I enjoyed the previous game to this… they both have awkward names so I’ll call them SASASR and SAASRT. No, how about Sega Racing 1 and 2. “Sonic and Sega” and “Sonic and Whatever”. Let’s workshop that one.
Anyway, this one has a much better variety of courses, with many more franchises represented. I did occasionally miss having a greater breadth from specific worlds such as JSR, but you can’t have your cake and eat it too. The new tracks are as well-designed as before, but often geography shifts mid-race, so they feel dynamic and exciting. There’s some cool new characters as well like Gilius, Nights, and AGES (a Dreamcast VMU come to life), but some have been removed… is it really worth losing the ChuChus or Bonanza Bros in favour of frigging Wreck-it Ralph?? I’m almost glad I didn’t have to deal with the silliness of character additions in the PC version. Miis are fun though with their unexpectedly realistic body shape, derpy soundbites, and chibi Outrun car.
Anyway, the meat of this game is the World Tour mode, which replaces Mission Mode with a more complex map structure and an unlock system where you’re rewarded for attempting events at higher difficulties. The challenges themselves don’t have the surprising variety of the first game but the difficulty curve is pleasing, as you really are pushed to earn enough stars for the later character unlocks. You don’t choose from a shop this time around; instead the “global progress” role is filled by an experience mechanic where using particular characters more lets you unlock configurations for those characters that change their stats. It’s a bit complicated at first but you don’t really have to worry about it until you get higher up that difficulty grade.
SAASRT’s main gimmick is of course the transforming vehicles (and stages); depending on the course and sometimes which path you take, you switch between car, boat, and plane modes, an idea obviously cribbed from the crown prince of mascot racers, Diddy Kong Racing, but done on the fly to make the races feel, again, dynamic. It’s not entirely successful: sometimes this switching between modes is more distracting from the fundamentals of racing, and the slippery handling of boats is just unfun.
Jarringly, the item selection is completely different from SASASR, but upon becoming more familiar with them, many are similar in function if not form, and overall the changes make it feel more balanced and fun. The race “starting boost” is also activated differently, and in a more engaging way. This may sound boring to you, but actually it’s interesting (I promise!) to see the devs tweaking this stuff from their first effort to their second, and coming out with a mechanically better game for it. The menu UI however is still bad, but differently so and I’d give it the edge over the previous game. Also the Off-TV play feature on the Wii U version is completely undocumented (swipe down on the Gamepad to activate and swipe up to return). I should mention the new slot machine feature too, which is stupid and unnecessary and I wish the tokens could have been used for something else.
So SAASRT has its pros and cons and awkwardnesses, but on balance it’s really a great game, with a ton of Sega fanservice, solid mechanics, plenty of content, it looks great, and it only crashed my Wii U a few times (yipe). It’s got four tracks carried over from the first game, pleasingly including a JSR track and one which was a DLC. Sure they reverted Beat from his JSRF outfit to his JSR one, but Gum is here now. And Graffiti City is basically the Skyscraper District plus Highway Zero. Kinda. So yep, five chilli dogs out of five or whatever. Sonic.
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