Game Reviews

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck, right? If there is one thing I've learned about axioms like these, it's that they're pretty much wrong as often as they are right. Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing walks and quacks just like a kart racer (yes, they quack), but turns out to be the love child of Sega's own OutRun and F-Zero GX in a pretty convincing duck outfit.

Sumo Digital's previous title, the excellent Sega Superstars Tennis, saw some of Sega's biggest icons (and a few nobodies) going head-to-head on the court. All-Stars Racing carries some definite stylistic echoes from that title, to the point that I found myself referring it as a sequel. This is a plus; Sumo's most impressive achievement in Superstars Tennis was how they managed to take characters and locales from such disparate genres and have them coalesce under a unified, attractive art direction. By miracle or black magic, seeing Ulala from the rhythm series Space Channel 5 hover alongside deposed Sega mascot Alex Kidd in a track right out Jet Set Radio Future feels perfectly natural. Even more realistic characters—Ryo of the ill-fated Shenmue series, for example—behave with enough exaggeration to fit right in.

Throwing these characters together on the track and calling it a day would have probably been good enough for plenty of nostalgic gamers. There's a certain unique appeal to seeing a gaggle of gaming icons jammed together under the banner of a single title, and time and again this draw has proven lucrative absent any significant innovations. Sumo Digital thankfully vaults over this low bar, imparting All-Stars Racing with solid racing mechanics that easily shine without any help from Sonic and his cohorts.

The cornerstone of these mechanics is the concept of drift. Drifting, as it pertains to motorsports, is defined by Wikipedia as "a driving technique...where the driver intentionally oversteers, causing loss of traction in the rear wheels through turns, while maintaining vehicle control and a high exit speed.