Flying, driving, and boating like never before! (Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed in Review)

    This year is a weird one, it's not very often that we get three kart racing games in such close succession, but here we are, getting Mario Kart World in June, and then Sonic Racing Crossworlds and Kirby Air Riders sometime in the near future. As I'm preparing to get back into the racing spirit, I thought I'd take some time today to talk about one of my favorite racing games, Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed. I'm convinced that this is the weirdest racing game that we're ever going to get, and also one of the absolute best. The character roster is absolutely insane, while maybe not hitting quite the heights of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the roster is definitely a bit more wacky and unexpected. Pair that with some really cool mechanics to lean on, you've got a really good game on your hands. I'm very excited to talk about this one today, so let's get our thrusters set and get to it!

More Than Meets The Eye!

    Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed is the sequel to Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing, and was a product of the era where Sega tried to do a bunch of crossover content, such as Sega Superstars Tennis. The original racing game in this franchise brought back many classic Sega characters for the first time in a while, allowing Sonic and Knuckles race with the likes of Billy Hatcher from Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, Aiai from Super Monkey Ball, Ulala from Space Channel 5, and Beat from Jet Set Radio. It was a pretty basic Kart racing game, and allowed for some fun nostalgia from these different franchises, and even introduced unique characters into each console version, with Banjo-Kazooie being in the Xbox 360 version and Miis being in the Wii version. If you've played Mario Kart, it was a similar game here, there are different items that you can collect, which will slow your enemies down or speed you up. Transformed takes this same sort of idea, but drives it to a whole new level. Transformed isn't just the name of the game, it's also the main special mechanic of this title. Throughout races, your car will transform between a car, a boat, and a plane, all of which feel really good to control and very different. The coolest thing is that each character has a unique vehicle that transforms based on what type of series they come from. For instance, Sonic's car just transforms using technology, sort of bringing to mind that Tails probably made the vehicle for him, where as a character like Gilius (from Golden Axe) has a car that looks like a turtle, but then morphs into a bird or into aquatic mode as you go into the different phases. Nights looks super weird, because they're the actual vehicle no matter what mode you're in, so they'll be a car being driven by the Nightmariens, or a boat, or a rocket, only becoming the true form of Nights whenever they go into All-Star mode. 

    I have to get into the character selection for a bit here. We have traditional Sega characters of course, like Shadow, Amigo from Samba De Amigo (who is weird, but not the weirdest by far), Joe Musashi from Shinobi, BD Joe from Crazy Taxi, and of course, Wreck-it Ralph. Yes, the character from the Disney Movie, Wreck-It Ralph, is in this game, just acting like a normal racer. Even stranger than that, we have Danica Patrick, the professional Nascar driver from real life racing along with all of these characters. She's driving a Hot Wheels inspired car, which I guess is maybe one of her sponsors, but either way, it's crazy that she's here at all. The characters get even weirder in the Steam version which got characters like Football Manager and a whole team inspired by Team Fortress 2. Unfortunately we did lose Banjo-Kazooie and some of the other characters from the last game, like the Bonanza Bros. and the Zombies from House of the Dead, but it's not a huge loss overall. I think when Marvel announced that Avengers Endgame was going to be the wildest crossover of all time, they forgot about this game.

    Even though I compared this game to Mario Kart earlier, it's closer to a Crash Team Racing situation, where the mechanics are similar, but there's much more emphasis on the drift. There's also a long story mode where you unlock all of the characters and mods for the different characters. There's a level up system here for each individual character, so the more you use one character, the better they get, though I'm still not sure how much the mods that you apply actually have to do with your likelihood in actually winning a race, but I know some folks have mastered this game a long time ago. I still have a long way to go before I have all of the characters unlocked. I think I only have four more to go, but it has taken me a long time of grinding up to the number of stars you need from the World Tour in order to unlock all of the content.

    Honestly I don't have a ton to say about this game, but I definitely like it, and I wish they could have kept this kind of game instead of steering it in a more "Sonic only" direction. That is only part of why I thought Team Sonic Racing was so boring in comparison, but that's a story for another day. I will say that Sonic Racing Crossworlds looks better than that, but we'll have to see how it holds up to this now 12 year old gem.

    Thanks for reading this post, friends! Have you played Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed? What did you think about it if you have? I would love to hear from you somewhere online. I'm going to be honest, I just have a soft spot for Ulala because Space Channel 5 is maybe one of the weirdest games I've ever played and I feel like not enough people know about it, so I'm happy to see her and Pudding (her rival reporter) in here along with the other wacky choices. I hope you all have a great day and thanks again for all your support! Until next time, I'm Jonathan, a Self-Proclaimed racer, and I'll talk to you again soon!