Obvious comedy aside, shit this game is good and damn does it look good. You would not imagine that a kart racer has thus far been above and away the prettiest thing I've run through this monitor, but I'm sorry Witcher 2, you sir are dethroned. The screenshots really can't do it justice.
The title of the game has this key little word that defines why it's so amazing to look at: Transformed. What does transformed mean here? It means, as the track goes, the vehicle you're driving in or the track beneath you can transform. It's way cooler than it sounds, usually - there's a little bug in the land/air to water transformation that crops up very rarely - but basically you go from driving, to hitting the water as a boat, to launching into the air as a jet or hovercraft or weird looking steam punk thing. The tracks change over the course of the race, either pushing you into different sections or entire sections explode, so you take off into the air.
On paper that sounds rather horrible, but on the most part the transitions are flawless. The game has an excellent sense of flow, blasting you past molten rivers, through dragon skeletons, over sinking aircraft carriers, through shinobi temples at autumn and just everything else you can think of. It is both a stunning homage to Sega games (though of course I wish they could have gotten rights to stuff like Herzog Zwei or used tracks from Phantasy Star) and wonderful to look at. This is probably the first game I can bring to mind where water not only looks good, but has its own feeling as a terrain that isn't just "go slow".Why do they put water in mmorpgs anyway? That's all it ever is - go slow. Great. Here, water is fun, though obviously the way a boat handles is pretty eager to fishtail. But then again, it's a boat. Boats do that. I am not good at driving a boat because I am not literally boat people. I've spent less time in a boat than I have in a plane in the real life.
The game's courses divide between air, land and sea. All three use the drift charge ruleset in much the same way. The plane modes can do a barrel roll, which apparently can offer a drift charge like boost should you evade an object or something. I've rarely done it. It's enough for me to not smash into things while flying. Drift charge is a charge up of "speed" you build while drifting. It's very goofy and kinda takes away from the game in the pure driving sense, but it's neat in most of the tracks. You learn where you can or can't drift, how long to hold it, giving a learning curve that builds on just knowing the tracks. The game has an excellent concept of learning curve, though I wish it had a tutorial or used the start of the world tour to explain things. I had to read forum posts to explain a bunch of the mechanics, which is kind of dismal.
The track selections, like I said, have tons of variety and are just visually stunning. This game is allowed to do stuff other games for whatever reason just don't do. You gleefully power drift over roof tops, blast through outer space weirdness and so on. The Afterburner level is beautifully impressive. You assume you're going to race over a carrier, whatever right? You race between two carriers, with a mix of flying and boating between them. And they're at war, so you're doing flips off sinking carriers and F14s fly in formation above. I really can't emphasize how startled I was at this track the first time I did it, and it's not even top five most impressive tracks in the game! There are some bad tracks, but of the 16 new tracks, I would say 13 of them are awesome and fun. 2 of them could use a little work. 1 of them is a mistake.
A pool of like, way too many drivers with their own unique karts is presented. Some of them are from games I've only heard of - Ulala, for one, is from the Dreamcast era of SEGA games I'd never played - and others are from games I've heard of but I know nothing about the character. Still and regardless they're all charming in their way, though I think Shadow the Hedgehog is just the most ironic comedy character they've ever produced. The guy is like a serious poochie and all his Japanese anime style taunts make me bust a gut. The kart animations are all pretty good and most of the designs are really nice to look at. You can tell they put a little more effort in Sonic and Tails' vehicles but sometimes the more minimalistic models work just fine, Ulala's kart is very simple looking but matches her design well. Pudding's kart is ... Rather phallic, but I don't know, maybe that's a thing from the game she's from.The driver quips and flavor stuff is all pretty funny, and they give the game lots of personality even if you never use them. Amy Rose goes 'ruff' in this silly way, and Danica Patrick mostly plays it straight. A bunch of the taunts make me laugh or smile, some of them very serious to the point of comedy, others clearly set up to just be silly. The sulks when you fail a world tour even can be pretty funny too, from Shadow's ridiculous "Snort! This is nothing!" to Ralph crying about how they're going to have a party without him now.
I don't know that all of the different racers are fundamentally necessary. The PC version shipped with another three on top, and I've barely played anyone except for Shadow, Knuckles and Tails. It is nice to play tracks with different racers, like I said they've had all got tons of personality, but I kinda wish the game had less racers and more courses. Also I wish they'd gotten better voice work for the Team Fortress. God, their name is a pun even. See they're from Team Fortress, but also they have three drivers, so they're Team Fortress? Get it. Get .. never mind. Sorry.
Physics-wise the game has its ups and downs. Conveyance of speed is excellent and the turning physics are more complex than most kart racers, although some of the stuff can feel very arcadey and not in a good way. Sometimes you get hit just to slam into a boost, or someone boosting runs into you, and you car just does the oddest things. You might blast forward or spin out entirely, or you spin them out and nothing seems to happen to them. It can feel a little floaty. AIs are often barely tickled by some of the weapons, and some of them are really frustrating. I feel like there's some further element to taking hits from the weapons that I just can't figure out, but maybe there isn't and the AI just takes less damage.
I like the general spread of weapons. They're not too hard to use and most of them are pretty fair. I've read that online the ice weapon kinda decides matches, but playing GPs against the AI none of the weapons really get you too hard. I do not like how players can fire weapons in either direction, as the game already has tons of stuff going on and it puts the skill ceiling a bit beyond what I can humanly manage at times. The AI, on the other hand, has no issue with it at all and you can be in the middle of setting up a drift into trick boost then an AI hits you with a tiny projectile with a one millisecond margin of error between two erratically moving objects. Oy! You can end up getting plastered from both ends while in 6th, which really makes being in the middle of the pack unnecessarily punishing. I also really do not like how weapons fire while drifting, as it's totally counter-intuitive. It's hard to really explain - they fire on some weird angle of like, where the car would be facing if you weren't drifting? This isn't a big deal expect while doing traffic attack and the end result is I find traffic attack events with weapons horrible. I think I'm supposed to be able to clear the lane while drifting in them and I just don't feel like trying to figure it out. Why would I do something unenjoyable like that when I could go race the Adder course for the 90th time and do trick boosts while in a lava river? A lava river. C'mon. That's hot.
The world tour events have a bunch of variety. I really enjoy some of them - I wish there were more boost races and other drift events. Traffic Attack is fun early on, but the later ones are downright dismal. Pursuit, sprint and versus all have their ups and downs. The biggest issue with versus is how much time the game blows making you wait to actually play. I care not in the slightest about the game taking an eternity to tell me THIS IS YOUR OPPONENT. I just failed on the last opponent 3 seconds out game, I don't need to be told again and again and arrrrgh. It's also a little dodgey in parts in that the distance eliminates a player, so getting a bit ahead before a boost chain can instantly remove an opponent, or vice versa, or you might struggle for the full minute on some courses.Admittedly - all the events on the billy hatcher and burning rangers tracks get painfully miserable in A or S class, and the one drift event on the house of the dead track has this horrible turn that gets me every time, but still I like the events and I like the idea. Maybe those are normal in modern kart racers, I don't have experience with them so I don't know. But between the world tours, GPs and I guess multiplayer (which I'm not into) the game really has a ton of content to push playing it past the ten hour mark.
There are certainly issues with the game. Maybe I missed it, but I'm so unbelievably tired of opening options and not seeing a layout of the control scheme. Is this so hard? I don't even need a tutorial, just a basic layout to explain to me what the buttons do. That's it, just a little chart in game, ok? There are, inversely, way too many menus. Terrifyingly so. The game itself is a charm, but the menus are like some form of narrated photoshop. It feels like the game is horrified at the prospect I might make a decision. Is there a quit button? Seriously, can I have a control scheme? I end up alt-f4ing out of the game when I'm frustrated. Is that my quit button?
One of the things I really disliked is the forcefed Drift event in the World Tour right at the start. Yeah, it's not that hard, but the game explains nothing and it takes a couple tries as early on you don't quite get drifting. I feel like the start of World Tour should have laid down more on mechanics as the Drift events are probably the hardest in terms of learning curve for a new player. Each attempt you have to click through a relative armada of stupid menu options and how your idiot gained an XP or I don't even know what. And oh lord, if you happen to hit start midway through and hit restart - you know, to skip that shit? - It has to reload the track screen and of course you need to give it permission. It's irritating, and it's irritating precisely because the game itself is such a delight. I don't know if people ever playtest stuff like menus. I guess they can't. More than a couple of times while struggling to finish overtuned S-rank stuff I would find myself thinking - I want to change characters. In spite of the fact that the game forces you to click through pile after pile of garbage useless menus, you have to leave an event fully before you can do anything like that. On the other hand too, there's several points where the game offers barely enough options, or you have to click through a slew of nonsense to get to a menu to quit a GP. It is really painful to be fighting with the later challenges in world tour and having to click through multiple menus to get a restart. Either tune this shit so I can make more than one single mistake or make the restart button instantly take me back to the start of the race. I really don't understand why or how game developers sit down and go, yeah, restart should take 30 seconds to do. I want to restart I don't want to click back through everything. I know it's a little spergy but I honestly get so angry when I make the tiniest error, fail out of some overtuned event and then spend any more than two milliseconds resuming. It's not really a mark on the game itself, but why do they have a "ARE YOU SURE!?!" when you hit restart. Why. Why. Why did I click it in the first place? Balance it out, how many thousands of times do I have to click thorough ARE YOU SURE versus the one times I might, maybe, hit it by accident.
Seriously, does anyone ever test this stuff? Does anyone ever sit down with games and go - Man, these menus are dumb. Why don't we fix these? Or do they just ship it and no one cares because no one actually plays games or something?
A couple of the courses could use a little work. The burning rangers one is pretty bad in mirror mode, below average in normal and just terrrrrrrible on the higher difficulties. There's a couple points they should have widened the tracks a little bit and loosened some of the corners or smoothed into some of the walls, especially in the boat sections. I get that boat physics work that way - Water is not air or land, it behaves very differently - and that's fine. I like how the water bits feel on most of the courses, they add a challenge, but it's too tight here and feels very unforgiving. Running into things is absolutely dreadful in a boat. The ice town level, which is from a game I don't recognize, is very picturesque, visually one of my favorites and honestly just rather unfun to drive in huge parts. It's jerky, the corners are weird, the water section feels like you're going through a traffic tunnel... I think they could have done with widening the Billy Hatcher course a little in places, and just not put the burning rangers course in the game period. I've never heard of the game, the course was clearly tons of work to put together, and it's just the worst of the selection. I'd rather have a course from Phantasy Star or Shenmue. I feel like there's better Dreamcast titles as well for it, though honestly I wish people would use some of the less often referenced Sonic levels. Two games in a row have that damn level from Sonic 3, but still no Aquatic Ruin zone or Hilltop Zone? Or Mushroom Hill? Come on, these have oodles of striking visual style. Tell me you can't imagine a beautiful course made out of this one.
The two worst things about the game are weird. First, and perhaps foremost, some of the courses have "flats" or sections where you can ram into a wall and can't progress. You basically lose if you happen to hit these. Certainly doing so is rare, but given your agency over your kart can be overwritten with weapons, sometimes you just get jammed, piledriven and knocked into some stupid wall that shouldn't exist. It happens more with boats and planes, which leads to the other things...
There are issues with some of the boat and trick physics. I said I like them, and I do, but for one: If you get hit as a boat you have to "accelerate" to fall. It really messes with your perception, say you get tapped as you're going over a water fall. You will suddenly "float" and you can do five tricks in a row, but it's still really weird that the game has a subjective sense of gravity. (This is also true of falling off buildings, which can sometimes basically flat out end a race for you on lap one.) Also a couple of times the boats just ... Act out. I've had a couple spots where the boats spin out underwater or just out of nowhere my boat flips around. It's hard to even describe. Ironically my biggest issue with the boat physics is you boat so rarely in the game and usually in such a simple way that the tricky parts feel monstrously more difficult. I should also note that the all-star mode turns whatever you're driving into a plane. The problem is, the game doesn't actually do the transitions as well as it should and you can end up flying off the level while in all-star. I also wish it had a timer (maybe it does?) so you know when it's running out. How you drive when you're in a mode that can't spin out or stall, and how you drive when you're going to be propelled forward at high speed suddenly in a mode that does ... Well it leaves a little to be desired. Getting the timing right is part of the learning curve, though I did once hit the jump at the end of Race of Ages as all-star ended only to fly through the air over 20 seconds of water, boost fully and finish the s-rank challenge in first. So ... I guess maybe it's fair.
As for tricks, any contact made midair with an object causes a trick to "fail" -- well, sometimes anyway. There are parts in the game where I simply can not explain why a trick fails midair. I don't mean like the slightly obnoxious mispositioning in the Golden Axe level where you can tap a wall, but there's a couple spots where I can't get tricks to work on A or S rank I can on B rank. I consistently have issues with a spot on the Shinobi course where I'm several metres in the air and I just can't get it to trick boost. Not that I never can. Just that sometimes Shadow goes AH-OH-OH and it doesn't work.
Don't get me wrong, this is a great game, though the menus stuff and how tightly tuned the A-rank stuff is do take away from it a little. I get that I'm never going to bother with some of the S-Rank stuff - some courses suck, some challenges I find boring as doing chores - but the last couple character unlocks being tuned around doing very hard A-rank stuff can be irritating. I mean yes, I kept playing til I unlocked the last character, who is awesome, but... I think if I were to offer feedback to the devs, my two biggest complaints are just how unfortunate the Burning Rangers track is on A and S rank which is one of 16 tracks and the fact you don't need to do pass through menus. Once you're in GP mode for example it should just say, here's your racer selection, here's the tracks, here's the mode all on one screen. The Xbox controller has enough keys that you can have one dpad quick switch between them, so it'd be just as fast at both metrics. Still complaining that a menu is sluggish and poorly set up because it keeps you from enjoying the game is probably more praise than anything. I wish there was some sort of like, super Grand Prix option where I could set up 10 courses in a row, disable all the XP nonsense and scoreboards, just race race race then see who wins.
I am really hoping for another sequel to this game. Seriously, just take the same engine, keep all 20 courses, give me another 20 courses, some new drivers and some new weapons. Game looks great, maybe polish the mechanics a little, give me a Phantasy Star track and some Sonic tracks from the levels people rarely talk about. C'mon, Oil Ocean? Hill Top Zone? These zones make themselves. High praise. Best game I've played through this year so far, and best looking too. Oh and give me a mode where I GP race 12 tracks, a full season, so I can just plow through and not mess with stupid menus or those derpy slots.If there's anything to be bitter about in this game it's just the sharp pang of nostalgia. It's a great game, and it reminisces many great franchises that, unfortunately, haven't really made the jump forward - And I'm kinda not sure why. C'mon SEGA, 2d platformers are hot, make an Alex Kidd game and a Shinobi game! Actually, maybe they did.
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