Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed put simply is a cart racer featuring some of the characters from the Sonic the hedgehog animations as well as some from other things such as Wreck-It Ralph and B.D. Joe. However, the transformed bit makes it stand out as it’s not just cars anymore, boats and planes also feature in the races.

There are a few modes in this game such as the Campaign and the World Tour which are just basic races; there’s a Grand Prix which is a timed series of races as well as a Time Attack single race and Multiplayer modes. A decent amount of content for a racing game.

To progress in this game the player must gain stars by doing well in races which is a decent way of using player skill to determine how much of the game can be played, but also something I hate about games because if you’re bad at the game, you can’t beat hard difficulty, can’t get all the stars and can only access some of the game. This being a family friendly cart racer I’m not sure that works well in this game.

The racetracks are all themed and have a good variety of land, air and sea involved in their designs. These tracks also change slightly lap by lap which keeps things interesting. Add to this the environmental dangers and item pickups which give opponents items to fire at you to get a joyfully tense way of racing.

As for in game unlocks, there are new characters to unlock as well as in game stickers which give a strangely pleasing feeling to see when the notification thing appears. The drivers themselves have a set stat pool which making them superior to each other at different activities and gives new driver stat combinations as another unlock for the player to go for.

Overall, I really like this as a cart racer and as a brilliant time-waster game for when there’s only a few minutes to spare. I don’t like how you have to be good to progress and the three vehicles mean three slightly different control styles but it is definitely one of the better games of its kind that I’ve played. Oh, and the All-Star part of it is where your vehicle turns into a high powered jet which is fun.

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The art that I’m using as the featured image was found on the marketplace section of the Xbox website. It shows Sonic many times, displaying the transformation of his boat into a car and I think Tails can be spotted in his plane in the background. It gets the point across but only the main car in the foreground makes it look in any way stylish.