Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds - Year One Review

With the Avatar Legends DLC finally out, Year One of Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is over. This, of course, begs the important question: what does Nori think of all this? That's right, if we are to judge the quality of this past year of content, we of course need the opinion of the most important girl in the world (me)! Strap in. This one's a longer one. ALGO STUFF: Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is a 2025 kart racing game developed by Sonic Team and published by Sega. A spinoff in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, it incorporates characters and features from previous Sonic racing games. The game's main new feature is the "CrossWorld" mechanic, which causes racers to travel to other tracks in the middle of a race. Several guest characters from other franchises appear via downloadable content. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds was developed by Sonic Team, with members of the Initial D arcade games' development team contributing. The game was released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on September 25, 2025. A Nintendo Switch 2 version followed on December 4, 2025, and an arcade version is in development. CrossWorlds received positive reviews from critics, who praised its gameplay and customization features, though its single-player content and downloadable characters' presentation were criticized. Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game series and media franchise created by the Japanese developers Yuji Naka, Naoto Ohshima, and Hirokazu Yasuhara for Sega. The franchise follows Sonic, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog with supersonic speed, who battles the mad scientist Doctor Eggman and his robot army. The main Sonic the Hedgehog games are platformers mostly developed by Sonic Team; other games, developed by various studios, include spin-offs in the racing, fighting, party, and sports genres. The franchise also incorporates printed media, animations, films, and merchandise. Naka, Ohshima, and Yasuhara developed the first Sonic game, released in 1991 for the Sega Genesis, to provide Sega with a mascot to compete with Nintendo's Mario. Its success helped Sega become one of the leading video game companies during the fourth generation of video game consoles in the early 1990s. Sega Technical Institute developed the next three main Sonic game. After a hiatus during the unsuccessful Saturn era, the first major 3D Sonic game, Sonic Adventure, was released in 1998 for the Dreamcast. Sega exited the console market and shifted to third-party development in 2001, continuing the series on Nintendo, Xbox, and PlayStation systems. Takashi Iizuka has been the series' producer since 2010. #sonic #sth #sonicthehedgehog #sonichedgehog #sonicracing #sonicracingcrossworlds #soniccrossworlds #kartracing #kartrace #spinoff #videoessay #review #gaming #game #videogames #spongebob #megaman #pacman #avatar #tmnt #minecraft