Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is one of the best racing games in years

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is a racing game that has finally given Nintendo’s Mario Kart franchise a run for its money. While I certainly enjoyed Mario Kart World on Nintendo Switch 2, the rather empty open world and questionable approach to track design left me wanting more.

Sonic Team’s Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feels like a direct shot across the bow, squarely aimed at the good ship Nintendo. Full cross-platform play is supported, and a dizzying amount of modes and content at launch have kept me busy long after clearing every Grand Prix event.

What impresses me the most about CrossWorlds is that it isn’t content to simply be a great kart racer; it innovates, too. The titular CrossWorlds mechanic is brilliant, lending unpredictability to every race by transporting players to a completely different track for the second lap. Meanwhile, the superb gadget system offers countless ways to tweak how your vehicle behaves.

In today’s day and age, the game offers an incredible day one package stuffed to the gills with things to do; not to mention a boatload of items to unlock from vehicle parts and music tracks to higher speed classes and even the odd alternate character skin. CrossWorlds does, of course, have a comprehensive downloadable content (DLC) roadmap, but what’s here from the get-go is already very impressive.

Speed of sound

There’s no dedicated story mode in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, which is probably for the best given the interminably dull one that was featured in 2019’s Team Sonic Racing. Instead, developer Sonic Team has focused its efforts on more worthwhile aspects. The game boasts 24 race courses and a further 15 accessible via Travel Rings, for a grand total of 39 tracks.

It also has an impressively large character roster that has most of what you’d probably want from a kart racer. The usual suspects are all here, but I’m also happy to see less-represented characters like Blaze, Silver, Jet, Wave, and Storm all make the cut, too. Some deeper cuts would’ve been nice to see, like those from the beloved IDW Comics series, but what’s at launch in terms of roster is incredibly solid.

Grand Prix is your main single-player mode, featuring eight cups (with even more to come via future DLC) of four races each. The final race here is a bit of a cop-out, simply being a lap of each of the cup’s main three courses. But track variety remains impressive. You’ll find plenty of circuits inspired by beloved Sonic locales - such as Sonic Adventure 2’s Metal Harbor and Radical Highway, Sonic Unleashed’s Apotos, and Sonic Frontiers’ Kronos Island.

Courses unique to Travel Rings also impress, and these are a bit more gimmick-focused. Magma Planet is largely flight-based, having you gliding through perilous sections filled with giant lava worms. Holoska is an icy world where your vehicle will transform into a boat to speed through waterlogged caves. Meanwhile, Steampunk City offers plenty of routes through its winding industrial highrises.

Oh yes, I should also mention that Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed‘s signature gameplay mechanic returns here. Tracks in CrossWorlds are cleverly designed around land, water, and air travel. Most tracks will also change up significantly on the final lap, opening up new routes for your transforming vehicle to take advantage of, while also sprinkling in new hazards and a few extra boost pads for good measure.

Grab those golden rings, those things’ll make your engine sing

Track design - not to mention the amount on offer - is a big win in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. But that’d all fall apart if the racing itself wasn’t any good.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has some of the most fun, polished, and fast-feeling racing I’ve ever played in a racer of its kind. Drifting is especially fantastic and has a bit of a Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled feel to it, in that max-level drifts give you significantly more speed. And snaking - the act of chaining together smaller drifts in a straight line for consistently high speed - is absolutely something you can do here. So you can be sure there’ll be a pretty lofty skill ceiling when you hop online.

Vehicles are governed by five stats: speed, acceleration, handling, power, and boost. Your choice of character has an effect on overall stats, while also having a primary specialty in one of those five categories.

I’ve found that pretty much any approach is viable here; having an acceleration-based character like Tails on a boost-focused Extreme Gear board can help you stay swift and recover quickly when hit by items. Meanwhile, a heavy like Zavok or Eggman brings power to throw their weight around and hit hard with items, but slotting them in a handling-oriented machine can offset some of their unwieldiness.

During races and time trials, collecting rings scattered around the course will increase your top speed, but you’ll lose some if you collide with walls, other racers, and stage hazards, or when you get hit by items.

Speaking of, items are another area where CrossWorlds has vastly improved over other Sonic Racing titles. There’s a good amount of them, too, from boxing gloves that home in on racers ahead of you, all the way to the hilarious monster truck. Others include defensive items like a tornado that breaks incoming projectiles, sawblades that temporarily cut an opponent’s car in half, and a large magnet that latches onto vehicles, influencing their direction of travel.

To put it simply, races in CrossWorlds can be hilariously chaotic. But very rarely were there instances where I lost a race because of these items. Items are balanced so that catching up to the pack is a breeze. And sure, there’s occasionally an element of Mario Kart-esque luck involved, the odd spot of final stretch shenanigans, but there’s nothing as outwardly powerful as the race-ruining Blue Shell here.

Under the hood

Another element that really brings races alive in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is the gadget system, perhaps the game’s biggest innovation. Gadgets offer you a way to tweak your playstyle beyond your vehicle’s stats, and there’s a metric ton of them. You start with a gadget plate with a single slot, but you’ll get a total of six slots unlocked gradually by completing race events.

Gadgets offer a wide range of stat boosts and modifiers during gameplay. There are simple ones, like giving you marginal stat increases, allowing you to carry more rings, or letting you start a race with a specific item.

However, many more interesting gadgets are available. One speeds up the time it takes to perform an air trick, for example, letting you chain more together for a bigger speed boost upon landing. Another causes your car to spin whilst drifting for a more aggressive playstyle, while another still adds a fourth level to your drift gauge.

You can have multiple gadget loadouts, but you’re only able to equip one per race. Furthermore, certain gadgets can’t be used during time trial events, such as one where you start with a boost item.

It’s a rich, deep gameplay system that offers tons in the way of player expression. As well as online, AI opponents appear to also have their own gadget loadouts during races, making things that much more unpredictable during single-player content.

A mountain of unlocks

Something that I found extremely impressive with Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is just the sheer number of things to unlock. Not only that, but unlockables are spread throughout the various modes of the game, giving you great incentive to check everything out.

In Grand Prix, you can unlock higher speed classes and even a mirror track mode, as well as additional gadgets. Over in Race Park (a collection of race modes and custom race options for single and multiplayer), you can race against special teams and unlock their vehicles upon beating them three times.

In Time Trial, getting an ‘A’ rank on three different tracks (including Travel Ring CrossWorld tracks) unlocks a selection of music from throughout the Sonic series. Expect to unlock songs from Sonic Frontiers, Sonic Mania, Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Colors, Sonic Lost World, and more here, for use in the game’s Jukebox mode (more on that soon, actually).

Ancillary unlockables include alternate skins for certain characters, decals for use in machine customization, and titles for your online profile by clearing specific challenges. There really is a dizzying amount of things to unlock that should keep players coming back for hours on end.

Once you’ve got some decals and machine parts under your belt, then you’ll probably want to try your hand at making your very own custom vehicle. And the options available here are certainly plentiful.

Making your own vehicle or Extreme Gear board is a moreish endeavor. You can mix and match the front and rear appearance of the vehicle, apply color schemes, and decals for a more personalized touch. Vehicle paint also comes in a variety of types, including metallic, pearlescent, and candy variants.

A few rough patches

I really don’t have much to complain about with the overall package here. The game’s price point is on the steeper side for those used to Sonic games often coming in at less than full retail price. And that’s a bit of a downer, and may make the game a bit of a hard sell in and of itself. You certainly get what you pay for here with a mountain of content, but waiting for a sale isn’t a bad idea, either.

Otherwise, a couple of side modes are pretty underwhelming. You’ll eventually unlock a ‘friendship’ system that lets you spend tokens earned from races on character-specific titles and decals. But there’s no unique dialogue here, and it just feels like a last-minute addition to dump tokens into things to get some fairly inconsequential unlocks.

However, the Jukebox mode is the biggest letdown for me. I do love having loads of Sonic music to unlock and listen to, and these tracks can be assigned to races, which is nice. Unfortunately, you’re unable to set music on a per-track basis. Instead, you’ll assign a playlist to the three laps you’ll race on.

On top of that, the selection is entirely random. So you’ll more often than not end up with something unfitting like Infinite’s theme from Sonic Forces playing over a relatively innocent track like Colorful Mall or Chao Park.

I sincerely hope Sonic Team patches in a way to choose songs for individual courses in the future. CrossWorlds’ own soundtrack is really good, though some songs can be a little overbearing with harsh synths and obnoxious final lap chanting spoiling things a bit. So having a way to swap out songs on a per-track basis would be extremely welcome.

Should I play Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds?

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Accessibility

There aren’t a ton of accessibility options in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, but what’s here is welcome. The main gameplay options come in the form of a steering assist that prevents you from veering off-course, as well as an auto-accelerate setting and trick assist for if you don’t want to be flicking the stick constantly in midair. An ‘original’ camera setting also exists that reduces the motion offered by the ‘dynamic’ camera mode.

How I reviewed Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds

I played Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds for around 15 hours for this review. I played the game on PlayStation 5 with a DualSense Wireless Controller, on an LG CX OLED TV.

I completed every Grand Prix cup on Sonic Speed, and some on the higher Super Sonic Speed class, as well as the unlockable mirror mode that inverts circuits. I also spent plenty of time customizing vehicles, unlocking stuff like car parts, music, and decals, too.

First reviewed September 2025