Do you know why Nintendo aimed being the second console last generation with the underpowered Wii? Because They offer something different than the competitors. Take a look at Mario Kart, such an easy formula to take to another level and make it even better than what Nintendo does with it, but there's no one else quite doing what Mario Kart does. There's the occasional Crash or Diddy Kong Racing, but nothing withstanding.
Now Sega is interesting because back in the day they were competing for consumers in much the same way Microsoft and Sony are doing right now, they tried to offer different tastes of the same cake. Sonic was the Mario of Sega. Now this is the Mario Kart of Sega, or Sonic Kart if you will.
It's not copy. Are all first person shooters copies of Wolfenstein? Are all video games copy of Pong? Some influences are a little more blatant but Sega knows how to do it. This is no All-Stars Battle Royale, this is more like an arcade racer that might or not remind you of Need for Speed or Burnout.
Reinvention of kart racers is what Diddy Kong Racing did years ago, now the formula is just followed. In fact, the term kart racer seems to be linked with this kind of brawl racer since Mario Kart is rarely about karts these days, this one isn't either. The racing pandemonium is well executed, enough to keep an eye out for sequences of this. Many characters from this are completely unknown for me, I wasn't exactly a Sega kid back in the day, not am I someone highly attached to obscure hunting franchises. It might serve as a welcome invitation to many games.
Though Nintendo may still have the lead on memorable characters Sega seems pretty much up to the task. While other developers seem to focus putting the player in the cockpit taking most of character development out for the sake of immersion, Sega does resemble a competitor Nintendo might have had in the past. The competition was much like who could put out the most fun games with the most memorable characters, now it's who puts out the best shooters. The leading roles have changed, the script is exactly the same.
Sega Racing takes what Diddy Kong Racing did to a whole new level. Remember how cool it was back in 1997 when you could not only race karts but hovercrafts and planes too? There were stages set for each of them, some gave the opportunity to ride two or all of the vehicles, but a choice had to be made beforehand. Now things just "transform". You might have to ride all three vehicles in the same track, most of them have at least one transformations where a car morphs into a plane or a hovercraft, or a plane into an hovercraft, or... whatever, anything can happen. Different paths lead to different vehicles you can transform into.
The stages themselves are mutant, they offer different aspects each lap. One good example is one of the tracks that is flooding, in the first lap you race cars normally, as the second and third laps advance the flood gets worst and the track changes completely. It's completely crazy, Mario Kart and Diddy Kong Racing never had this much chaos. As long as items go the selection isn't quite impressive, but they do the job. Kinda reminds me of how Mario Kart tried to throw several new items and started leaving some behind. The new ones weren't quite as interesting and some of them were completely ridiculous -- I'm looking at you Chain Chomp in Double Dash.
To help bring in a little more depth a system of drifting is included, and I must tell it works amazingly well. Different than Mario Kart, you don't have to keep tapping the control stick to get speed, you simply need to drift during a considerable amount of time. Three levels of boost are reached according to how long you've sustained your drift. There's also the possibility to link drifts and keep the momentum to release later on as the player sees fit.
There's quite a selection of characters to choose from. To add to silliness, which is always good and somewhat lacking in today's more serious gaming, an homage to Sega lets you ride trademarks of Sega's past. Imagine controlling an hovercraft composed of a Dreamcast controller, and the driver is the controller's VMU. Different tweaks are possible by unlocking and choosing which stat you vehicle will focus. Speed, acceleration, boost, etc. There's 6 level's and you get experience from basically everything you do.
There's a special move gotten from normal stage pick-ups which is the all-star pick-up. It's like a smash ball from recent smash bros, it raises you speed, gives invulnerability and lets you shoot projectiles. Of course each character has its own set of projectiles and how good this pick-up really is, so much that there's a stat that controls this power. After playing this game for several hours I have to say that there's a 50-50 chance you'll get this if you're not dominating the race or at least in first three positions, using it right is key to get good results, especially in the World Tour mode that stands as the main single-player mode and it's completely amazing.
You have numerous locales each with its own set of challenges. The challenges go from straight-to-the-point racing with pick-ups and everything, to sprints against the clock, battle races, where you need to disqualify the opponents via items, and so on. It's a great opportunity not to fill with races and that's what they did, at first, strangely, there seems to be an unusual amount of simple races, as the tour goes on this number gladly diminishes. The fact there's 4 difficulty settings and every time you beat one you get stars to unlock vehicle tweaks and new characters is great.
Time attack also presents this 4-difficulty separation, staff ghosts are differentiated as easy, medium, hard and expert. When you beat all of them you feel good, since nothing in-game is unlocked but it's a good challenge for those looking for more playtime. The Grand Prix mode is pretty standard and get quite tricky in later difficulties. Heavy use of drift and maneuver boost must be achieved to get first place in expert. Of course, luck in getting the star is always helpful, even though that won't do miracles.
There's more than just drifting to achieve higher speed. For example, you can perform back, front and side flips if you tap the right analog stick or arrow keys, it looks cool but will also save up boost on how m any flips you've done to release when you land, pretty helpful driving cars and hovercrafts, but for planes you simple get to do aerobatic maneuvering. There's no actual air time from jumps in plane mode since you're always in air; but then you can do reckless boosts, which is done by maneuvering the plane out of an object milliseconds before you crash; if done correctly you'll get an instantaneous boost from being reckless.
Others boost opportunities can be done by doing some trick in plane mode just before you transform into another vehicle, called transform boost. This depth of gameplay leads to some fun stuff in the online leaderboards, even though the ghosts are messy and we don't seem to have any control in which ones we want on-screen; I find them pretty distracting. They say you can download ghosts from other players but I couldn't really do it. It would be nice to have the option to download replays from top players as well, but since the ghosts are already messes-up, this would be a disaster.
The soundtrack is pretty cool too, I often find myself playing other music while playing games these days, this was a decent exception. It's also quite pleasing graphically, I could definitely see some Wave Race in how the waves flow, depending on your speed you can also get momentum for some tricks in some of them.
The online gaming is pretty solid, there's many game modes, like battle, battle race and a version of capture the flag. Unfortunately it's not the most played game in the universe, it can be a little difficult to hold a decent match for too long, and any other game mode except regular race will be a hellish task to form. They even added local split-screen multiplayer which some games today seem to have lost, especially PC games.
The final question is, can this game front famous series like Mario Kart? The answer is yes, it's got pretty much everything Mario Kart could offer plus some more. You won't play as legendary Nintendo characters but, come on, by now that's not a big deal, it quit being fun after Mario Kart 64, now it's just a total mess. Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed fills a gap of a Nintendo franchise, which many people are willing to do these days. those of us who thought Rare would do exactly that for Microsoft were in for disappointment. Sega does it for basically every console and PC, which couldn't be more awesome.