Team Sonic Racing

Team Sonic Racing is an attempt to bring the idea of a team-based game into the kart-racing genre, and it does so quite thoroughly. The player doesn't race alone but as part of a three-member team that shares a combined finishing result. When a teammate is out in front, they leave behind a yellow trail that others can ride to pick up extra speed, while whoever is lagging behind receives items from the team and can, in turn, send their own items forward to whoever needs them more. Filling the team gauge unlocks a shared ultimate manoeuvre that pits the whole trio against their rivals for a few seconds. The result is a racer where it pays to watch the others and share, rather than focusing solely on your own line.

Mechanically it's a classic kart racer with drifting, jump boosts and items built around the Wisps from the main series. Three car types, speed, technique and power, differ in how they handle shortcuts and collisions with obstacles, which forces the player to think when assembling a team. The Team Adventure campaign leads the player through dozens of tasks that, besides regular racing, add slaloms, target-destruction runs or time-limited driving, and unlock parts for kart customisation. The Switch version is the most technically scaled-back of the whole release, with lower resolution and less smoothness than the other consoles, but handheld mode works well, and local four-player split-screen has been kept intact.

The visuals lean on the colourful environments typical of the newer Sonic games, while the music draws on rock and electronic motifs characteristic of the series. Reception was fairly good: reviewers praised the team system as a fresh idea, but criticised the smaller variety of tracks and characters compared to the same studio's earlier Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed. Today, Team Sonic Racing is an interesting alternative for group play, since it forces even people who otherwise just stay quiet and floor the gas in races to actually communicate.