Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

Often touted as the best of the Sonic kart racers, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed Collection (god that's a mouthful) is a very solid and fun racer showcasing racers from SEGA games and stages inspired by their games and gives you a balanced single player and a multiplayer mode that still has a lobby or two available.

SASRTC has sat in my Steam Library for years. I've heard it was a great, under-appreciated kart racer. But for a while I've stopped playing them as I gravitated to other genre's and platforms, especially since I didn't have many friends to play multiplayer focused games with. I crushed the AI on 150cc in Mario Kart 64 thanks to good driving and power sliding. I figured my skill would translate to this game and I was wrong. Playing online first and then on Hard/C-Class of the first race in World Tour - the game's Career mode, I could almost never exceed anything better than 4th place in the first place. It gave me the impression that success was based on having the right racer and item RNG. Surely, there was more to this "oh so great kart racer"

Truthfully, the only reason I'm playing this now is because one of my favorite streamers was playing and I wanted to play with him, as he was checking out Team Sonic Racing and started to reminisce about All-Stars Racing Transformed. I never got to play with him but, I noticed how he got smoked in online races and so did I. I wondered exactly why, and it was only later I noticed how he and other drivers did tricks off of ramps and drifted around corners. It was thanks to a Steam Guide and the World Tour mode I learned the importance boost stacking.

No tutorial teaches this and in fact, the controls are not even listed in game, instead only in the configuration menu pre-launch, making knowing the mechanics to the game a bit obscure, until you play the World Tour mode, where certain events can't be completed unless you drift and boost properly. Item boxes can give you boost. Boost pads give you boost. Performing successful tricks on jumps give you boost. Performing tricks while driving through transformation checkpoints give you boost. Drifting for a certain amount of time (as opposed to constantly switching left to right in Mario Kart) gives you boost and the longer you boost, the more levels of boost you get.

So the road to success is chaining your tools to boost to regularly get extra speed. While the typical race start boost can give you up to three levels of boost, the game has another 2-3 levels of boost thanks to stacking your boosts. The tracks are designed with this in mind, where drifting through an S-bend into a boost pad into a jump with tricks can give you three or more levels of boost, leading you faster into the next piece of the course that might give you 1 or 2 levels of drift boost before reaching another area where you can chain drifting, boost pads, transformation boost, and trick jumps together.

Soon, I noticed, the difficulties for standard Races in the World Tour mode are well crafted. Easy mode/C-Class is easily completed by normal good driving, only requiring you reach 3rd place or better. Medium/B-Class has the same requirement, but smarter AI that uses boost well. Hard Mode/A-Class has maybe the same AI (or even better), but requires that you place 1st. World Tour contains other modes, such as a Checkpoint race that runs out of time if you don't boost or another checkpoint race that runs out of time unless you drift in lanes that give you more time. A Versus race pits you against a single enemy racer where the goal is to stay ahead of them when the time runs out or complete a lap before they do. Where other kart racers have you complete a handful of races in a cup (which you can also do here in the Grand Prix mode), World Tour puts you in a single player experience of a variety of modes that slowly teaches you how to get better and unlocks characters and stages. By completing levels and higher difficulties, you get more stars to unlock further stages and racers - encouraging you to play harder difficulties for more stars.

World Tour mode is the main career mode of the game, giving you a reason to stick with the game by unlocking characters, stages, and mods for the characters through leveling which modify the attributes of racers such as speed, acceleration, handling and boost. While a great slew of single-player content, this will prevent you from just jumping into multiplayer with your favorite character or getting the most optimal character to win an event or time trial. Grand Prix is the similar modes from other kart racers. Time attack lets you repeat a course indefinitely to improve your single lap time against ghosts. Single Race lets you delve into a single course race complete with three laps which have alternate paths and transformations as you complete laps. You can join an online lobby or host your own custom one, though, with the age of the game, you may only find a couple lobbies if any.

All-Star Racing Transformed is a great purchase for Kart racing fans. While the initial impression will feel like a decent kart racer with alot of Sega references, it soon becomes a deep and challenging test of skill when you delve into the mechanics.