This review contains spoilers
Team Sonic racing is very disappointing. It is a perfectly fine kart racer combined with a terrible visual novel which feels like it only exists because someone higher up in the company decided that a game that didn't benefit from a story needed one. In fact, everything in the game kind of feels like it was decided by someone else. It is almost cliché to point out that Sega All Stars Racing Transformed was better, but this is a step back in every way except the team mechanic. Even the unfortunately brutal difficulty balancing around challenge events seems to be a step backwards.
First let's talk about the Team Mechanic. It certainly has potential, but is honestly very flawed. This part of the game forces set teams for no real reason, with some of those teams being questionable at best. This could have been solved by just letting the player pick one teammate from each type for a custom team, allowing for more variety in player characters and letting me not have to race with Vector The Crocodile if I want to play Blaze The Cat, the best Sonic character. I would love to play with a team of Blaze, Rouge, and Big The Cat, but alas I cannot. I will give the story mode credit for not forcing you to use specific characters, despite the bad visual novel bits heavily implying which team it expects you to use, even if ultimately nobody really feels unique enough to stand out from their archetypes outside of their aesthetics anyway. Swapping powerups with teammates is genuinely a neat idea. Making slingshotting your car a more codified team activity is also a good idea. Team boosts are... ok? They aren't as good as Transformed's equivalent ultimate system but they're just... there. At least they have neat music attached to them.
The thing I really didn't expect though was just how bad the visual novel side of things were. It seems to only be able to show one or two characters at a time, outside of one big crowd shot at the end (which is a single sprite not even containing everyone in the cast). It is often unclear who is present in a scene, with characters jumpscaring you by becoming suddenly present, and towards the end having Eggman and Dodon-Pa openly discuss plot elements that the other cast members just seem to ignore. It is baffling to see a big budget title completely fail at something that indie devs with zero budget have done better jobs at. And even with better presentation, the plot drags. 5 chapters or so are just the characters getting introduced, milling around, everyone but Big The Cat thinking Dodon-Pa is the villain, and them making jokes about Big being stupid and Sonic being hyperfocused on having fun despite signs that he's clearly falling into a trap. All the characters are pretty two-dimensional in this, even by the standards of recent Sonic games. They then proceed to all just... keep racing, despite numerous suspicions that something is going on, only for it eventually to come out that the obvious twist villain is just a rich monarch slash corporate CEO who could have just explained this four chapters ago. Even if this had been a trap, everyone just... kept racing anyway, which... it sure was a decision to make every motivating factor in your racing game point away from racing being a good idea. Anyway, nobody in the Sonic cast manages to point out that Dodon-Pa has been making them do unpaid labour before Eggman kidnaps him for no reason and forces everyone to... race more. Even though they were already racing. And had no intentions on stopping. And then the mcguffin explodes in a bad cutscene and everyone is fine and gets new cars so they can keep racing.
So basically, this game made Sonic 06's plot look like Shakespeare by comparison. No story would have actually been better than this, and that's depressing.
The music is really good though. Combining several Sonic tracks into each track leads to some really cool mashups and new takes on songs, and it is without doubt the best thing in this game. It's a shame that the fantastic soundtrack couldn't support a better game. My recommendation would be to just listen to the soundtrack while playing a better kart racer.
First let's talk about the Team Mechanic. It certainly has potential, but is honestly very flawed. This part of the game forces set teams for no real reason, with some of those teams being questionable at best. This could have been solved by just letting the player pick one teammate from each type for a custom team, allowing for more variety in player characters and letting me not have to race with Vector The Crocodile if I want to play Blaze The Cat, the best Sonic character. I would love to play with a team of Blaze, Rouge, and Big The Cat, but alas I cannot. I will give the story mode credit for not forcing you to use specific characters, despite the bad visual novel bits heavily implying which team it expects you to use, even if ultimately nobody really feels unique enough to stand out from their archetypes outside of their aesthetics anyway. Swapping powerups with teammates is genuinely a neat idea. Making slingshotting your car a more codified team activity is also a good idea. Team boosts are... ok? They aren't as good as Transformed's equivalent ultimate system but they're just... there. At least they have neat music attached to them.
The thing I really didn't expect though was just how bad the visual novel side of things were. It seems to only be able to show one or two characters at a time, outside of one big crowd shot at the end (which is a single sprite not even containing everyone in the cast). It is often unclear who is present in a scene, with characters jumpscaring you by becoming suddenly present, and towards the end having Eggman and Dodon-Pa openly discuss plot elements that the other cast members just seem to ignore. It is baffling to see a big budget title completely fail at something that indie devs with zero budget have done better jobs at. And even with better presentation, the plot drags. 5 chapters or so are just the characters getting introduced, milling around, everyone but Big The Cat thinking Dodon-Pa is the villain, and them making jokes about Big being stupid and Sonic being hyperfocused on having fun despite signs that he's clearly falling into a trap. All the characters are pretty two-dimensional in this, even by the standards of recent Sonic games. They then proceed to all just... keep racing, despite numerous suspicions that something is going on, only for it eventually to come out that the obvious twist villain is just a rich monarch slash corporate CEO who could have just explained this four chapters ago. Even if this had been a trap, everyone just... kept racing anyway, which... it sure was a decision to make every motivating factor in your racing game point away from racing being a good idea. Anyway, nobody in the Sonic cast manages to point out that Dodon-Pa has been making them do unpaid labour before Eggman kidnaps him for no reason and forces everyone to... race more. Even though they were already racing. And had no intentions on stopping. And then the mcguffin explodes in a bad cutscene and everyone is fine and gets new cars so they can keep racing.
So basically, this game made Sonic 06's plot look like Shakespeare by comparison. No story would have actually been better than this, and that's depressing.
The music is really good though. Combining several Sonic tracks into each track leads to some really cool mashups and new takes on songs, and it is without doubt the best thing in this game. It's a shame that the fantastic soundtrack couldn't support a better game. My recommendation would be to just listen to the soundtrack while playing a better kart racer.