So after the pretty decent but somewhat shallow outing of Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, Sumo Digital sure caught me off-guard when they announced a sequel to it. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed does a good job at improving the flaws and shortcomings the first game had, such as making the courses more varied with at least 1 track based off a different franchise such as Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe, NiGHTS, Shinobi, etc. as opposed to just running with 3 or 4 themes for each course, more interesting track design with tougher placements hazards and they even brought in remixes of various SEGA franchise tunes to accomodate the soundtrack.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed's main gimmick is having the vehicles and gameplay change constantly during the race, transforming your car when you pass through large blue rings to either a boat or a plane. Some courses have a interesting mechanic in where usually the 2nd or 3rd lap has you driving through a completely different pathway, forcing you to adapt to these situations and work your way around these. Most racing game veterans will recognize this vehicle-changing gimmick from Mario Kart 7, but it reminds me more of the likes of Diddy Kong Racing from back on the N64, except that the courses are designed specifically for each vehicle mode rather than a wide-open track fitting them all. Also very important is that while you're in the air, flipping and rolling your vehicle is encouraged to build up boosts for when you land, but you have to be careful with this as not landing properly will costs you speed and lose all boost buildup, and there's switch-drifting which helps you maintain your drift boost buildup as you switch from steering left to right and vice-versa.

Other new features are the mods that come with each character. Mods are pre-set custom stat adjustments that you can pick from on the character select screen to help you adjust to certain conditions better in the races and in missions in World Tour. (Explained later down below). If you get hit alot or crash into obstacles, acceleration suits your vehicle best and if it has alot of sharp turns, go for handling.

Items are more or less kept the same, but given a new skin, such as the boxing glove to the missile, the barrier shield from Sonic to a glove which in addition to blocking either a stage hazard or a enemy projectile now gives you that item to use in return to get revenge on the attacker, if your item slot isn't filled with another item. Most items are balanced enough, but I will list my issues with them when I get to them.

World Tour is also a new addition to this game specifically designed to cater to the more mission-based gameplay in where you need to clear races under certain rules or different gameplay methods, such as flying through rings in plane mode, winning consequtively from a set amount of opponents in the same race in a 1-on-1 format. The difficulty you clear these missions on affect the stars you get, which in turn are required to progress further in the World Tour's map and the real reward from doing them: unlocking new characters and special mods. Most of these missions are designed pretty decently, but your skill will be sorely tested on quite a few on them, especially in the unlockable Expert class difficulty.

As for my issues with this game:

- A few items are very unbalanced and usually can most likely make or break a race for skilled players. A good example of this is the ice weapon. You gain 3 shots of these by default, and while the game tells you that shooting all 3 shots at 1 opponent will freeze and stun them longer than normal, I notice no such difference, and every seperate shot stuns you as much as getting shot by all 3. The game developers tried to implement a way to make it hard for expert players to win races by a miles' lead compared to the other racers with the Sky Tiger item, a item that spawns giant wasps in front of the 1st place lead, but won't hurt the user if he passes by them while they're still active.
It sounds fine on paper, but in terms of programming, it leaves alot to be desired. It works only fine on small passageways on car and boat plathways because it almost garantuees the 1st place lead can barely avoid them, but they can't spawn properly if used near a transform ring, and in the plane they are very easy to avoid due the large area's in the plane sections. It's also possible to shoot a wasp and clear yourself a way through them, which I think shouldn't be possible. It can be a decent counter to expert players, but this isn't comparable to the Blue Shell from Mario Kart by a longshot.

- The method of unlocking characters in this game is very arbitrary compared to the previous game. If you want to play as your favorite character from the get-go and isn't available right at the start, you're going to spend a incredibly long time mastering the game's courses and mechanics just to be able to unlock them. For expert players this isn't a big deal, but casual players who don't have alot of free time on their hands will be annoyed by this, if they want to play as for example NiGHTS or Joe Musashi, it will take quite some time for them to even unlock them, when in the previous game you could just play a few races, earn points to spend in the shop to unlock them, and there you go.

- The physics in a few courses, especially the boat sections in the game are very clunky and will cause the many frustrated losses of players. A good example of this are the boost ramps in the boat sections of Samba Tour and Adder's Lair in where if you approach the ramp from the side and not dead-on straight, your boat will tilt to ridiculous extremes and will lose all momentum and speed trying to readjust itself, or you will be launched way higher in the air than you're supposed to, and lose a good deal of speed as well. And there are also some courses in where some object events that occur in laps will actually hinder the player very drastically if they're not careful and going too fast, such as a robotic fish in the final lap of Ocean View causing the player to bump all over the place if they come in contact with it, spawning when the 1st lead reaches a specific area, and the bridge in Adder's Lair at the end of the 1st lap will not raise fast enough and cause the player to most likely crash into it and lose all speed. These are major issues and I don't understand why the developers couldn't iron out those bugs.

-Unlocking the Expert class difficulty in World Tour is very late near the end of the mode itself, and forces you to replay every single mission you cleared before on the Hard difficulty all over again if you want all the stars in the game, which is a really cheap method of artifically extending the mode's gameplay length.

Issues aside, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is a solid racing game, and I do recommend it for both racing game enthusiasts and fans of SEGA's franchises in general, but beware of the steep learning curve and having to deal with occasional frustrating glitches or lag in the online gameplay.

So after the pretty decent but somewhat shallow outing of Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, Sumo Digital sure caught me off-guard when they announced a sequel to it. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed does a good job at improving the flaws and shortcomings the first game had, such as making the courses more varied with at least 1 track based off a different franchise such as Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe, NiGHTS, Shinobi, etc. as opposed to just running with 3 or 4 themes for each course, more interesting track design with tougher placements hazards and they even brought in remixes of various SEGA franchise tunes to accomodate the soundtrack. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed's main gimmick is having the vehicles and gameplay change constantly during the race, transforming your car when you pass through large blue rings to either a boat or a plane. Some courses have a interesting mechanic in where usually the 2nd or 3rd lap has you driving through a completely different pathway, forcing you to adapt to these situations and work your way around these. Most racing game veterans will recognize this vehicle-changing gimmick from Mario Kart 7, but it reminds me more of the likes of Diddy Kong Racing from back on the N64, except that the courses are designed specifically for each vehicle mode rather than a wide-open track fitting them all. Also very important is that while you're in the air, flipping and rolling your vehicle is encouraged to build up boosts for when you land, but you have to be careful with this as not landing properly will costs you speed and lose all boost buildup, and there's switch-drifting which helps you maintain your drift boost buildup as you switch from steering left to right and vice-versa. Other new features are the mods that come with each character. Mods are pre-set custom stat adjustments that you can pick from on the character select screen to help you adjust to certain conditions better in the races and in missions in World Tour. (Explained later down below). If you get hit alot or crash into obstacles, acceleration suits your vehicle best and if it has alot of sharp turns, go for handling. Items are more or less kept the same, but given a new skin, such as the boxing glove to the missile, the barrier shield from Sonic to a glove which in addition to blocking either a stage hazard or a enemy projectile now gives you that item to use in return to get revenge on the attacker, if your item slot isn't filled with another item. Most items are balanced enough, but I will list my issues with them when I get to them. World Tour is also a new addition to this game specifically designed to cater to the more mission-based gameplay in where you need to clear races under certain rules or different gameplay methods, such as flying through rings in plane mode, winning consequtively from a set amount of opponents in the same race in a 1-on-1 format. The difficulty you clear these missions on affect the stars you get, which in turn are required to progress further in the World Tour's map and the real reward from doing them: unlocking new characters and special mods. Most of these missions are designed pretty decently, but your skill will be sorely tested on quite a few on them, especially in the unlockable Expert class difficulty. As for my issues with this game: - A few items are very unbalanced and usually can most likely make or break a race for skilled players. A good example of this is the ice weapon. You gain 3 shots of these by default, and while the game tells you that shooting all 3 shots at 1 opponent will freeze and stun them longer than normal, I notice no such difference, and every seperate shot stuns you as much as getting shot by all 3. The game developers tried to implement a way to make it hard for expert players to win races by a miles' lead compared to the other racers with the Sky Tiger item, a item that spawns giant wasps in front of the 1st place lead, but won't hurt the user if he passes by them while they're still active. It sounds fine on paper, but in terms of programming, it leaves alot to be desired. It works only fine on small passageways on car and boat plathways because it almost garantuees the 1st place lead can barely avoid them, but they can't spawn properly if used near a transform ring, and in the plane they are very easy to avoid due the large area's in the plane sections. It's also possible to shoot a wasp and clear yourself a way through them, which I think shouldn't be possible. It can be a decent counter to expert players, but this isn't comparable to the Blue Shell from Mario Kart by a longshot. - The method of unlocking characters in this game is very arbitrary compared to the previous game. If you want to play as your favorite character from the get-go and isn't available right at the start, you're going to spend a incredibly long time mastering the game's courses and mechanics just to be able to unlock them. For expert players this isn't a big deal, but casual players who don't have alot of free time on their hands will be annoyed by this, if they want to play as for example NiGHTS or Joe Musashi, it will take quite some time for them to even unlock them, when in the previous game you could just play a few races, earn points to spend in the shop to unlock them, and there you go. - The physics in a few courses, especially the boat sections in the game are very clunky and will cause the many frustrated losses of players. A good example of this are the boost ramps in the boat sections of Samba Tour and Adder's Lair in where if you approach the ramp from the side and not dead-on straight, your boat will tilt to ridiculous extremes and will lose all momentum and speed trying to readjust itself, or you will be launched way higher in the air than you're supposed to, and lose a good deal of speed as well. And there are also some courses in where some object events that occur in laps will actually hinder the player very drastically if they're not careful and going too fast, such as a robotic fish in the final lap of Ocean View causing the player to bump all over the place if they come in contact with it, spawning when the 1st lead reaches a specific area, and the bridge in Adder's Lair at the end of the 1st lap will not raise fast enough and cause the player to most likely crash into it and lose all speed. These are major issues and I don't understand why the developers couldn't iron out those bugs. -Unlocking the Expert class difficulty in World Tour is very late near the end of the mode itself, and forces you to replay every single mission you cleared before on the Hard difficulty all over again if you want all the stars in the game, which is a really cheap method of artifically extending the mode's gameplay length. Issues aside, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is a solid racing game, and I do recommend it for both racing game enthusiasts and fans of SEGA's franchises in general, but beware of the steep learning curve and having to deal with occasional frustrating glitches or lag in the online gameplay.