The mascot kart racer has seen a major resurgence in recent times, with the next few months packed with adorably familiar faces zooming around on outlandish tracks. From the caricatured visages on show in F1 Race Stars to the comforting plushness of LittleBigPlanet Karting, it’s a pretty packed marketplace. As Mario Kart established long ago, this is a genre that lives or dies based on its multiplayer; it was with a sense of trepidation that we sat down to try out Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. It comes down to this.
The game’s multiplayer is divided between online, in which up to 10 players can compete, and offline splitscreen which supports four players on most consoles, with an extra player being supported on Wii U thanks to the GamePad’s screen. Additionally, while the online mode only supports competitive mode, if you’re playing offline with some mates you can work co-operatively to try and beat the computer.
The first thing to note about the game is just how familiar it all feels; if you’ve ever touched a kart racer, then its combination of boosts, jumps and drifts will feel like second nature. With regards to multiplayer, this means anyone with even the slightest level of competency in the genre won’t have any problem leaving the AI racers in the dust on anything but the hardest difficulty setting.
If you’ve ever touched a kart racer, then its combination of boosts, jumps and drifts will feel like second nature.
Partly, this is down to the balanced range of weaponry on offer; while each of the characters has a unique ‘All-Star’ move, there are no blue shells here. Granted, if you’re in last then the odds of you getting one of the more powerful weapons is increased, but as it should be, individual skill is the only real guarantee of moving you up in the rankings.
While on the topic of individual skill, one of the best features on offer in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is that experience gained in multiplayer transfers over into your single player campaign, and vice versa. It’s a nice touch that really encourages inviting mates round for a game; after all, four lots of experience means that when they all head home an even wider arrange of powered-up characters will be available for you to use in the World Tour campaign.
The way it works is that each character earns experience points when racing in order to level, up to a maximum cap of five. Doing so unlocks mods for that racer, which are fixed bonuses that can be switched between pre-race in order to customise the character to suit your playstyle. So if you’re a fan of Knuckles but find his handling somewhat lacking, you’ll be able to pimp it out after reaching a suitable level in order to excel with the red echidna.
The nature of the levels, with most featuring some combination of land, sea and air racing, means that they feel suitably varied but inevitably you’re going to have some tracks that you perform better on. When we tried it out, racing on land usually saw us fly into the lead but the second we took to the air and had to deal with navigating vertically as well as horizontally, in order to pursue boosts and dodge weapons, things got slightly messier.
It’s this part of the multiplayer experience where Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed stands out. While much of the gameplay is reminiscent of other games in the genre, the fact that you’re likely to be better than your mates in certain vehicles than others means level selection becomes that much more important, and you’ll want to try them all. Throw in the well-balanced weapons and ability to mod characters to suit your playstyle and you’ve got a multiplayer experience with a focus on skill as much as fun.
Sumo Digital is creating a game that’s shaping up to be a refinement on a familiar formula that tries to be different from most other offerings out there; just don’t expect it to transform the kart racing genre, despite the title.
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant and is not a car, boat or plane. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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