Title: Team Sonic Racing
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Developer: Sumo Digital
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: May 21st, 2019 (NA)
ROM File Size: 6.6GB
This is the latest Sonic racing game by Sumo Digital, who previously made Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and its sequel Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Unlike the prior two games, this game now is exclusively a Sonic game without any of the other Sega franchise characters. With that, does this game show the real superpower of teamwork, or does it slingshot Sonic a million miles out of bounds? Let’s find out!
Here’s the first race showing a slipstream line, a white wisp, as well as drifting.
Team Sonic Racing is a team-based racing game. By that, I mean you have to choose a team of three characters (usually in a predetermined set), and your results upon completing the race depends on the point sum of your teammates’ points, as opposed to merely being in 1st place. Depending on how each character places in a race, the higher each team member places, the more points each team member earns.
During races, there’s two mechanics to keep in mind and use; your Team Ultimate gauge, and the slipstream path. The slipstream path is a yellow line that you or your teammate starts leaving behind, depending which of you is in the lead among you. If you or your teammate race on this line, you’ll start charging up a slingshot. If you move away from the line when charged enough (there’s three stages of charges), you’ll get a boost, and also earn energy for your Team Ultimate gauge. Another thing is the passing of item boxes containing the wisps that originated in Sonic Colors.
The first area on the map, note the controls on the bottom.
Different wisps give you different effects and offensive abilities. Orange Rocket is basically a super fast green shell where it bounces off walls until it disappears or hits an opponent. Crimson Eagle is like a red shell that homes in on opponents. White wisps are the equivalent of mushrooms that give you 1-3 boosts. Blue Cubes are your typical obstacle for opponents. Red Burst leaves a burning trail behind you for a few seconds. Anyway, these are activated with the B button, but you can also pass an item to a random teammate with the A button, and if accepted, you get additional energy for the Team Ultimate gauge as well.
Once the Team Ultimate gauge is full, you hit X and then you’ll go into a super mode (but not Super Sonic) where your whole team goes super fast, as well as gain invincibility. These come through in a pinch so use them ASAP so you can start building up the gauge again. Note that you can’t start building up the gauge until it empties and the effect wears off.
Team Ultimate in action.
You can also perform tricks in the air after a ramp. Unlike in the Mario Kart series, you can actually do different manual stunts with the right stick. For example, if you tilt the right stick upwards you’ll do a vertical flip, and you can do this up to three times again for an even bigger boost once you land safely on the ground. Be warned though, if you mess up the landing, you’ll lose all of your rings. Rings are collected the usual way and do give you a minor increase of speed (like in the Mario Kart series and Diddy Kong Racing).
The main story mode has Sonic and crew face off against this new Tanuki character named Dodon Pa. No-one knows who he is or what his motives are, so who knows who he truly is… Anyway, he’s the guy who rounds everyone together and challenges everyone to race that’s not just any race, but a special race to see who’s the fastest! It’s very important to note that the story works… oddly. In the adventure mode, you progress via missions in a manner not too dissimilar to New Super Mario Bros. or Sonic Colors where each mission is a circle on a path. Here’s the tricky part; normally you’d use the A button to select the mission and that’s that. This is the case… only you then skip the story segments.
The mysterious Tanuki; Dodon Pa.
That’s right, each major mission begins with a cutscene with still portraits (Sonic Free Riders did this as well for comparison) where the characters fully-voiced interact with one another. The trick is that you have to select the mission with the Y button to actually view the cutscene before (and another after beating) the mission. Why this wasn’t done the other way around where the A button selects the mission with the cutscene intact I will never know. Most won’t notice the directions on the bottom of the map screen telling you these things. I didn’t catch it until someone told me about it.
In addition to the standard missions that require you to get the most points in a race, there are also other mission variants. These include collecting enough rings while drifting to extend the time long enough to rack-up enough points. Another has you passing signposts to also rack-up enough points, and another is a elimination race where the last racer in a completed lap is removed from the race. I say rack-up enough points, because you can earn medals upon earning a certain amount; bronze, silver, gold, and, you guessed it, platinum. And let me tell you, some of these are EXTREMELY difficult to even get the silver medal. These missions also provide keys for doing a special objective, such as getting enough extra time in a ring challenge, which can also be painfully difficult. This is crucial to the game because you have to earn keys to progress through the story.
The Mod Pod machine.
Stars are earned by completing other more simple objectives in races. However I don’t know just yet what happens when you get them all. You are told how many there are on the top of the map screen, that’s all I know about them. Another important aspect is the Mod Pod system. This is your classic gacha unlock system where you use the credits you earn from winning races and missions to use on a Mod Pod machine. Each use is 10 credits and upon opening the capsule, you can randomly unlock either a new car part for any specific character that changes your car’s stats, to a new paint job (usable by any character), to new horn sounds (also usable by anyone). You can also get a random wisp box that you can use for a single time in a race and gain whatever effect it says.
Visually it’s a mixed bag. You can tell the Switch version is a downport because it’s rather low-res (I’d say 720p docked). Textures and shadow detail definitely look low-res at times as well. The framerate seems to hold 30fps pretty well so no issues there. But yeah it’s sad that the visuals have a definite lack of polish to them. Plus car parts flicker in the garage when moving around in the menus as another example. Art-style wise it’s quite good. In terms of raw graphics it seemingly holds up well enough at first glance and is very comparable, but it’s still obvious that the other versions will be a much cleaner and smoother experience. Honestly you’d have expected the game to be a Switch game first and then ported upward, but that’s just me.
Here’s the character select screen showing all the characters via the garage menu.
Audio-wise it’s good. Jun Senoue returns to take charge of the soundtrack after so many years. Crush 40 is also back to make their first main theme song since what, Sonic and the Black Knight in 2009? They even got Sonic Mania‘s Tee Lopes in as well. There’s a lot of remixes from prior games. The music so far sounds pretty good! Even if so far it’s not my fav in the series (that’d go to the Adventure era). The game as said is fully voice-acted and there are actually a number of recasts. Silver, Blaze, Knuckles, Omega, Omochao, and Zavok all have new voices. Some are good while Knuckles is a bit rough in my opinion. Honestly I’m still not totally into Roger Craig Smith as Sonic after all these years. Ryan Drummond forever and yadda yadda yadda. 😛
Overall, I… wasn’t all that impressed to be perfectly honest. Some of the side missions are REALLY hard (note, these don’t have difficulty modes, only the normal races do), and as said the keys earned from them are mandatory for progressing in the story. The general racing is pretty good and I did like the team mechanics (the slingshot and Team Ultimate bits being two particularly enjoyable ones). I remember playing the Wii U demo for Transformed and I didn’t dig it that much at all, so there’s that. Anyway, I hear Team Sonic Racing is VERY similar to the prior games so if you adored them, you’ll love this I’d think. There’s also clearly fan service with the themes used for the tracks. And it’s actually at a rather good budget price like Sonic Forces before it (maybe slightly higher).
You’ll Love:
+ The team mechanics are fun to use. I especially liked the slingshot and Team Ultimate bits.
+ A decent selection of characters, though with odd exclusions like Cream (with the Chao taking her spot in Team Rose).
+ Music is good, but for reasons I can’t put a finger on it’s not really as good as the Adventure era to me. Bias maybe I guess?
+ The gacha system with the Mod Pods is really fun and fair. The only duplicates are the wisp boxes, so you’re VERY frequently unlocking a new item.
+ Fully voice-acted in English. Voice work tastes will differ from person-to-person.
+ Has screenshot and video capture support.
You’ll Hate:
– Visuals definitely have that very downported look with low-res textures and shadow detail, and it’s uber jaggy, especially when you see your karts in the character select screen. Oof.
– Cutscenes are all in portraits, so no actual 3D in-game cutscenes.
– Due to cart space, Sega flat out cut the CG intro video on Switch. Eh, just watch it on YouTube right here!
– Utter difficulty of some of the side missions and their objectives (THE RINGS). This halts story progression due to needing the keys they give as one of the rewards.
– Car customization is somewhat limited. Doesn’t help when literally half of the unlockable ones share the same stats as the standard parts but are now just shiny and gold. The latter gold parts also hide paint jobs.
Score: 7/10