Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review for Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, PC

It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. In any other year, it would stand a good chance of being one of the best racing games of the year – and certainly the best kart racer. Instead, it has the misfortune of coming out just months after Mario Kart World, which may not be the best Mario Kart game ever, but that still outshines CrossWorlds every step of the way.

Some of this, admittedly, comes down to personal taste. In the old schoolyard debate of Nintendo vs SEGA I always came down on Mario’s side, plus the various iterations of Mario Kart have always been my go-to games for their respective systems, so it hits on my nostalgia a lot more when I get the opportunity to race as some of the Mushroom Kingdom’s most iconic characters – plus there’s decades of history for me to know that Toad is always my go-to racer. By contrast, while I’m sure someone out there has the same feelings of affection for, say, Charmy Bee or Big the Cat, they just don’t do it for me in the same way.

But this also hints at some of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds’ bigger challenges. Whereas Mario Kart’s racers all have distinctive personalities, their advantages and their disadvantages, the racers in CrossWorlds feel a lot more same-y. If you look at the various racers’ stats, you don’t have the same huge discrepancies you get in Mario Kart between, say, Bowser and Yoshi – all the numbers, from Sonic on down, are more or less in the same ballpark, with the odd outlier here and there.

Even when you get more into the game and start unlocking more vehicles and more upgrades, it still feels like lots of tinkering for very little payoff. In this regard, it probably doesn’t help either that CrossWorlds really makes you grind through race after race if you want to earn currency to improve your cars. On top of that, the game’s focus on rivals – where beating certain racers gives you more upgrades – adds to the grindiness of it all, by pairing you up against other racers who are just a tiny bit better, which means you’ll regularly be redoing races just to get minor improvements.

The other area where CrossWorlds shows a lack of imagination is in how its Grand Prix are structured. Each Grand Prix features four tracks: three original ones, plus a fourth that just takes laps from each of the other three tracks.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that: as we saw in Mario Kart World’s Knockout Tour, there’s a really great way to tie together successive courses in a way that makes them feel part of a larger world. But CrossWorlds doesn’t do that: it just grabs you out of one track, and then plops you down on the next one. It feels like it’s lacking in imagination.

This lack of imagination even plays out during individual races. The titular “CrossWorlds” are fifteen different tracks that pop up at the end of the first lap, giving the leader a choice between two. While these tracks are nicely designed (even if some of them feel like they came straight out of Mario Kart’s past), there’s no real advantage for the leader in picking one or the other – and, of course, you get sent back to the original track for the third lap. It’s a fun diversion, but at the same time, you’re left wondering why SEGA didn’t just use those CrossWorlds to add to the number of tracks in each Grand Prix, rather than going with the rehash they opted for.

Having said all this, you might think I dislike Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, but that’s not at all the case. As I wrote up top, in any other year it would stand head and shoulders above the competition. But in a year like this, where we can compare and contrast CrossWorlds with Mario Kart World so easily, its faults seem a lot more glaring. As it stands, it’s a very solid kart racer that has the misfortune of being compared to one that’s just more enjoyable.

SEGA provided us with a Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Nintendo Switch 2 code for review purposes.