This isn't part of the review of the game per se, just some thoughts about the launch and reaction. It's more of an aside to the review, so feel free to skip straight to The Shape of It.
I gotta say, the state of the game at launch seemed tailored to put off or piss off as many people as possible, and all of it could've been avoided by adding a single word to the game: “beta”. That would've framed all the flaws in a much more forgivable light and dissuaded beginners from approaching the game until it was more-or-less ready for them (I think version 2.2 at least).
Okay, but more specifically, here were the issues:
no clear vision of the default player
painful slope physics
unforgiving and counter-intuitive AI
extreme unlock conditions
lack of playtesters and dismissive devs
By no clear vision of the default player, I mean the game seemed confusingly set up for radically different kinds of players. Was it for total beginners, given the long, unskippable tutorial starting with “press A to move”-level advice? Was it for veterans, given the high difficulty and default Lite Steer setting? Was it for offline players, given the GP mode that you had to play to unlock multiplayer and mods? Was it for online players, given that the input delay setting was greater than 0 frames by default (to simulate the lag you get in online play)?
By painful slope physics, I mean your ring management had to be on point or you'd end up stuck charging a spindash at the bottom of slopes while everyone else got ahead. I get that the game's inspired by 2D Sonic platformers, where slopes slow you down a lot, but in those games you can just jump over smaller slopes and you're not competing against other people who can use items that let them basically ignore slope physics.
By unforgiving and counter-intuitive AI, well, there videos from the perspective of computer racers showing extreme rubber-banding and miraculous recoveries, plus social media posts by people who read the source code and found massive bonuses the game gave your grand prix rivals, particularly your main rival. It was rough even on “Easy” difficulty (now “Relaxed”). To be fair, it must be hard to guide and balance AI in a high-speed kart racer where conditions change fast and unexpectedly, especially considering the age of the engine, but they should've erred on the side of approachability over challenge in the lower difficulty settings.
The AI problems were complicated by how computer racers perform much better on easier tracks than hard ones, and the game buffs them more the better you play. The upshot is that at launch, I saw many players with a high level of pre-existing skill getting obliterated in early Grand Prix cups and coming away with the impression that the game would get even harder from there.
By extreme unlock conditions I mostly mean that the second half of the cups, which include many of the best tracks, were locked behind finishing special stages in the first half. The rival AI made it hard to even reach these stages in the first place, and even if you did, you'd only get a handful of attempts (with no way to practice) before being locked out and needing to re-do the entire cup (taking 20 minutes or more per run).
By lack of playtesters and dismissive devs, I mean that the devs had a limited set of playtesters that reportedly included their own family members (often exactly the people least able to give honest negative-but-constructive feedback). If you're gonna release a physically- and mentally-demanding competitive game then you need the preternatural skill to make it tighter than a tourniquet from the start, or you need high-quality QA, or you just gotta get over yourself and open up to public feedback and take good notes. Instead the devs initially stuck to their guns on choices even die-hard fans were hard-pressed to defend.
All in all, the devs shot themselves in the feet. I'm glad they changed things and the game ended up where it is now, but it was a rough few weeks where a lot (maybe the majority) of attention the game got was legitimate criticism… and I don't count bad-faith social media mockery by people who never played the game as legit criticism. The game was just genuinely unready.
The Shape of It
What is this review not? It's not a review of the game as a kart racer among other kart racers, because the only other kart racer I've played within the last decade or more is the previous game, Sonic Kart. It's not a review of the game as a Doom hack among other Doom hacks, because I've played very few (and very little of the original game). It's not a review of the game as a Sonic fangame, because I'm not deep into Sonic (I beat Adventure, Adventure 2, and Heroes, and I've played the original 2D platformers, Spinball, and Mean Bean Machine, but that's it). It's not a review of the game as a broader Sega fangame, for similar reasons.
In general, it's not a cultural commentary, and in specific, it's not a commentary on the game's place in gaming, indie gaming, free games, fan games, open source engines, competitive games, modding scenes, the overlap between zines and gaming, indie professionalisation and public expectations, etc. Those are all worthy topics, but I don't have the experience and insight (or otherwise the rampant delusion) to write this much about any of them.
It's just my opinions on the game itself, having played a lot and gotten pretty good. I wrote it up for three reasons: first, the benign narcissism that contributes to making anyone publish anything; second, the hope that if other players read this they'll get catharsis where they agree with me and maybe something to think about where they disagree; and finally, I'm slowly getting into digital game dev and it was good to reason out what I liked and disliked, and why, and why the devs may've done things the way they did, about a game I feel strongly about in both directions.
I expect few people to read it, and most people who do to mainly read the Track Reviews.
Finally, you'll have to forgive some awkward paragraph flow and dry or mediocre phrasing (though some of that comes with the territory of this being a more technical review). The bigger sections of this review tend to just be lists of comments on aspects of the game, paragraph by paragraph. I could edit it to be more fluid, but it's so big and I have so little time.
The Manual
A few patches after the launch the devs finally released a web manual. It explains all the basics, plus gives tips on using items, explains some more-complex techniques, and lists some of the more intricate character stats. Normally you'd have to go digging in official or unofficial discords or half-maintained wikis for this kinda stuff. I think this was the right move—a game this challenging needs to give away some things to help people get into it, or most people will just bounce off the opaque mechanics. People still need to learn tracks, items, and execution, so giving them some hints and facts isn't gonna spoil the game.
Console commands
One major thing missing from the manual is a list of console commands, which are mostly useful in multiplayer. These aren't just minor tools like ping, they include things like quickly changing maps with map or queueing maps to form a temporary cup with queuemap. Then there's a slew of commands for customising your server setup. They should be in the manual even if most players will never use them; people shouldn't have to dig through patch notes or the game's source code just to figure out how and why to use certain commands.
The console does have brief explanations for each command, but with typically-harsh console typography (no line spacing, mono-spaced font) and no examples, and the help command (which neither game nor manual tell you about) just dumps a non-searchable, non-alphabetised, space-separated list of all commands:
User Interface
The UI's had a massive redesign compared to Sonic Kart. A friend of mine said the game no longer felt like a Doom hack and instead felt like its own thing, and I think the new menu design plays a major role. Not that I've played a lotta Doom hacks, but the difference is night and day:
The understated colours in particular are a great contrast to the vivid character, track, icon, and tutorial graphics, and there's a clear visual hierarchy between the foreground (important info) and background (decoration). The only problem is the default large size of the menu options, which makes some menus less navigable (everything's so big that the full menu can't fit on the screen, and you can't take everything in at once). Compare to how Advance Wars 2, a different game with a similar menu structure, handles two levels of menu on one screen:
Character select likewise has major improvements and one or two flaws. The big upside is that it uses a character grid (showing speed, weight, and overall engine class) instead of being a big undifferentiated list like in the original game. This was probably inspired by (maybe even built by the same people who made) custom Sonic Kart launchers with this feature. It's very good to see that make its way into the base game.
Speaking of character select, it's also right near the top of the menu tree. This is a real pain in Time Attack, where you've got good reason to change characters often but there's no built-in character change. You gotta go all the way back up to character select, then change, then go all the way back down, which takes 20+ key/button-presses through 4 blackout transitions. Compare this to Sonic Kart, where changing character in time trials takes 5+ key/button-presses through 0 transitions.
Here's what it's like to change a character in Ring Racers' Time Attack:
And here's the same thing in Sonic Kart's Record Attack:
To make matters worse, while the game remembers which option you picked last on most sub-menus, for some reason it doesn't remember which track you selected, only the cup. Together, these two problems form the one big pain point with the UI, for me at any rate.
One big exception to the bigger-and-more-stylish trend is, appropriately, the Statistics pages. These are very dense, comprehensive breakdowns of most of the stats anyone would want to see in a readable form, including neat stuff like a list of how many rounds you've won as each character you've used including a heatmap of those characters' stats. However, the layout's occasionally a little rough, e.g. when you get the platinum medal on a track, it outdents the track's collectables, which means it's hard to read both the collectables and the platinums while scanning down the list:
I get not wanting to spoil the existence of the platinum medals, but this is a downgrade.
Finally, the settings menus use this awkward automatic accordion UI that jumps groups of settings up or down when you move from one group to the next:
I'd honestly prefer another layer of menu over this kind of thing.
While the UI choices have a few wrinkles (and one or two big problems), the devs massively improved on the original game and did a good job giving this one its own identity and filling out the space without packing it full of clashing visuals.
The Tutorial
The aesthetic is a stunning intro to the game that immediately sets it apart from its precursor: dark silhouettes against the dusk sky, high-tech bases and clinging seaweed, pastel and rainbow seabeds (please forgive the tiny image resolution below).
I know a lotta people hated the dialog, but I thought it was cute enough and showed love for the series. In hindsight it really does feel like the last echo of an abandoned Diddy Kong Racing-style adventure mode (especially paired with how often the tutorial levels are slower-paced or open-ended, and the fact that there's an “action button” used to advance dialog that I'm not sure the game ever uses again). My only real problem with the dialog is how it blends critical info with character moments; there are places where it's tempting to speed through, but that way you can easily miss something vital.
I can't be quite so positive about the content. People have long complained about the awkward and uneven emphasis the tutorial places on different game mechanics: how much time you spend doing Tricks, which rarely show up in the first half of the game (I think there's half a dozen tracks in the first half with mandatory Tricks), and how you spend no time on critical, much more common mechanics like race-start positioning.
Two things I think get commented on less is the tutorial level on drifting and the lack of an explanation on underwater controls.
The drift level forces you to escape an SPB (Self-Propelled Bomb, basically an implacable homing missile) by drifting around successive U-turns both above- and underwater. A new player might drift only a handful of times before this trial, and then they're forced to outrun the deadliest weapon in the game with a new technique whose behaviour is seriously changed underwater. As someone who was pretty good at Sonic Kart before I started Ring Racers, this was the one bit of the tutorial I had any trouble with; it took me about 10 minutes, while the rest of the tutorial was a breeze. This isn't so bad now that the patches let you skip later parts of the tutorial, but it was rough when failing this challenge blocked you from the rest of the game.
The tutorial never actually explains the underwater control changes, it just says they're “different”. It's hard to believe they didn't have time or space to add this when the tutorial starts with “push button to drive”-level simplicity and granularity.
The Material
There's a staggering breadth of characters, maps, and music, and I know friends who grew up with Sega and then played this game got a lot out of the deep cuts and the breadth of the references. That's not me, but it's still very impressive.
Characters
There's a vast range of characters (and followers, which are little decorative sub-characters) that shows off a love for and a depth of knowledge about the whole series, plus a bunch from outside the Sonic games. They range from the obvious (Sonic, Tails, Ring the Racer) to the venerable (Bark, Bean, Eggrobo) to the downright arcane (Battle Kukku XV). That same vast range makes a few conspicuous absences even clearer:
Vector
as in the crocodile. It's a weird and much-observed omission, as basically every other character from Knuckles' Chaotix is in the game. I dunno if this is some kinda in-joke given they included Vectorman, a completely different non-Sonic-franchise character.
Doomguy
Sonic Kart included him in the expanded lineup as a cute nod to the game being built on Doom, but the devs didn't include him this time. In some ways it feels like they neatened up the game a little too much.
These aren't even really criticisms, though, and I get that people have to focus on what interests them when working on this kinda project.
Tracks
Generally the tracks are vivid, varied, and characterful, drawn from a wide variety of classic and modern Sonic and Sega sources. Check the Track Reviews for (much) more.
One specific thing I'll say here, though, is that I think they really could've done with another track category (formally or informally). They have circuits and sprints, but I'm thinking more of an obstacle course category (or even game mode). Tracks like Marble Garden Zone and Carnival Night Zone feel genuinely different from other tracks, so much so that I think it'd be better to make it explicit in the game.
Audio
This is pretty short, because almost all the music and I think sound effects are taken from elsewhere. It's picked well for each track, character, item etc. and good music in particular plays a major role in hype tracks. They generally have good quality all-round. The custom music is generally well-made, but this is one of those areas where I'd really wanna have more knowledge before I comment properly.
Mixing is pretty good within each sound type and they let you set sound effect, music, and total game volumes separately, which I always appreciate.
Collectables
There's no other way to say this: the game has a shitload of collectables for a kart racer. There's a hidden (or not-so-hidden) Spraycan on every track, plus a scattering of even more carefully hidden Ancient Shrines. The Spraycans unlock colour schemes and the Shrines, when properly activated, unlock characters and followers. It's a massive amount, and as someone who liked finding the secret keys in Diddy Kong Racing, a lot of these were fun to find and reach and often give you a reason to slow down and take in the course.
The Shrines and other secrets are often built into the tracks, giving them some charm or intricacy (e.g. the badnik control room in Storm Rig, the upper route around Melty Manor, or the hidden room in Haunted Ship). Other Shrines are tucked into corners and still reward a more patient run-through of the track.
The Spraycans fill a few different roles. Some are hidden in corners or behind scenery, others are up tall half-pipes and need some precise speed to snag, yet more need you to use items to reach inaccessible ledges or get big air off ramps. Unfortunately, on some maps they're an afterthought and practically sitting in the open (it's not clear whether they were added late in development). There are also more tracks than colour schemes, and once you've unlocked all the colour schemes all remaining Spraycans disappear. That's not really a problem, but only because many Spraycan hiding places kinda lack character.
Challenges
The game comes with a… I mean I can only really say the same thing: there's an impressive number of challenges to unlock characters, followers, colour schemes, and more. Many of them are actually thematically appropriate, e.g. to unlock Chao you need to complete a Grand Prix with the Chao Egg follower, and to unlock Flicky you need to no-contest as Motobug (who explodes, releasing the flicky inside).
Unfortunately, some challenges are so specific that most people will just set up a race optimised to achieve whatever goal is set instead of trying for them “naturally”, while a few just kinda disrespect your time. The worst example of the latter is probably unlocking Rouge: you need to complete the Prison Attack level Security Hall in at least 5 minutes and less than 5 minute and 1 second, which takes nowhere near that long to beat. This means you need to sit around for several minutes waiting for the timer to run up before you hit the last prison, and if you don't hit it in that 1-second window then you need to wait all over again.
Still, the game does give you some outs: firstly, many character-unlock challenges have an alternate condition where you just need to win a certain number of races as a certain character, and secondly, playing races gets you “Chao Keys” that can be used to unlock rewards direct on the challenges menu. These options mean people can still play as their favourite character etc. even if they're normally locked behind shit-hard conditions. I can see a lotta people thanking their lucky stars the devs added these keys to the game.
Overall?
It's big. Large. Vast, even. There's a lot of everything, for better and worse. Obviously this stuff is much more fun to work on than a lot of the rest of the game and, like I said, it's where people can let their love of the source material shine. However, as I've seen other game devs point out (about their own projects, not Ring Racers), the fun stuff can distract from working on the underlying engine and mechanics, improving performance, tightening up the UI, etc.—the fundamental refinements.
The Engine
The underlying mechanics have had a major overhaul on Sonic Kart. I say “overhaul” and not “upgrade” because there are many pain points where it really isn't better.
Controls
The controls are generally fine. Some advanced input combinations (particularly the fastfall-into-triangle-dash combo) are harder on keyboard than they would be on a gamepad. This is probably just an inevitable consequence of having a more complex set of inputs that need to be triggered even faster than the previous game.
Side note: All in-game controller representations use the Sega Saturn controller. Any time a button icon appears, it's for that controller, and any time an image of entire controller appears, it's for that controller. The devs seem to expect you to have one—AFAIK there are mods to change the button icons and controller images, but I'm not aware of any way to this in the base game.
Graphics
This part's really just to say that the game loves throwing distracting shit on your screen while you're trying to react to things. There are two big offenders: when you use rings, a torrent of them appears above your character, and when you start a new lap, a big lightbulb sign appears to tell you so.
The rings in particular remind me of this joke character I made for Sonic Kart: Marge Simpson (kinda) with her tall hair blocking your view.
Except, in Ring Racers, it's not a joke.
Characters
Each character has explicit stats on two axes measured in integers from 1 to 9: acceleration vs speed and handling vs weight. Usually these are shortened to just speed and weight, so e.g. Sonic is speed 8 weight 2 and Eggman is speed 2 weight 8. These stats feed into several hidden stats:
spindash charge speed
drift spark speed
ring boost speed and length
tether speed, acceleration, and strength
boost stacking rate
I'm not gonna go into the meaning of all these, but basically characters aren't just faster or slower, heavier or lighter; they do lend themselves to different playstyles. Ultimately this does just come down to two axes, but that at least keeps things simple for players and modders. While it'd be cool to have more stats (e.g. offroad vs onroad ability, or item affinities), they'd probably risk disturbing the balance of the game more.
Speaking of, to the devs' credit, any engine class can compete on any track. There are definitely better and worse choices, but they only really matter in extreme cases (e.g. going for platinum time trial medals). Overall, as long as you have a base level of competence in the game, you can try out different characters and go with what feels good to play.
The one thing missing, re: the game engine, is representation for all stat pairs. There are 63 characters vs 81 stat pairs (a great improvement on Sonic Kart's default 5/expanded 35 characters), but some characters share stats, and there are some large gaps in mid- and heavyweight engine classes:
In particular, the only characters with speed 9 are lightweights and one weight 9 character (the fastest and heaviest in the game). Even adding just two more, or moving two existing ones, one at speed 1 weight 6 and another at speed 9 weight 6 or 7, would've papered over these gaps. It's a small problem, though, and generally every class is relatively well-represented with different stat pairs, and every class is viable on the track.
Side note: I dunno how they decided on the characters and their stats, but I think the ideal way, if they weren't gonna create a character for each stat pair, would be to independently create a list of Sonic and Sega characters they wanted to include and a symmetrical-enough plot of stat pairs, then map the characters to the stats as much as possible.
Tracks
The difference between the tracks in this game and the base tracks in the first is night and day, and even the last and most complex custom tracks for Sonic Kart can't really match the average track in Ring Racers. The terrain is often much more complex and spectacular, far more three-dimensional, than before (the designers love to show off with ramps, big half-pipes, banked turns, and occasional loops). The hazards are more diverse and dangerous, on top of a new terrain type I think of as “rough road”, which is slippery and makes your character sprites bump around. The idea is, your vehicle's bouncing on loose rocks, stairs, etc. and can't get a good grip to turn properly. It adds a new challenge to otherwise-simpler tracks without needing them to add unfitting terrain, though sometimes the way it's applied doesn't make sense (e.g. it's used for all staircases, even very shallow ones with very broad steps like those in Dark Fortress).
Almost all hazards run on a 50%-on/50%-off pace. For example, spikes that pop out of the ground will be up 50% of the time and down the other 50% of the time, spike balls swing in even circles, crushers spend half their time moving up and half their time moving down (aside from when they pause at the top/bottom). Hazards often come in pairs, with one out of phase with the other, so e.g. there are two crushers side-by-side and when one's all the way up, the other's all the way down. Overall this is menacing and challenging—there's no safe place, you have to recognise which path is less dangerous and take that ASAP.
The problems come in two flavours. The first is that some pairs of hazards pause for so long at the extremes that when you turn a corner at high speed and see them it's impossible to tell whether they've just stopped or they're about to start moving again. Example: the second pair of floating blocks in Sunset Hill.
The second flavour is that the floor spike hazards have no tell—they're on or off, no in-between, no hint, and when you're moving fast you don't often have the flexibility to get into the rhythm and pass safely (or else risk being overtaken). In an astronomically rare win for Carnival Night Zone, the floor spikes at the end of this track work exactly how I think floor spikes should be in general in this game:
You can actually predict and aim for the safe spot and it feels fair to me when I fail and hit the spikes (shame about everything else in that godawful track).
Water
Water got a major upgrade on the previous game in two ways.
In another move that adds to the diversity of tactics and lines you can use on any given track, you can now hydroplane on water if you're moving fast enough. Several tracks use this to create vertical branching paths (e.g. Emerald Coast, Mirage Saloon) or hazards (e.g. Water Palace, where the track boosts at a solid wall and you need to drop underwater before you collide).
Going underwater puts you in a very different mode—besides the wavy graphics, your handling gets worse, but your drift becomes an inside drift (much sharper than your turning circle). This changes existing challenges and opens up new ones. While the water physics can be confusing (I had trouble until someone pointed out the inside drift part), the game does ease you in with easier, shorter water sections before dropping you in longer ones or full-water tracks.
I think they did a good job with these changes. It's hard to drive well underwater at first, but once you understand how the game changes the physics it's a straightforward challenge to get better. Meanwhile, designers can use water as a smaller, more focused hazard/track condition (e.g. in Darkvile Castle 1).
Items and rings
There's a major tactical trade-off between these two: you can't use both at the same time. If you have an item in hand, or deployed as a shield (around or behind you), then you can't use rings. This means you can't so easily turtle up in first (where you already have a major advantage) with orbiting defensive items or a Lightning Shield. However, it also makes it harder to use lower-grade items tactically—Orbinauts and Bananas tend to just become fire-and-forget road trash unless you're in the right situation and can hold onto one for a few seconds or more to use it deliberately.
Item grades (the kinds of items you get in a given item roulette, depending on position and distance between you and other racers) do occasionally feel poorly-tuned. If I'm comfortably in second, but first place is comfortably in first, then I don't want an Orbinaut or three, I want something that can help me close the distance. In theory ring boxes should help, but since they turn back into item boxes after a short time there's only a narrow window where you can get them.
Speaking of ring boxes, in my experience they have an uneven benefit. Ring roulettes tend to be better than low-grade items, but worse than high-grade ones. This is good if you're toward the front of the pack and pick up a ring box you turn into a jackpot (or at least any non-Bar rings), but bad if you're at the back—you get some speed, but not enough to seriously compete against people using high-grade items like Rocket Sneakers or Invincibility and you have to drive through all the hazards left by people in front of you.
Finally, a few things about specific items:
Ballhogs are destroyed on impact with anything, which makes them much safer to use than in the first game, but also less effective and chaotic.
Jawz feel almost useless as anything other than a close-quarters weapon; for me the homing ability just means it's less cognitive load (you can fire and forget without having to line up a shot). I think they removed the Jawz exploit from the first game, so this weakness might be to counterbalance that.
The Garden Top (and less so the Flame Shield) has a high skill ceiling and is satisfying to use right, but really needs a place in the tutorial.
The three shield items (Bubble, Flame, and Lightning Shields) only protect you from a single bump with another racer, not from items or hazards, making them much more fragile than the same items in Sonic platformers. Basically they're not shields; you need to protect them.
SPB speed seems inconsistent. However, the mini-boost rings (I think called “manta rings” in the code?) are a welcome addition to make them worthwhile items instead of annoying last-lap fodder.
Hitstop and respawn
I've grouped these together because they're both kinda frustrating for similar reasons.
Hitstop happens any time you take a significant hit, including bouncing off a shortcut tripwire when you don't have enough speed. With how brutal damage already is, like the painfully-slow multi-stage tumbles that can cascade into broader failures, hitstop just feels like an unnecessary and disorienting slog added for the sake of making Ring Racers more “the fighting game of kart racers”.
The respawn mechanic likewise takes away control for too long, I think. It feels awful to spend what is in the context of the game a really long time hanging there before being dropped in with no invincible grace period. To make matters worse, AFAIK there are places where falling off the track and respawning at a later checkpoint is actually optimal play.
There are several ways the game takes control away from you, but these are the worst, to me. At least if I get hit by an item then that's due to someone else's good play—this is just the game itself holding me backfrom playing.
Basic physics
I wish I could say the underlying physics were as good as the controls/stats/tracks generally are. One person I know who's very big into Sonic Kart doesn't play Ring Racers, citing how unpredictable it can be. Things that should be simple and intuitive can be opaque and bizarre—a big problem being air-time from slopes. When you reach the top of a slope, will you fly high? Have a weirdly weak jump? Stick to the track? Who knows for sure. Meanwhile, minute fluctuations in the track mesh can give you small air off of banked turns or smooth, curving slopes if you hit the wrong part of the track. This removes your control, flattens your speed, and can end with you going offroad or falling in a pit. It's not a problem on many tracks, but it's a real pain when it kills a time trial run, and it feels really out of place in a game this cartoony.
Collisions also have some issues, at least when using sprite graphics (I dunno about the full 3D graphics the game also supports). Side-to-side collisions are fine, but front-back collisions often feel subtly wrong to me—the visuals (two 2D sprites some distance away from each other) don't match up with the physics (two colliding 3D objects). The result is, collisions with hazards sometimes feel undeserved, particularly the large spike balls found on several tracks. I don't know what the fix is except maybe making hitboxes narrower the closer an object is to the horizontal centre of the screen, and I dunno how practical that is in this engine.
Another related issue on many tracks is 2D sprite fences, which can be very difficult to see edge-on, but still have collision from that angle:
This wouldn't matter if fences were always face-on as you follow the road, but some tracks have them edge-on (e.g. the end of Cyan Belltower).
Springs are another somewhat flawed physics object. Even the ones that are clearly meant to overwrite your momentum still preserve a fraction of it after you hit them, and this fraction can ruin you. There are numerous cases of this, but the one that most sticks out is the last spring-wall in Dead Line: it either bounces you directly along the track (good), or diagonally off into the void (kills you).
Finally, wall collisions could be a little better. The game has a limited sense of glancing vs head-on collisions; hitting a wall at a light angle or grazing the inside wall while drifting round a corner often seriously kills your speed (and sparks).
These are some major, if specific complaints, but in general the physics are fine. It doesn't feel bad in general, it's just that the edge cases come up too often for my liking, and the game never feels quite set on whether it's modelling you as a realistic car, a cartoony kart racer character, or a pinball.
Overall?
There are major improvements on the original game and it generally feels good in its own right while also having a fair, but high skill ceiling, but there are specific issues where it's not tight enough that cause a lotta frustration in challenge scenarios like time trials. It's not enough for a game this demanding to be generally good—it needs to meet you halfway, and sadly, I don't think Ring Racers really does. Finally, the game could do with bringing back the idea of “hell maps” from Sonic Kart (maps hidden in the regular rotation because they were incomplete, unfair, jokey, or in one case too resource-intensive). That'd give the devs a way to acknowledge the effort that went into these tracks and allow people who really want them to still enjoy them, without inflicting them on the innocent theatre-going public.
Grand Prix
I just don't bother with this mode, between the often-brutal difficulty (see The Launch) and the time it takes just to complete a single cup to get a shot at the special stages.
Time Attack (a.k.a time trials)
The solo mode I spend by far the most time playing. It works more-or-less the same as in any other racing game: just you against the track, or against the devs' times, or against yourself, however you wanna look at it.
One thing that's immediately better in Time Attack vs the same mode in Sonic Kart is that you don't pick up boost items, you pick up ring boxes whose roulettes roll at a fixed slow rate. The main upshot is, you (mostly) can't use shortcuts—you have to drive the track as-is. Not only does this mean you race the track itself rather than avoiding it, it also makes the skill you develop in Time Attack more applicable to playing with bot or human players.
Beyond that, it has its ups and downs, though mostly ups compared to the other solo modes.
You can find my Time Attack medals in Track Reviews. I have a majority of platinums and I don't plan on getting the rest.
Times and medals
I really appreciate that you can get the full spread of medals—bronze through gold, and even a secret platinum. This gives you more points of comparison as you get better, and I wouldn't be surprised if (whether the devs meant it or not) having golds followed by hidden platinums gives players a kind of out if they wanna get good enough in time trials but not spend time getting exceptionally good.
Most course have well-spaced medal times, and most courses compare pretty well to each other, but a few platinums are absurdly easy while a few golds are absurdly hard. For example, it took me dozens of tries to barely get gold on Avant Garden, but very few to get a sloppy platinum on Ice Paradise, despite these tracks being pretty close to each other in the list. Still, I can see the advantages of having each medal grade lead into the next one, so the easier silvers are only a little harder than the harder bronzes; this way you're not completely shut out of getting medals while you improve your driving.
The only real problems I have with these times are that sometimes it feels like they're based on average dev times or just the best run they had a recording for and other times they feel like the best times the devs could pull off after hundreds of collective attempts.
Issues
The game's underlying physics just aren't tight enough. This can make time trials genuine trials to get through as you can do everything right and still get thrown off in a critical way (e.g. you ramp off a slope that should be smooth, which costs you vital seconds or even sends you into a pit). The vast number of times I had to restart platinum attempts not because I failed to execute properly but because the engine threw me a curveball was what part of what put me off going for all platinums.
Less crucially, the menu UI has some unfortunate gaps in Time Attack. First, there's no way to see which character you have the best time with on a given track, and while you can generally do well with any character on most tracks (the characters are well-balanced), in time trials even a half-second per lap can have a proportionately massive impact. Second, there's no way to see your total Time Attack medals of each grade (that's one reason why I added my medals and the medal filter to the Track Reviews). The Statistics pages in the Extras menu give you your total medal count, but that's across all grades in all Attack modes (Time, Prison, and SPB).
SPB Attack
I have mixed feelings about the special Time Attack sub-mode SPB Attack (brought forward from a mod for the original game). It's the ultimate solo challenge:
the track is in Encore/mirror mode
there are no rings on the track
there are no ring boxes, only item boxes with Super Rings
there's an SPB chasing you and you lose if it gets you
The upshot of this is you need to manage your rings, miniturbos, and wavedashes in a way you rarely need to quite so tightly in Time Attack; jackpots are out, cumulative ring boost is out, big drifts and some triangle dash opportunities are out, and precision control is in. It's soured for me by the fact that all the item boxes with Super Rings also have Drop Targets. Adding RNG runs counter to the entire idea of being the ultimate driving skill challenge. Still, I guess it's good to have this extra challenge that demands control and awareness over raw speed and muscle memory, just a shame they fumbled it.
Multiplayer Time Attack?
I'd love a multiplayer Time Attack mode. It wouldn't have to tie in with the medals or individual records, just use all the other rules: no player-player collision, no items, all ring roulettes, and a timer in the corner. There'd be no delay because you'd be completely isolated from other players mechanically—you'd just see their ghosts and get chat messages, and get ranked at the end. Think of it as parallel play, or a low-pressure way to learn from other players, or just Trackmania.
I've been working on a Lua script that does this, and while it gets kinda close it lacks timers, shares item and ring boxes between all players, and needs you to manually toggle off all items except Power Rings (and optionally some Sneaker items).
Overall?
I ended up setting a personal goal of 50%+1 platinums, because there are just so many tracks and so many ways the physics can ruin a run on top of the challenge of driving right in the first place. I didn't even really get into SPB Attack. It's a shame, as someone who got almost all the golds in Sonic Kart, but I just don't have the time to grind these out.
At the end of the day I don't have any more excitement, I'm not drawn back in with the idea that there's so much more to play, so many more platinums to get. Instead, it just feels hollow, and I feel more confident that a narrow work that leaves you forever wanting more is better than a vast and fatiguing work that goes on more-or-less forever.
Track Reviews
Mini-reviews of every race track in Ring Racers, with what're basically thumbs up/down ratings. Some are very mini. Two thumbs up doesn't mean a track's perfect. Ratings are relative to all other ratings, not any absolute standard (what standard would that even be?).
These ratings/reviews are based on time trials, multiplayer, and occasional bot matches. They're for v2.3 tracks. Some of them refer back to older versions of these tracks in Sonic Kart (vanilla or modded).
Reviews and ratings may change in the future (wherever a review says “Update”).
I only use the “Zone” name ending where it makes sense to me (e.g. Metropolis Zone, Star Light Zone, not things like Motobug Motorway Zone or Ice Paradise Zone), particularly if they're classic Sonic game Zones.
What makes a good track?
In general, my criteria are: aesthetic, mood, readability, flow, challenge, and in-game role.
Does the track have a strong aesthetic? Northern District, Panic City, and Skyscraper Leaps all share some ideas, but where Northern District and Skyscraper Leaps have good ambience and strong style, Panic City is just kinda flat, undifferentiated.
Does it have a definite mood? Some tracks do—hype, chill, clown, etc.—but some tracks just don't to me. Thunder Piston does, Metropolis Zone doesn't. Blue Mountain (either track) does, Diamond Dust Zone doesn't. Autumn Ring does, Aerial Highlands doesn't. Death Egg feels lacking because it doesn't have strong “final gauntlet” vibes (to me) despite being set up as one.
Is it readable? At the end of the day, this is a racing game. A track is designed poorly if you can't tell where you're going or meant to go. They did a lot better at signposting in this game than the last, but some tracks still suffer from visual clutter or poor lighting/flow.
Does it have good flow? Can you drive it smoothly? My favourite tracks tend to be fun to drive on (for me, anyway) even if I'm not going for high performance. That's not to say I don't like hazards or other risks: Collision Chaos has its bounce hazards, Lost Colony has its darkness, and Sub-Zero Peak has its ice road, and I like them all. Meanwhile, Aqueduct Crystal, Diamond Dust Zone, and Carnival Night Zone all have in-your-face gimmicks that stop you from driving with virtually zero margin for error, and I like none of them.
Is it a good challenge? There's a difference between challenge and just difficulty; some tracks in this game are hard because they're poorly-designed or deliberately hostile. The best challenges, to me, help me get better at the game as I get better at the track, but I know my picks there are subjective. Still, I like hard, but fair challenges (even e.g. Chemical Facility), and I don't like tracks that are just obnoxious to get through (e.g. Dead Line).
Is the track executed well considering its in-game role? I think this only really applies to early and late tracks. Early tracks (Ring Cup, maybe Sneaker Cup) should ease people into the game like a kinda extended tutorial. Late tracks (Extra Cup, Egg Cup, and Skate Cup each in their own ways) should cap off the game. Some tracks in between can still be tutorial-ish for advanced mechanics.
This is all post-hoc—I played the game a bunch, then wrote the reviews, then looked back at why I liked or disliked tracks and reasoned it out to these things. Like I said in The Shape of It, part of the reason for writing this was to figure out the “why” as I start thinking about game dev.
Filters
To reset the filters, select all first or last options in each set (e.g. “at most ++” doesn't filter out anything because all ratings are at most ++).
Rating
Medal
Total
/
Ring Cup
Sneaker Cup
Spring Cup
Barrier Cup
Invincible Cup
Emerald Cup
Extra Cup
SPB Cup
Rocket Cup
Aqua Cup
Lightning Cup
Flame Cup
Super Cup
Egg Cup
Goggles Cup
Timer Cup
Grow Cup
Chao Cup
Wing Cup
Mega Cup
Phantom Cup
Flash Cup
Swap Cup
Shrink Cup
Bomb Cup
Power Cup
Genesis Cup
Skate Cup
Recycle Cup A
Recycle Cup B
Lost & Found
Intro
This is a review of Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers (from here on Ring Racers) by Kart Krew Dev. Check The Shape of It for more info about what this review is and isn't.
This is still a WIP. It was last updated in October 2024. More-or-less all the material's there, but it really needs editing. I have no solid plans on finishing it.
About the game
Ring Racers is a free, indie Sonic/Sega-based kart racing videogame developed mostly in secret over several years and released in early-mid 2024 to an initially very mixed response that skewed more positive as the devs released a series of patches that rectified many problems that led people to bounce off the game.
It developed out of Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (from here on Sonic Kart), a simpler kart racer first released in 2018, which was itself based on Sonic Robo Blast 2, a 3D platformer inspired by classic 2D Sonic platformers that started development around the year 2000 (the very first game, Sonic the Hedgehog Robo-blast!, was a 2D platformer built with Klik & Play released in the late 90s). All three games are free, open source, Doom-based labours of love with extensive modding scenes that use the game's easy customisation to add new characters and levels/maps/tracks as well as new features, game modes, custom balance patches, and more. I haven't really played much Sonic Robo Blast 2, but the kart games, Sonic Kart in particular, are kinda like the M.U.G.E.N. of kart games—massive accumulations of everyone from everything, built over years by a wide range of amateur devs.
All this is to say that Ring Racers is the output of a large number of people's intense work, funnelled through a smaller team (Kart Krew), to create a majestic passion project, flawed and often inconsistent, stunning and yet riven with disappointments. In some ways this is a maximalist paradise; in others, it just has an identity crisis.
I played Sonic Kart for a year or two before Ring Racers released. There were ups and downs there, but I did get almost every time trial gold medal (the highest in that game; there are no platinums), played decently well online, made over half a dozen character mods and some custom console commands and Lua scripts, and even meticulously set up my own custom server. In short, I liked the game and I was pretty good at it.
As for Ring Racers, I'm pretty good at that, too. I can hold my own in multiplayer and I've got a decent number of platinums in time trial (check my medals in the Track Reviews). None of this is to boast—it's to explain a little about where I'm coming from and, more importantly, head off the “git gud”/“skill issue”-type reactions a minority of this game's fanbase has to any criticism. I have the skill. I did get good. There are still major flaws with the game.
In any case, I wanna be clear that I do actually like this game—you just won't see me going in for any effusive “Game of the Year”-type praise.
