It's a great call back to classic SEGA characters and franchises, and provides a heavy emphasis on fan service while maintaining a level of quality not often seen in kart racers outside of the Nintendo developed ones. It seriously feels like a love letter to long-time SEGA fans, and is certainly worth picking up.
Despite its goofy title and questionable marketing tie-ins, Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed deserves to be taken seriously... just not too seriously. It's a fun, challenging, and easily enjoyable racing game that uses a lot of familiar mechanics and ideas but knows well enough to try and do its own thing. And it does that thing pretty well.
If you're looking for a karting game that seriously goes beyond Mario Kart than Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed ticks all the right boxes and enhances the genre considerably. It's just a fun game that contains a strong single-player mode and some great online options. The levelling system works but more importantly, the gameplay is almost flawless.
Transformed is one of the best fun-racers in recent months and a classy alternative to Mario Kart, whose dominance is crumbling away. Without the frame-rate problems during split-screen races the speeding hedgehog might even have outpaced the racing plumber.
Finally a real strong competitor to Mario Kart outside of Nintendo platforms: Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed joins a simple and very intuitive control system to a varied and always entertaining gameplay, with great characters cast and inspired track design.
A superior Mario Kart clone and certainly the best Sega has ever produced, especially in terms of the teary-eyed nostalgia inspired by its endless retro cameos.
SummarySonic and the All-Stars cast battle for supremacy across land, water and air in transforming vehicles that change from cars to boats to planes mid-race.