Better presentation than the first game, even has voice acted cutscenes and a Crush40 vocal song but this game is atrocious, they got too ambitious with their shitty engine held together with tape and popsicle sticks, nothing works in this game and its an exercise in frustration.
The bog-standard racing is fine but hurt severely by rubber-banding AI, the battle mode and boss fights just don't work, playing them will make you miserable.
Just another crap Sonic game from the dark age shat out without any care.

Sonic Rivals 2 is a game I have a lot of nostalgia for, but objectively it’s just an expanded version of Rivals 1 with more content and overall more variety.

The games story is very simple, but here you can experience 4 stories from 8 different characters perspectives if you want! This game could really have done with a “Last Story” segment to make this worth it because despite a single run not taking too long, 8 playthroughs is a lot to ask just to say you’ve beaten this. Realistically single player is probably all you’re getting out of this, as the likelihood of playing multiplayer on this PSP game in 2024 is pretty slim.

Honestly the level design is actually pretty good. Better than R1 for sure, much more vibrant backgrounds and more engaging design. There’s also a few modes to break up the racing, nothing amazing but it breaks up the gameplay well enough.

I think the bosses are a step up, but that’s not saying much, you fight each of them 8 times so they get stale.

I’ll give them a plus one for fully voicing all the dialogue , and the game looks better on the whole. The soundtrack is pretty great, especially the main theme “Race to Win”, this feels right out of the adventure era and I love it.

Rivals 2 isn’t a bad game, it’s sort of just there, not one to go out of your way for, but not one to avoid either.

This has all the same issues as the first Sonic Rivals game. The racing mechanics are simply not fun at all due to rubber-banding AI and annoying power ups and items.

Sonic Rivals 2 features eight campaigns, although four of them are duplicates of the other four. Each zone generally goes Race – Battle – Race – Boss. The battles are a bit like a really bad version of Smash Bros, and the bosses have you and a rival trying to get six hits on the boss before the other, so you end up fighting each other more than the boss. The story just makes everyone look like idiots.

There is a saving grace for this game. Once you’ve played though one story, you unlock a Free Play mode. This lets you play the levels on their own. This shows that this would have been a decent game without the racing elements, as the levels themselves are a lot of fun, with some interesting gimmicks. It’s a shame that this doesn’t let you play the bosses on your own, but this mode is still far better than the main game.

This one left more of an impact than the first one, but it more or less solidifies my thoughts on the first. I think I'd just forgotten a lot about the first over the last two years, since playing 2 reminded me that most of these problems exist in the first game.

So it's a decent high-level concept - an expansion/update to Genesis Sonic's Versus modes (I assume; admittedly I've never had a player 2 for Classic Sonic), slapped onto the hot new PlayStation Portable. But the general physics are only mostly there. Sonic is a series where its games are made or broken by its physics, and Rivals fails to stick the landing in a few key places. The Spin Dash is less practical as a momentum builder than you'd think, and it's usually just faster to keep running, despite that initial kick of speed and what curling up usually does in Sonic games. There are those hurdles where you hit X or O to either jump or dash over 'em, but you whip by 'em so quickly that it's easy to miss the QTE prompts even when you're expecting them. There's a decent amount of creativity with obstacle theming, but a lot of them mechanically come down to button mashing - that bit in Frontier Canyon with the minecarts is more similar to that bit in Sunset Forest when you're climbing the mesh vines, etc.

There's a general issue with consistency to the game. This is a problem in both directions. The game has 8 playable characters, each having their own storyline, but the game adheres to an absolutely rigid narrative structure cross each of them, where the same characters play the same stages in the same order (the only differences being win conditions, character dialogue, and your choice of opponent on the versus stage). At the same time, how well you do on a given stage is largely contingent on how the AI does, which isn't consistent. I had a few stages where I failed over and over and over again, only to win because I did generally the same thing, just the AI doofed up somewhere along the line. You especially feel that in the Act 2 stages, where sometimes you spend a million years chasing down the rival, and sometimes you're able to stunlock them for an easy victory.

And holy crap, it all comes together in a sucky way with the bosses. Like, you try to attack the boss when you're supposed to, and sometimes it just doesn't feel like taking damage. Egg Bull in particular was an infuriating, excruciating fight.

I think the most succinct way to communicate my thoughts on the game lie with its narrative. As mentioned, the game is split into eight stories. I played through Sonic's story, had a mediocre time, and was left with a bunch of unfulfilled plot threads, but Sonic had finished the storyline he'd set out to accomplish, so whatever. I played Rouge next because why not, variety's fun. I played the exact same levels in almost the exact same way, ended on the same final boss, and hit credits, with some things explained. I realized that there wasn't going to be any secret Last Story to unlock after beating the eight character stories, realized that four of the character stories are going to be almost entirely redundant, and decided I'd had my fill.

Loose scattered thoughts: including the Sandopolis Ghosts in Mystic Haunt Zone is a cute throwback, Eggman Nega does basically nothing for this game, and that character art of Shadow smiling (reused from the first game) looks very silly.

A very short game that is artificially stretched by having """"8"""" different stories aka the same story 8 times but with different characters and slightly different dialogue
This was my first PSP game it came bundled with a console I remember having a choice between 2 different bundles but I dont remember which game the other one came with I just know that I picked this one
i didn't have a memory card for the PSP for quite a while so i always thought i never finished this game but replaying it now i think i probably did cause i remember the final levels and boss
and yah as a kid this game was ok kinda flashy but nowadays its really basic something like 17 stages and 6 bosses total and each one takes like 2 minutes to complete there this battle 1v1 modes that really feel underdeveloped and the ai is really dumb in it really not something you expect out of a sequel that being said i haven't played this first one so who knows maybe its worse

Take Rivals 1 (a game already considered mediocre to most) and fill it to the brim with barely playtested features, characters and levels and there you go. The absolute definition of quantity over quality. Most bossfights last longer than their playtests must've done, so much is broken and frustrating beyond relief.

I can consider Rivals 1 a guilty pleasure, but after all this game put me through and how I came out of it feeling... I've dropped this one so many times over the years for the reasons that made actually completing it finally a complete nightmare. Avoid.