Tate

This is a hit piece, MKW deserved it. The quality is night and day. 10 years and a hefty Nintendo budget does wonders for pure satisfying mechanics and responsive input. All the feedback (haptics, audio, visuals) are so perfectly over-engineered. They've blown it out of the park and made a Mario Kart game that feels current gen..

Sonic Crossworlds is fun in it's own style. The car customization is cool, the gadgets are interesting, but...

The balancing is terrible, the graphics feel far inferior (it looks like a ps4 era title in terms of level geometry and material definition... Even the background npcs on the main menu look jaggy and polygonal.). The feeling of weight is non existent. It almost feels like driving a toy car, there's no sense of traction. The drifting feels sloppy and not nearly as mechanically satisfying even compared to all star racing transformed... I've always preferred Sonic compared to Mario, and wanted Crossworlds to win me over. But it let me down on the final polish. It feels cheap, and to get the entire games worth of content (deluxe edition) it's more expensive than MKW.

In my eyes there is not a single category Crossworlds beats MKW in terms of production. It beats MKW on accessibility through cross-platform. And it beats it on collab tie in content. But as a game? No. It's a rehash of mk8's structure with more customization and the teleport gimmick. It's not really doing ANYTHING new except those two things. It's fun and chaotic, but MKW took the award, and for good reason.

This feels like a paid damage control article, or maybe an overhyped fan glazing SEGA.

(Edit) I initially disliked the highway portions too until I realized it's just a different style of racing. Will you ride the back of the pack? When is it a good time to safely pull ahead? Will you take a massive off road shortcut and risk being sent right back? There's so many options for how you battle and place yourself to prepare for the final sprint. It's something new.