I'll take F-Zero when I want to race at Super Sonic speeds thank you

My brother left Sonic Riders at the place were I live a few weeks ago, since he left it here I decided I might as well play it and see if it lives up to my expectations. After playing it for a little over an hour Sonic Riders did live up to my expectations, and that is a below average racer that has a few new ideas. But like most 3d Sonic games it is hampered by the fact that Sonic Team can’t get the basics of 3d game play down right.

Story.
Dr. Robotnick has started a racing contest in order to get chaos emeralds. In order to enter you have to fork one of the gems up and if you win you’ll get all the gems. Of course he has a team of racers working for him so it’s up to Sonic and the gang to win to keep him from getting the chaos emeralds.

Graphics.
The game starts with a music video of impressive 3d cel shaded anime characters racing. Unfortunately neither the games in game graphics and cut scenes look this good. Instead they pretty much use the same character models from Sonic advance 2 battle, there a little bit better but not much.

As for the actual racing Sonic Riders goes pretty fast and has a pretty stable frame fate on single player modes. But it is hinder by the camera, the camera zooms in way to close and you can’t see things like power ups or enemies on your side waiting to attack you.

Sound.
The music is ok it fits into the want a be futuristic racer that Sonic Riders is trying to be but I have heard better. The VA’s are done by 4kids now and the voices are the same has the English dub of the Sonic X anime. I like these voices just a bit better then the old ones.

Gameplay
All right before I get down on why this game really could have been better I’ll start with the more positive spin on it. First it does a lot of things right and some of them are pretty good. First off unlike a lot of racers were to get a boost requires timing with the B button, Sonic Riders starts you off by having you run. The closer you are to the starting point by the time the electric fence goes down the faster start you’ll have but if you hit the fence you’ll get zapped and be stunned for a few seconds after the rest of them launch. It’s a unique way to get bonuses out of the starting gate.

In order to boost and attack you press the O button that gives you a big boost of speed, but it takes your fuel on your board down to zero. When that happens your characters on foot in till they can find a way to refill there board. There are a few ways to refill, you can stop at pit cells which will stop you for a few seconds but completely refill your power, find them in capsules, or do tricks successfully when you succeed you’ll get more fuel. Tricks of course being the easiest way to do it, unfortunately doing tricks is hard because the game really doesn’t do a good job of telling a good trick from a bad trick. I have tricks were I have landed by board flatly on the ground and it got a lower score then when I practically nose dived into the ground.

Another new thing is that you can ride on the turbulence that the other players create when they go fast. When they go fast a jet stream appears behind them, get into and you can ride and do tricks to speed up and catch up to them. It’s a pretty cool feature to the game.

On the course are rings that keep you from getting plastered by enemy attacks and you can use them to buy upgrades to your board to, but this is were I go into the bad things and we have to get back to fundamentals again.

Besides having good frame rate and a good sense of speed controls are important in a racer and Sonic Riders controls are just about as bad has the not so classic racer Sonic R. It’s hard to turn even when you press the R button to turn sharply without hitting a wall or falling off the course. And objects in story mode are hard to accomplish has his without you falling off the course at every turn.

There are different modes but on two players the frame rate drops dramatically and the game looks horrible in these modes. You have a battle mode where players try to hit each other with there attacks and defeat them, a tag mode were in order to keep your power up both you and your partner have to stay close together, and of course a GP and time attack mode. The GP doesn’t have a challenge limit to it like F-Zero or Mario Kart and it’s pretty difficult to.

Final Recommendation.
Sonic Riders as plenty of good ideas but intill some one gets around to teaching Sonic Team how to do games right in 3d it suffers from the same flaws as other 3d Sonic games. Bad camera, clunky controls keep this game from what it should be. Do I recommend; it well as a rental to people who remember Sonic being good yeah but I only recommend this as a purchase to die hard Sonic fans, you know people who think Shadow the hedgehog and Sonic the hedgehog for the 360 are good games. If your looking for a good futuristic racer from Sega I suggest checking out F-Zero GX the Nintendo Gamecube.