#Sonic and sega all stars racing sonic full#
#Sonic and sega all stars racing sonic Offline#

What the game does excel at is nostalgic indulgence. There's no option to create a tournament drawn from a playlist of the best courses, no battle modes or anything else that takes advantage of the unique and varied wacky racers. Afterwards, it's back to the lobby to choose another track. Choose a course, tinker with the basics, then race. Options are slim to the point of anorexia, however.

#Sonic and sega all stars racing sonic Offline#

You can play against seven other racers online or with up to four in offline split-screen. Despite the fumbles, it's an incredibly easy marathon of levels that only starts to pose a challenge after a crude difficulty spike right near the end. Another finds Billy Hatcher riding his Giant Egg trying to squash enemies, but the wandering control makes it an imposition rather than a welcome break.

One pits Virtua Fighter stars Jacky and Akira against a giant House of the Dead zombie in a clumsy and ill-conceived boss fight. The ones that do deviate from the norm are, sadly, rather unsuccessful. Chases, battles, checkpoint and knockout races - the majority of them are fairly obvious riffs on the kart racer formula. Fun to begin with, repetition sets in with the missions long before you reach the finale. The former are predictable enough the latter menu option offers 64 challenges based around the bulging SEGA cast and their various abilities. Outside of six Grand Prix tournaments, you can choose from time trials and missions. What kind of evil game has an Achievement called Magical Sound Shower, but no actual OutRun music? Fiery boulders crash on top of you, banana skins spawn under your wheels, gun turrets blast you, giant balloons knock you off course, while robots, crabs and crows all wander into your path, ready to knock you out of pole position. With 24 to choose from, the ideas get spread too thin and the tracks all tend to favour too many random obstacles over truly ingenious design. Nearly two decades on, I could probably still draw a map of Koopa Beach or Choco Island's sublime simplicity from memory, yet mere minutes after putting down the joypad on Sonic's effort and I can barely distinguish one overly busy course from another. Some rather limp tracks don't help matters. It's all warmly familiar, yet uninspiring. Hit the speed pads on the track for another forwards shove. Rev your engine at the right point and you get a starting line boost. Traffic cones are dropped instead of banana skins, and the lightning bolt power-up is swapped for character-specific special attacks, granted to players lingering at the rear of the pack. Mario's green shell projectiles are replaced with green boxing gloves, the red shells with red missiles.

#Sonic and sega all stars racing sonic full#

Those based on Super Monkey Ball are pure hatred, full of short right-angled corners that jab awkwardly at handling designed to resist the handbrake turn.Д®verything else is much as you'd expect. The Sonic-themed stages, for example, are a (passing) breeze thanks to the wide banking curves that allow you to build up loads of boost by gliding gracefully around their elliptical lines. The big unanswered question: why does Sonic have a car? With the game's focus firmly on how well you can curve around bends sideways, tracks are either incredibly easy or frustratingly hard depending on how well they accommodate this feature. It's perhaps understandable that a SEGA racer would draw inspiration from the recent revival of one of the company's most beloved franchises, but what works in a time attack arcade setting doesn't necessarily fit into the specific niche of kart racing. Unfortunately, the bold ideas here begin and end with one word: drifting. Less surprising is the fact that, like so many others, it has produced something that lives almost completely in Nintendo's shadow, copying the Mario Kart template, pasting SEGA stuff over the top and doing almost nothing to move the core ideas forwards.ДЇor the elements that are new we can thank Sumo Digital, a developer that understands SEGA racing well thanks to its loving work on the recent OutRun games and also has prior form in the 'all-star' format following SEGA Superstars Tennis. What's surprising is that it's taken SEGA so long to offer up its take. Crash Bandicoot came tantalisingly close to taking the plumber's crown in 1999 with Crash Team Racing, but its otherwise been a one horse (and kart) race. Is there any other game that has dominated its field so conclusively and with such tenacity? Super Mario Kart is seventeen years old yet it remains the touchstone and the benchmark for its peculiar subset of the racing genre.