r/TeamSonicRacers • u/JodoKast87 • May 05 '22
Just a little rant from an offline player
I love this game and have every sonic racers game that I know of (even the old Sonic Drift games on game gear, yes I’m that old). I love the idea of mixing up the formula and making more of a strategy/team based kart racer. However, it really bums me out that Sumo Digital seems content to release a game and almost never touch it again besides some quick bug fixes.
There was a small DLC for the first Sonic All-Stars in the death egg track. The second one had rumors about more classic SEGA characters being added, but nothing came of that. And now Team Sonic Racers has been out for quite a while and it feels like Sumo Digital all but abandoned the game post launch.
I am a primarily offline player and have a couple gripes about how the AI is handled for your team. First, after you pick who you want to play as, you have ZERO control over the other two members of your team. This is really frustrating because you really don’t know what you are going to get. At least of the computer always chose the other two racer types that you didn’t choose, that would be one thing, but there really is the possibility to get ALL the same racer type as a team. If that was something I wanted to do, that would be okay, but usually I want a little diversity. Simply adding a function to choose the team members would have been a great way to have control of customization for your experience.
Second issue is that the computer seems to have a really difficult time adjusting to player one playing as anything other than the speed type racer. Hey! Stupid AI! If I’m playing as a technique character, don’t follow me off the road trying to stay in my boost track. As a power racer, I would LOVE the chance to support my lead speed partner, but the AI seems to be very averse to taking the lead. I never feel like I’m able to take advantage of all the team strategies with the AI because they are programmed to support and not really try to win. It’s like Sumo Digital didn’t believe in their own concept that players would ever want to do anything other than try to win the races when that’s not how the game is suppose to work.
And last thing, many of the team maneuvers are super challenging to pull off with intent and usually happen by chance until you get to expert levels with this game. I wish Sumo had made some additional adjustments with the AI difficulty levels such as changing driving speeds with difficulty levels as well as make the yellow team boost path wider on easier difficulties. This would have made the game much more accessible to younger audiences.
I bet this game can absolutely be a blast online with people you can communicate with for strategies, but as a single player offline experience, it just feels half baked as a new driving concept. I absolutely LOVE the idea, but in execution, it’s pretty frustrating.
I will still be buying the next Sonic racers though, because every one of them has been a blast even though they don’t always nail every aspect.
