Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review for Nintendo Switch

System: Switch
Release date: September 25, 2025
Developer: Sonic Team
Publisher: SEGA

By complete coincidence, 2025 is the year of racing games – we’ve got Mario Kart World, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, and Kirby Air Riders yet to come. This means that in terms of online discourse, you’ll almost always see at least two of these games compared to each other. In the past, Sonic has starred in several high-quality racing games – Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed was fairly popular back in its day, and some would even say it rivaled your typical Mario Kart title. Continuing that trend, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds absolutely stands its ground in the kart racer scene – but as you might expect, there are some compromises on the Nintendo Switch version.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds does a lot right, from its gameplay loop to its presentation. Driving feels smooth, responsive, and skillful, and the car customization is top-notch. You can change your kart’s front, back, and wheels, and you can even change its color. The customization options don’t end there, though: you can also use gadgets, which take up slots on your gadget gauge and add special abilities. Some gadgets have you start the race with a speed boost, a monster truck power-up, or even an extra item slot. This lets you form your own game plan and customize your driver to meet that goal, which adds an additional layer of strategy right off the bat. You unlock additional gadget slots as you play more races, and this offers an extra incentive to playing through Grand Prix.

Speaking of Grand Prix, it has tons of personality – at the beginning of each one, the game selects a rival character that has enhanced speed and AI. Every driver in the base game has unique dialogue for every other character in the base game, which results in hundreds of interactions between racers. This gives Grand Prix higher stakes – plus, it’s fun to play the mode over and over to see all of these characters speak to and interact with each other. The courses are no slouch, either – just about all of them are well-designed, with many twists and turns (and there are only ever straightaways when you’re going through a CrossWorld portal). On the second lap of each course in Grand Prix, you can choose to enter one of two portals to be transported to a different track for one lap. This adds a bit of extra variety to the races – not to mention that crossing from one course to the next is a visual spectacle all on its own. Sonic Racing’s graphics and music are on point, with some visually striking backgrounds and colorful courses with tons of little details throughout. Online play works good here, too, and you can even race with players on other platforms. That’s a huge point in CrossWorlds’ favor.

Given that our audience is pretty much exclusively Nintendo fans, it does make sense to draw comparisons to Mario Kart World here. The biggest difference that I could find is that Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is much more fair, and generally much less chaotic. There are 12 drivers per race as opposed to Mario Kart World’s 24, which makes tracks feel less crowded and clogged. Powerful items do appear in CrossWorlds, but they are less disruptive across the board, and with fewer drivers in the match you won’t be attacked quite as often. It’s not that Mario Kart World doesn’t take skill to an extent, but CrossWorlds places a much higher emphasis on skillful driving, navigation, and tricks. As a side note, if you’re coming from Mario Kart and don’t know what the items do, the in-game tutorial menu has helpful explanations for each one.

Another one of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds’ strengths is its roster. You’ve got all of the series staples here, plus characters that were left out of Team Sonic Racing like Jet the Hawk, Cream and Cheese, as well as Espio and Charmy. The main attraction here, though, is the crossover characters – the volume and variety of additional racers is frankly insane. There are a total of 56 playable characters, with unexpected inclusions like SpongeBob, Joker from Persona 5, Steve from Minecraft, Hatsune Miku, Pac-Man, and Mega Man. Almost all of these characters are exclusively available as DLC, but it’s still interesting to see how many different and unique racers the developers managed to include. There’s truly a racer for everyone here. Some might be a bit disappointed at the lack of deep cut Sonic characters, but overall I think the roster is strong and makes this game memorable even if some of the inclusions feel a little random.

It’s important to note, then, that most of the crossover characters basically do not have voice lines in the game, nor do they have rival dialogue during Grand Prix matches. Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka stated in an interview that adding voices to crossover characters “make(s) it difficult for the external company”, but I do think this was a misstep – while playing as Pac-Man or Mega-Man without a voice is fine, it would feel sorely missed when playing as SpongeBob or Patrick, for instance. Base game characters who are voiced have some odd voice direction choices – for example, Rouge uses the same two “ooh” and “ahh” voice clips every time she performs a trick, which winds up feeling particularly repetitive given the number of times you’ll be performing tricks during a race. That’s a very minor issue overall, though.

As you might expect by this point, Nintendo Switch is almost certainly the worst way to play Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. There’s a Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade coming for the game later this year (the exact date is currently unknown), with the physical version coming out early next year. And it’s much-needed: the action runs at 30 frames per second, which of course isn’t very good for a racing game. Docked mode in single player runs best, in my experience – handheld mode looks extremely blurry and split-screen multiplayer runs somewhere around 20 frames per second or less. Even the main menu of the game ran in single-digit frames per second when zooming in on your character. Single-player docked mode is somewhat acceptable on the basis that it will be upgraded in a few months, but handheld and split-screen multiplayer are rough. I only reviewed the Switch version of the game, but I’d expect that just about any other platform runs better.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is a perfectly competent kart racer that definitely holds its own in the very crowded genre. That said, the Nintendo Switch version is quite compromised – handheld mode is especially blurry, particularly if you’re playing on a Switch 2 in the meantime. 30 frames per second is also quite poor for a racing game focused on speed. I highly recommend this game if you liked any of the previous Sonic racing titles, and to be honest I’d also recommend it even if you haven’t tried any. But you’re probably better off waiting for a Nintendo Switch 2 patch (which will hopefully bump up the game’s resolution and frame rate) or playing it on a different platform instead. However, technical problems aside, this is Sonic’s best racing outing yet.

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds copy provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.