Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed review (2018)

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer re-review provided by:

Archive Spelunker

Archive Spelunker

Justin Wagner

I have an uncanny fascination with Sonic racing games, from the half-baked to the sublime—I reckon as soon as they stuck that little blue bastard on a snowboard in Sonic 3, they should have never turned back. Isn’t going fast the thing he’s best at? The newest game in this sacred lineage, Crossworlds, ended up being one of my favorite games from last year… but it’s still not the best Mario Kart alternative on PC, because All-Stars Racing Transformed exists.

In this retrospective, former editor Chris Thursten credits Nintendo's "radiant coherence" for its triumph over Sega in the hardware game: a clever way to highlight the radiant incoherence that makes the Sonic racing series stand out to kart obsessives. Even in a post-Fortnite world, the presence of guests like Football Manager and Shogun (from Total War: Shogun, of course) feels delightfully incongruous.

Thursten's review from 2018 understandably focuses on the novelty this game boasts via its zany roster. Past the novel exterior, though, you can still find a killer arcade racer that trades some of Mario Kart's chaos for something leaner and more skill-expressive—overextend with tricks and imprecise drifts and you might lag behind, but master all three vehicle types and no amount of powerups can keep you from dominating. I still revisit the game here and there and remain liable to crush 40 races in a single sesh.

Also check out Mollie Taylor's great review of Crossworlds, as well as the vibrant fangame scene keeping insatiable Sonic racing fans fed with projects like Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers.

I’m not sure anybody has ever had more fun making a game than Sumo Digital did when it made Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.

On paper, the brief from SEGA would have been as desperately mercenary as they come: make a copy of Nintendo’s monumentally popular Mario Kart, but with Sonic. Take Nintendo’s near-perfect party game series and smear Sega’s blue weirdo and his friends all over it.

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Sumo seems to have understood that it was never going to make something pristine with the materials it was given. SEGA found itself resolutely Mean Girls-ed by the end of the ’90s console wars, too scrappy to mean anything as a brand and personally victimised by Nintendo’s radiant coherence.

As mascots go, Mario is a stranger proposition than Sonic—a portly plumber is a weird hero to invest in when you’re a child—but sheer craftsmanship overruled the rule of cool. Sonic found himself too inherently ’90s to hold onto that cool very long anyway, destined for a faltering retreat from the mainstream and a new career in fan fiction.

The first wonderful thing about All-Stars Racing Transformed is that it accepts this: not just about Sonic, but about SEGA’s whole brand. The core cast includes everybody you’d expect: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and so on, each driving cars that transform into planes and boats as stages change over the course of a race.

Then somebody put their hands on the crossover lever and gave it a push: you can also play as the bloke from Shenmue, who rides around in an OutRun cabinet, or as B.D. Joe from Crazy Taxi. You can play as AiAi from Super Monkey Ball, who appears to have the Dreamcast logo shaved into his head: a gang sign that only middle class ’90 kids will understand.

Nintendo has done this sort of thing before, of course, in the Smash Bros. series. Hell, Sonic is in Smash Bros. Not content to be outdone, however, Sumo leaned even harder on the crossover lever and snapped it off, wholesale embracing Sega’s latter-day existence as a publisher of sober PC strategy games.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that you wanted to do sick drifts across the deck of After Burner’s aircraft carrier as a tank-driving general from Company of Heroes: but you do, you really do.

You want to fuck up Tails with a well-aimed swarm of bees as a Roman centurion from Total War. You want to fly around a level from Sonic 3 as actual human racing driver Danica Patrick.

Harvest time

You want to do it all as Racing Transformed’s inarguable star, Football Manager: just a regular man in a football-themed car who likes to bellow things like “get in!” as he tumbles from a collapsing bridge in Panzer Dragoon Saga and transforms into a boat.

I can’t express how happy I am that somebody decided to make this, that they were willing to shatter the ideal of a ’90s console brand into pieces and throw it to the crowd.