Get your dose of True Sonic Speed
Well, Characters look early PS2 (no textures) and environments look rather unimpressive when you are stopped. Controls take a little time to get used to and aren't precise even after relavtive mastery. The controls coupled with a few cheap obstacle placements can make the game feel unevenly paced. The trick system is about as simple as it gets, and other than original names for advanced spins, get boring after prolonged play. The turbulence trails put your character on auto-pilot, but not auto-trick, providing you can succesfully enter them. The characters are far too balanced making character choices equivalent to a palette swap. Two extra characters were wasted on A.I. bots (literally). You can only collect one hundred rings per race to add to your bank for purchasing extra gear, and two hundred with a special and underpowered gear. Extra gear is relatively useless due to unbalanced powers and draw backs on top of being expensive. Extra missions get repetitive. Extra skills use too much air (namely tornado) I actually never used that skill in real play, and A.I. doesn't either. Tracks can seem a little too short. Random items, while Sonic faithful and genre complementing, serve basically no purpose other than giving you more rings or air. Jumping is horrid and requires a little to much effort. Sonic CAN run faster than the top speed of the Gears by fact, but still has to ride them and runs slow in-game without it. Now for the good stuff:
If there is one thing this game does right and well, that's provide you with a great sense of speed. The speed gauge doesn't really do justice to how fast this game looks and feels. The controls may be simple and a little clunky at first, but by no means hold you back from having great races in about 20 minutes of play. Track selection is large and varied. Each stage has two versions for approximately 16 total tracks. Each track requires a decent amount of memorization, but by no means becomes too difficult to master. Music is appropriate for every stage and avoids chessy lyrics throughout by not using them for the most part. Racing requires a respectable amount of tactical choices besides "go faster, turn better." Charaters are broken into three types to give each one a distinct advantage in choice of paths. Each track uses the type-specific shortcuts appropriately giving you speed advantage and helps replanish valuable air to your gear. Landing tricks helps maintain speed and replenish air. Doing a front flip or back flip changes trajectory, allowing you to reach different paths. Different paths are useful for the most part, since the most difficult ones are the best shortcuts. The leveling up of gear induced by ring collecting helps give purpose to ring collecting and brings up the intensity of the race. Rings serve as currency, but since you can only collect 100 at a time, collecting rings after reaching the cap is a tactical decision to help keep rivals from reaching max potential. Turbulence helps balance out races to keep the action intense. The boost attack is not only tactical in reaching top speed and knocking your opponents rings off, but entertaining with clever animations. Voice work is spot-on, despite preference of voice actors. Multiplayer modes are respectable and innovative, notably the mode where you share an air tank between two players. Good selection of Characters, and because they are overly balanced, you can easily play as any character and have fun. Inclusion of Air Skates helps bring gameplay seeming closer to actual running, which is asthetically pleasing as Sonic. Gears are in large variety and come in the form of Boards, Skates, and Skooters (hover bike-ish). Some gear is character specific to help incourage tactical decision and increase character distinction. You can play as Sonic for a larger majority of the time than past 3D Sonic titles.
While the shortcomings are noticable, they are small and detract from the fun only momentarily. The game is a rather smooth ride. The plot of the serves its purpose of moving the game along and keeping things cohesive. While this game certainly doesn't break any major ground in racing games, it provides simple fun for a few hours here and there. This is a great foundation and hopefully Sonic Team will consider refining the experience for a sequel. If your not a Sonic fan, you'll probably see little appeal in this game. If your a racing fan, you might be impressed by the speed, but turned off the the quirky controls.