Rating of
4/5
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/31/13
After being pleasantly surprised by the excellence of “Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing,” and being a fan of the love-it-or-hate-it “Sonic R,” I have come to strongly appreciate Sega’s attempts in the kart racing genre. With a shiny new WiiU and very few appealing games available on the thing, the WiiU version of “Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed” (“SART”), called the ‘Bonus Edition’ due to its inclusion of Metal Sonic and an extra racetrack, seemed like a no-brainer, especially because Sega decided to sell this game for a MSRP of $40, a third less than what most WiiU games go for.
Presentation
“SART” doesn’t look quite as sharp as its immediate predecessor. The game still looks quite good, but there are some barely-perceptible jaggies and some environmental objects that look like they could have used a few more polygons. When playing on the WiiU’s GamePad, a lot of smaller textural details disappear or become harder to see than they are in the upscaled 1080p image that the WiiU pushes to the TV.
Sega broadly increased the number of old IPs invoked in this second all-star-centric game, bringing in characters and tracks from “Skies of Arcadia,” “Golden Axe,” and “Shinobi,” while simultaneously dropping the zombie lovers that originally appeared in Japanese-arcade-exclusive “House of the Dead EX.” Most of these characters look good and authentic to their original games, though I found Vyse from “Skies of Arcadia” to be badly/stiffly animated.
The music included in the game is, once again, typical Sega fare, but usually drowned-out by the huge amount of engine noise emitted by the karts. The voiceacting is about the same as it was in the previous “Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing,” with a noticeable improvement in the game’s narrator, who no longer sounds like he’s talking to 5-year-olds or applying to be one of The Wiggles. Guest character, Wreck-It Ralph (from the game “Wreck-It Ralph” from the movie… “Wreck-It Ralph”) has a noticeably different voiceactor from his previous theatrical appearance, and sounds significantly dumber than he should.
Overall, “SART” would be a nice, shiny first-round WiiU game… were it not for the bugs. The game has a tendency to crash randomly. One night it crashed 5 times in 3 hours… but never crashed before that and hasn’t crashed since. When it does crash, “SART” crashes spectacularly, forcing the player to actually unplug the WiiU in order to reboot, since the crash locks the power and reset buttons on the console itself. Sega has already had to release patches to fix missing boost strips in certain tracks, and in adding Alex Kidd as a free bonus character on Christmas broke the unlock process for his final kart mod and left him with brain-dead AI. Thankfully the WiiU is just as capable of accepting patches as the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC… but Sega needs to take responsibility and put forth the initiative required to actually release fixes.
Story
I’ll just say the same thing about “SART’s” lack of narrative that I did about its predecessor’s: Some racing games go awry when the developers try to create a compelling story that involves driving in circles. Sega has long been developing a reputation for including horrific, fan-fiction quality stories in their games. Thankfully, the writing team took a pass on “SART,” and the game features no story elements whatsoever. The player can go through the entire game with no objective other than winning. And it still works.
Gameplay
Like “Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, “SART” features a variety of gameplay modes, all of which allow up to 5 players to participate (4 with standard controllers, 1 with the GamePad). The two main modes are Grand Prix and World Tour.
Grand Prix are series of four races with cumulative point totals. These are typical kart-style races, relying on drift boosts and a variety of well-balanced weapons to get ahead of other racers.
World Tour, on the other hand, is an ongoing series of single events, each with one of a variety of gimmicks. A World Tour event might be a normal race… or it might be a VS race against a number of specific characters who come out one-at-a-time, or a Pursuit Race where the player must chase and destroy an enemy tank, or a Ring Race where the player must fly through rings to prevent a countdown timer from losing too much time, or a Boost Challenge where the countdown timer only stops when the player is boosting, or one of several other different types. Thanks to the way World Tour is setup, the variety of gameplay in “SART” is huge.
The ‘transformed’ part of “SART’s” title refers to the added ability for each character’s kart to transform into a boat or an airplane for specific segments of each track. To transform, a kart must pass through a transformation ring, otherwise the kart will retain its current form and automatically ‘fall off the track’ on order to be reset into the appropriate form, losing time in the process. Because of the vehicle variability added to this game, the tracks are incredibly diverse, can be crazy long, and almost universally change the layout between laps. Thus the first lap in a course might be all car-based, but during the second lap an explosion might destroy the road, necessitating transformation into a plane, or a fork might change, redirecting into water and necessitating transformation into a boat. I was incredibly impressed by the track designs in “SART” and found myself having more fun with the variable courses and vehicle transformations than I have ever had with a kart racer before…
…The only real flaw in “SART’s” gameplay is the ridiculousness of the enemy AI. The game has four speed classes for each Grand Prix and World Tour event: C, B, A, and S. While C class feels like a nice, fun introduction to the game and its mechanics, B class immediately ramps up the AI viciousness to the levels of the typical ‘Mario Kart’ game on 150cc difficulty (the hardest, aside from Mirror Mode). A class is equivalent to “ModNation Racers” in over-the-top difficulty, while S class is nearly impossible. The extreme difficulty of game modes above B class wouldn’t be a big deal if “SART” used its predecessor’s method of unlocking characters and vehicle stat mods, using money earned by participation. “SART” instead requires the player to reach a specific threshold of collected stars to unlock characters and mods, with each star coming from completing a World Tour event at a specific difficulty. Thus it’s really easy to earn one star from every World Tour event, but nearly impossible to earn all four… which is required to unlock EVERYTHING. What makes the insane difficulty at higher class levels even worse is that every kart has its speed increased but its handling decreased. I understand the speed increase, as it has been part of the kart racing subgenre since “Super Mario Kart,” but I feel like the horrible handling in A and S class events might be another bug in the game, considering that I found it impossible to execute simple drifts and make turns that I found easy in C and B class.
Overall
“Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed” could have been the greatest kart racing game ever made. Huge, diverse tracks; a great cast of characters; plenty of game modes; and well-balanced weapons are exactly what the karting subgenre needs. However, the number of annoying bugs, including the broken difficulty of the A and S ranks makes this game start to feel more like work than fun far earlier than it should. Hopefully Sega continues hammering away at this game and can fix the crashing and balance issues in an update. Karting fans should definitely not miss this game, even in its imperfect state. It’s still that good.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: N/A
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
