Team Sonic Racing
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"What up, Sonic Squad? today we're doing some Sonic Racing!"
— Sonic the Hedgehog 2020
Team Sonic Racing is a kart racing game and a spin-off from the Sonic the Hedgehog series.
Unlike Sumo Digital's previous Sonic racing games, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Team Sonic Racing only features characters from the Sonic universe, as the team wanted to expand the series' world and character roster.
Unlike its predecessors, it received mixed reviews from critics; while its team-based gameplay, track designs, and music were praised, both the story mode and voice acting were criticized. Many critics also considered it inferior to the Sega-All Stars games.
Plot
Sonic the Hedgehog and his friends receive letters that invites them to participate in a Grand Prix like none other. The invitations come from the mysterious sponsor of said race: Dodon Pa, a tanooki riding around in an Egg Mobile-like vehicle. While the gentle and chatty Dodon Pa seems only interested in having Sonic and friends as racers in his Grand Prix, his intentions are a complete mystery and might be more sinister in nature.
Good Qualities
- The whole game is a massive improvement over Sonic Forces.
- The gameplay is very smooth, and its main target of keeping it fast is very cleverly brought out.
- It involves a vey creative and addictive use of teamwork. For example, whenever the leader of the team is in the lead, they will produce a yellow stream that can help team members catch up with you. Which really does show how teamwork is a very important element in this game. Sound familiar?
- Very solid graphics. As the animation has very gleam and colorful designs, and the models for the characters have more feature in the rendering. For example, the characters' gloves have a more visible polyester texture.
- Very solid voice acting from most of the characters. Especially, as usual, Mike Pollock as Dr. Eggman. The replacement voice actors do a great job with their characters, such as Dave B. Mitchell as Knuckles (mostly) and Erica Lindbeck as Blaze.
- The customizations you can make to your car to give it upgrades are very helpful, and you can change the appearance of them to have a very cool look.
- The Adventure Mode is great, as it has a list of great variety of goals to advance further that are well connected to the series such as collecting 100 rings.
- The story in Adventure Mode is good.
- Very awesome soundtrack. Especially Green Light Ride by Crush 40.
- The characterization for most of the characters are very solid, as they are all portrayed with their usual qualities without any unnecessary flanderization.
- After Sonic Forces portrayed him as a complete coward who always relies on Sonic to protect him, and also couldn't handle Chaos 0, Tails' personality in this game onward reverts back to his individual hero and brave who doesn't need anyone to protect him from 'Sonic Adventure.
- Very creative track designs that are inspired by past 3D Sonic games, and it has some new and original track designs.
- After years of being absent from or otherwise appearing with little to no contribution to the games, Blaze the Cat finally reappears in this game with some importance to the story.
Bad Qualities
- The Nintendo Switch version, while good, is at a lower framerate.
- It also lacks the opening cutscene unlike the other versions that do have it.
- Low character roster only consisting of 15 characters which doesn't make sense considering Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing had 24 playable characters and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed had 30 playable characters, to be fair, this was justified since Sega wanted to add all Sonic characters in the game rather than using characters from different media. But even so, they made odd character choices such as Omochao and 3 other types of Chao in Team Rose instead of Cream, putting Vector in Team Silver without Espio or Charmy, and use Zavok yet again as part of Team Eggman while leaving out the rest of the Deadly Six.
- Adding to that point, there is no downloadable content whatsoever, the reason for this is because Sumo Digital didn't want to be forced to add microtransactions in the game, whether that's good or bad is up to you.
- The game is released a month before Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, which was extremely hyped and has a lot more content than Team Sonic Racing even without all the updates, which made people prefer CTR-NF over this, making this game the victim of bad timing.
- The game is released a month before Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, which was extremely hyped and has a lot more content than Team Sonic Racing even without all the updates, which made people prefer CTR-NF over this, making this game the victim of bad timing.
- Despite what's mentioned in GQ#9, Shadow hasn't fully recovered from his flanderization and character derailment he suffered from since Shadow the Hedgehog, sadly.
- Though, it should be noted that in the Japanese version of this game, his personality is different, as it's based on his portrayals in Sonic Heroes and Sonic 06, so that version makes him more of a friendly rival rather than a toned-down Boom Shadow.
- Some of the new voice actors like Bryce Papenbrook and Dave B. Mitchell, who replaced Quinton Flynn and Travis Willingham respectively, don't fit their roles as Silver and Knuckles.
- You can't select your own team members and instead you get them randomly when playing Team Mode.
Reception
Team Sonic Racing received generally mixed reviews from critics and fans alike, who praised its team-based gameplay, track designs, and music, but criticized the voice acting and story mode, many critics also considered it inferior to its predecessors, the Sega-All Stars games..