E3 2018: Hands on with Team Sonic Racing
When Sega began to tease the next entry in the Sonic racing
series, many people took notice, as the previous games were quite good, but now
that the next entry is here, its not good news at all.
The demo at E3 consisted of a handful of characters and a
single track, but with 12 racers on that track, most were just copies of the
robot, in fact the demo overall felt much the same. The reason why it’s called
Team Sonic Racing, is that you need to race as a team, you and two other
drivers, have to work together, a solid idea, but the problem is that it means
nothing in the grand scheme, unless you are playing with a good team.
When you race, two things happen, that are different from
older games, first up is that when you collect an item, you can use it as
normal, or if you hold onto it, another member of your team, may request it. In
the same way that if you have an item, a member of your team, might hold up the
same item for you to take and this system is how you level up your weapons, but
giving and taking from your fellow team mates. The problem I encountered is
that when racing with AI, they would never offer their items, but if I offered
mine, one of them would take it, without fail, so it made levelling up my items
somewhat difficult.
The other thing that the team racing impacts, is the
leaderboard, you still earn points, based on where you finish, but it is the
combined total that works towards your final standing. I can’t see many people
being happy, to rank first in each race, only to come last in the overall,
cause their team mates were in the bottom two each race. Playing with a team, where
everyone supports each other, could make the game truly incredible, but so far,
playing solo with cpu team mates is not fun at all. One aspect that I was
unable to get an answer on, when I asked the question, was could you play
without the team mechanic and sadly the person at the booth was not able to
answer.
Team Sonic Racing looked great from a visual point of view,
but the team racing mechanics could really hurt the game in the long run, but
with many months until its December release, only time will tell.
Luke Henderson