Airplanes are the most uneven, initially seeming to have a bit too much airspace, leaving a disconnect from the tight encounters of the other modes. Crash or get shot, however, and you’ll lose your charge, making clean racing a must to reach top speeds.īoats handle similarly, but open up the track to compensate for the wider drift arcs, and allow you to take advantage of airtime granted by launching off ramps or cresting a wave to get small boosts granted by doing tricks. Hold a drift long enough and you’ll charge up to three drift boosts, with each charge granting longer and faster increases of speed. Cars can hold drifts almost indefinitely, reversing the direction of a drift effortlessly, allowing you to trace the best racing line through the corners while hitting every boost pad.
These stages tie into Sonic Racing Transformed’s headline feature-the ability to change between three different vehicle forms.Įach vehicle has its own set of nuances to master. The legacy of the aforementioned Blur and Split Second shows through here, with a competitive refocus on weapons and dynamic stages that change lap to lap. Thanks to the success of the first game, Sumo Digital was able to take in members of the shuttered Bizarre Creations and Black Rock Studio.
Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed takes the drifting and structure of its predecessor to and seriously refines it. Still, Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing was a little too messy for serious competition: the powerups are uneven, and the track design isn’t quite there (it might be accurate to have 90° turns in the Monkey Ball stages, but it isn’t much fun to drive on them). It also set the standard for SEGA fan-service, with offbeat choices like Fantasy Zone’s Opa Opa and the Bonanza Bros as unlockable racers. The first game in the series, Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, built on the sublime drift mechanics and challenge modes developer Sumo Digital brought to Outrun 2006. All while being an absurdly fun celebration of all things SEGA. So it might catch you by surprise to find out that Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed manages to not only build on the legacy of games like Outrun 2, Split Second and Blur, but takes the mascot racer, a genre that often aggravates players with its random elements, and turns it into a serious competitive racer. Sonic the Hedgehog might be fast, but he’s probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of top tier arcade racers. New Testaments is a monthly retrospective in which Amr Al-Aaser presents an overlooked modern game and champions its best ideas.
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