Team Sonic Racing: Sonic Racing 3: Sonic Drift 5: But It's Got the R From Sonic R

So, how does Big the Cat drift?
Kinda… like a… big cat, I suppose?





50km in:

On a scale from “Racing across ruins from an ancient civilization” to “Spotify Playlist: Partysongs 90ies” , this is… the latter, so far.

Kinda like Lukewarm Trundling, instead of Awesome Racing™.
i have to try all the characters and do more racing on the new traxxx, will report back when i have wrapped my head around what’s going on in this game.

so, if y’ask: buy/shortlist/watch/avoid?
… hmmmmm. watch, and see.

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i am so, so extremely tempted to buy this. i already have a very good idea that i’ll play it for a few days, lament buying it, and then play it a few times in like 2025 and then put it down forever

but, but, but new kart game! fuck.

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i’ve been playing transformed a bunch the last few days instead of buying this. transformed is pretty great! it has tedious progression, some jank collision, and a few other irritants, but overall it’s an extremely good game!

sadly my desire to buy new sanic only grows

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a new day, a new shot at glory:

blue/reddish evening skies yesterday made me give it a second shot, and i start to get a liiittle bit more comfortable driving in this game. The addition of a third team in the story mode does help, and i started to pay more attention to my AI-team members. I still haven’t a clue what the wisps stand for, so i am handing them out left and right to tails and knuckles, since they are too slow for sonnick.

What Team Sonic made me realize again, almost a decade later:
Idk whether SEGA has realized that they’ve made a brilliant design decision in transformed, i.e. developing tracks that offer huge replayability-potential by offering different ways how to go about your racing, sometimes forcing you to go airborne or showboat your way around, wheverer you feel more confident when driving as a character - and then adding three, sometimes unique, transformations that are specific to each character and manage to pander to those very vocal sega-fans at the same time. and then add wonderful themepark-ride-esque track-designs. And a brilliant soundtrack.

I feel like i need more time with TSR to figure out how it fares, but i slowly feel like even though i didn’t want to, i cannot help myself still comparing it with transformed, it’s like you have listened to that gem of an album for a decade, and the artist finally follows up on it, and even though you take anything you can get, you feel that it’ll never be able to step out of that huge shadow of that otherworldly masterpiece.

Transformed has been too gooooooooooooooood

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FWIW, I hear this game really shines in multiplayer, due to the team combo aspects. Kinda like Double-Dash.

gotta try that as well then!

tonight, i even started trying to influence the positions of my members by driving looking backwards (and that’s a thing i absolutely avoid/don’t do in other games, eyes on th road ahead) - boosting tails to second place by virtue of a speed-boost/slipstream is fun.

it grows on me, bu-

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the jim sterling video about this game highlighted a couple very annoying quirks with online - the post-game point-tallying and voting takes ages, and the matchmaker (at least for now) is having issues connecting to populated games, often dumping you in an empty room which is never joined by anyone else

the latter will surely be patched(?), but the former is a major turn-off

Some good referencing in these

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playing a little bit of this, noticing how much presentation they seemed to have ripped wholesale from both Mario Kart 8 and Rocket League

and because of that, i can’t help but compare those two games controls to this and by comparison it’s super stiff but i liked Transformed so i’m digging this too

i like being able to give your team your items when you don’t need them, that’s neat. i like the feeling of drafting inside someone else’s drifting lines. i like getting the hang of the drifting in general.

i like it, its a colorful and fun Sanik Kart game! i’m on Switch so i haven’t tried online yet but i think this gonna be my game to power through in handheld mode on mute while i watch something else (which is good because i’ve seen a LOT of character chatter during races)

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Yeah, I can see how this game is a step back from Transformed, and it feels less ambitious, but it also feels, uh, somehow cleaner? More streamlined?

I mean, I love the messiness of Transformed. It’s a very cool little love letter to all things Sega, wrapped in a kart racer. This is, uh, less of that, but still very fun.

I do like the little bubble car full of Chaos bouncing around.

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I don’t understand what you mean by “messiness”, in regards to Sonic Racing Transformed.

I guess it’s a bit more chaotic? In terms of weapons and character abilities and whatnot. Not a knock on it! TSR just feels a bit more uniform, I guess. Not necessarily in an entirely bad way, but in a way that’s arguably less exciting than what Transformed offered.

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price drop at Target for only 40$, tempted to buy it now.

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I think it came out at $40? Unless they do as some do and charge more for the Switch version.

It’s fun though, $40 is probably the right ceiling for the price on it.

i didnt know which sonic thread to put this in but i cant stop laughing

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they’ll never top the overall production of this one imo. they peaked

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agree. i played the bejesus out of transformed and TSR doesn’t do it for me so

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I think I 100%d it on two different platforms

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Same here, Sonic:ASR…(T) is peak arcade racing, and Sumo just knew they weren’t going to top it.
So they’ve made Hot Shot Racing, which imho is deliberately not Sanic Kart 3, but fell flat on its nose if compared to its larger-than-life predecessor.

When compared to Kart 3 though, it is good enough to warrant playing that over Kart 3. The only thing Kart 3 has going for it (after a >1 year hiatus) is its OST, there were some good bgm tracks in there. Maybe should give it a secknd chance now that i have the XBox 4 :sonicthink:

noted unpopular opinion here, but personally i think both Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and Hotshot Racing are significantly superior from a pure racing perspective relative to Transformed

  1. the course design is too gimmicky in transformed, in many places sacrificing racing flow for “neato” spectacle
  2. the tricks are not interesting (another nicked mario kart mechanic) nor fun to perform
  3. the boat controls like ass
  4. plane speed meta requires obnoxious rolls and flips to be performed non-stop which looks bad and feels worse
  5. the progression is not particularly interesting

i spent a week or two speedrunning it (i’m always a sucker for time trials, and the core kart driving/drifting engine is obviously fantastic) but was eventually like, actually no, this game is decidedly not as good as its held up to be (for my money, anyway)

never played TSR but it seems like the worst one of all at a glance

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