to memorize the track one way, and then another.
The final touch that made this trial really interesting was the gadget system. Play for a little while, and you unlock items that tweak your abilities or stats. Play for a little longer, and you’ll open up all your gadget slots, allowing you to create “builds” like in a Monster Hunter or similar, stacking and combining skills to synergize with each other and create a new thing.
For my time-trial Sonic I went very standard, raising his ring limit (and thus max speed, similar to Mario Kart), equipping a gear set that leans his car’s stats even further towards max speed, and finally a minor speed boost. An all-speed build suited for time trials. After a few hours in time trial mode, with a ride built for speed and after picking up all the shortcuts for my courses, I was still well short of a S-rank for my speed class. The grind only made me hungrier for more.
For Amy I found a really fun drift build that calls for a little more dexterity with a special drift technique (drift out, then in), but in exchange allows her to boost on command and max boost through any turn at all. I started to call it the “Initial D” build. Wildly fun and not really competitive despite my attempts, much like many of the other builds you can create. For online races, you can have a build specifically meant for aggressive driving: slipstreaming behind your opponents, boosting by crashing into other cars. Many other gadgets existed and I only got so much tinkering time. Anyway, I found this a really interesting twist for this genre– not so much the idea of car customization itself but of attaching entirely new mechanics to it– and I’m really looking forward to giving it a proper shot when the game comes out.
Day one of the beta I was playing online races. Day two the online race mode switched to more of a random Mario Kart free-for-all (with Joker from Persona 5 there). Turned off by the Mario Kart I was playing this game to escape, I switched to time-trial, where I discovered and came to love toying with gadgets. I wanted to mess around even more with this game, but Labor Day weekend was a bit of awkward timing for a video game demo, and I did have things I’d rather do in real life.
I want to buy CrossWorlds, but like most major games these days it’s pretty much a hundred bucks including the DLC, and it has preorder-exclusive stuff too. I guess we’ll see around release time– which, wait, how long has this draft been sitting on the back burner?!– if I ever get around to it. I haven’t bought Bananza yet, you know.
