Review Based On Xbox 360 Version – Also available on the PS3 and Wii

Nearly twenty years after Nintendo sent some of their most famous characters onto the racetrack, Sega has decided it’s their turn. Granted a good chunk of Sega’s popular icons come directly from the Sonic franchise itself, which the title of this kart racer makes no secret of, and you may not even recognize or remember half the other racers Sega decided to include but don’t let that fool you. Cartoon celebrities do not a-great-kart-racer make. At least not not on their own. Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing has strong gameplay and excellent visuals that will quickly win you over.

The game offers 24 exquisitely animated race courses that include everything you’d expect from a kart racer, from power ups to shortcuts. They range in difficulty from challenging enough to keep your interest, to challenging enough to demand your full attention and some serious kart racing skills. Every detail of the tracks seems to have been considered by the design team. Brilliantly re-conceived, yet familiar landscapes based on your favorite Sega games fly by at high speed as you speed through the tracks. Twists and turns keep you barely able to maintain control on courses narrow enough to make the other racers a serious hazard to anyone trying to get to the front of the pack. From form to function this game doesn’t disappoint.

Where the game fails to impress is in the power-ups and character specific abilities. In short, there’s nothing new. You can snag missiles to fire at drivers ahead of you and bombs to drop in the path of karts coming up behind, and that’s certainly fun but it’s standard fare for a kart racer and almost requisite to the genre. Each character does have their own unique power that can be used once per race but while the animations are creative, relevant to the character (Sonic turns into Super-Sonic, etc), and fun to watch, the actual in-game effect each character’s power has is identical: you get to go really, really fast for a few seconds.

It would have been nice if Sega made these different abilities actually DO different things, like one character can get a super-weapon, but another creates an earthquake that knocks all the other drivers off the course briefly. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure how they might have really knocked it out of the park with these unique (looking) powers each character has. Thankfully, it doesn’t detract from the game at all, it’s just a sore point because it could have made this excellent kart racer something altogether magnificent.

The single player missions are well done and break up the the action nicely. You’re not always competing against a fleet of other racers for first place, much of the time you are tasked to collect certain items or perform specific maneuvers on course, which helps keep the game from getting monotonous. A plethora of unlockables also keeps the gameplay fresh and players will want to keep coming back for more. There is also a very strong multiplayer component that offers standard racing online, and a few more advanced options (such as battle mode) in split-screen. The split-screen mode with some friends is likely to be this game’s most popular because it is a straight-up blast.

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing has smooth controls, great courses, beautiful graphics, and all wrapped in a shell that is stylistically and unmistakeably Sega. As a kart racer it doesn’t bring anything particularly new to the table, but it is definitely a game worth playing for both kart racing fanatics weary of continually replaying their classics, and also new players who have never jumped behind the wheel of a kart racer before.