The idea of a new kart racing game seems a little crazy in these days. After all, there is Mario Kart for the Wii and Mario Kart for the DS. What do we need with another kart racing game? Well, if you don't own any Nintendo products, you might not have played a kart racer before. Crazy, I know. But Sega thinks that it's true, in fact they think so, so much that they have come out with Sonic and Sega All Star Racing for every console(including the Wii).
Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing is an kart racer game. The modes in the game are pretty standard. There is a Time Trial mode, a Missions mode, a Grand Prix mode, and a Mulitplayer mode. All of these are pretty much what you would expect. The player is allowed to play with eight characters to start with and can unlock up to around 20 or so. The mission mode also gives the player a tour of some of the locked tracks and characters. All be these brief and repetitive tours, as there are around 50 misisons and only around 5 different variations. The carrot on the stick, are Sega Miles which allow the player to unlock new characters, tracks, and soundtracks. The player earns the miles by doing just about everything in the game.
The actual racing is pretty standard, the player drifts by pulling a trigger and the player activates any power up they might pick up by hitting the A button. There are superstar power ups that appear in the power up pods randomly. These do change things for those lucky one or two that might get these over the course of the race. But all in all it's a standard kart racer. Which by no means is a bad thing.
Sonic and Sega All Star Racing is probably one of the best kart racers that doesn't have a Nintendo logo on it. But things aren't all roses; as great as the game can be. In general there are far too many random elements in the game. The fact that the player has to unlock the balance of all the tracks to get the time trial achievement. Which basically means that the player is going to be playing quite a lot of Sonic and Sega All Star Racing. Which is certainly fine; but the repetitive nature of all this playing would probably get to just about anyone. Also, considering there is no REAL difference between an online race and a single player race as far as miles are concerned it's much easier to just get these miles through offline low difficulty play. Finally, today, Sega seems to agree with my estimation of the situation because for 400 Microsoft Points the player can unlock all the characters and tracks.
Sonic and Sega All Star Racing is a great kart racer. I certainly loved playing with all the historic racers in Sega's library. I also feel like perhaps in the future there could be new tracks or new characters although there doesn't seem to be any anchors for downloadable content. Sonic and Sega All Star Racing probably wouldn't be the first game I would pick up this time of year. I would probably look at this as a discounted game or perhaps an extended rental. But I think that most people would get around 10-20 hours of fun out the game. So if you have some time to kill with some crazy and somewhat adolescent fun. Go for it.
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