A while ago, I bought Sonic Gems Collection for the GameCube. One of the titles included in this game was Sonic R for the Sega Saturn. I heard some positive reviews and mostly mixed to negative opinions about it and I had watched gameplay videos of it by Anon7906 and Cobanermani456, so I decided to play it for a while and review this game.
And what can I say but... I REALLY do not like this game at all!!! And here is why.
The controls
The controls of this game are very slippery and unresponsive, which isn't surprising to me because I have played a number of Sonic games with crappy controls. The games's controls are just as bad as Sonic Lost World (3DS) and it REALLY pisses me off that Sega can never make the controls in a Sonic game run smoothly on a 3D Sonic game.
The graphics
The visuals and graphics overall look like a really crappy N64 game which is funny because ONE: The Sega Saturn was supposed to compete with the N64 and TWO: Sonic R was "supposed" to be Mario Kart 64's rival. The courses and textures look really grainy and just an eyesore to look at.
Imbalanced character stats
Now, I know all the stats of characters do not have to be the same but in THIS game... Sega were REALLY stupid with the character stats!! The biggest example is Amy Rose!!! She drives a car in this game and for some reason, she is SO slow to where even Knuckles outpaces her! Even when I was racing as Sonic, Knuckles seems to outpace him as well!!! Is Knuckles actually the fastest thing alive??? Sega were OBVIOUSLY trying to copy Mario Kart, but failed at that point didn't you Sega???
Very little content
This game has much less content than Mario Kart 64 with only 5 courses and 3 modes which are Single Player, Multi-player and Time Trials. Even Ridge Racer Vita had more than this, and it was DLC!!!! Really Sega??!!
The courses
The courses in my opinion are very complex and confusing to a point where you will accidentally go the wrong way which is bad because the game makes you explore the courses for Chaos Emeralds and Character Tokens.
On the positive side, the game has some good music and the exploration is unique to a racing game.
But overall, I really despise this racer!!! I have seen and played better racing games than this piece of sh*t!!! Sega didn't even try to fix the problems in the original, they just straight up ported this game to the GameCube, which was a VERY lazy move!!! This game cannot even in the slightest, compete with Mario Kart 64 because of how awful it is. Seriously, if you do not want to be disappointed, do NOT play this game!!