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Name: Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing

It's not very often that a game appears with a collaboration of high profile characters all pitted against each other in one form or another, Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing is just that, a racing game just as the name suggests with a pedigree of famous characters from across a variety of platforms all following a similar formula as that of the Mario Kart series on the Nintendo platforms.

This plethora of characters offer plenty of individual uniqueness to keep players interested, of course, this being a title with Sonic's name in it, and a SEGA title, you'll find plenty of the series characters within. But this isn't just about Sonic, you have characters from plenty of other games such as Shenmue, ChuChu Rocket!, Jet Set Radio, House of the Dead, Virtua Fighter, Crazy Taxi, and Space Channel 5, just to name a few, in total there are well over 20. Some characters however are unique to each platform, for instance on the Nintendo Wii version you'll be able to play as your Mii where as the Xbox 360 version will have Avatars and Banjo and Kazooie to choose from. PC and PlayStation 3 players will not get any unique characters but then you're only really missing out on Banjo and Kazooie since you can't have your Mii on either platform, SEGA themselves have said there is plenty of opportunities for additional characters through extra download content after release. Not all the characters are available as soon as you start, some have to be unlocked after purchasing them with SEGA Miles which you'll earn throughout the game, but after making the no doubt difficulty decision of who to side with on your conquest for the podium finish you'll be greeted with the racing itself.

All-Stars Racing takes place over 24 tracks and each is filled with shortcuts which once found can make all the difference in winning a race, but they aren't easy to find or navigate so you're tempting fate trying to use them. The courses themselves all come with their own themes which have been taken from the aforementioned games so you'll be racing around Sonic tracks such as the Green Hill zone, House of the Dead zombie towns and plenty of others, each is filled with its own unique set of tight eye-bending turns and jumps, the only real issue here is that there just isn't enough of the themed courses. While the tracks do offer plenty of variety, you're mostly stuck under the same game theme such as Sonic, or Samba De Amigo, the themes certainly aren't as varied as the characters which is disappointing since it would of been nice to see more courses from other characters games, again however this could be something later added but SEGA haven't confirmed anything.

The single-player game while spanning 24 tracks is set over the Grand Prix or various Missions which are more a type of single race. Grand Prix is split into six cups and each cup has four tracks within it, the Grand Prix pits you against seven AI opponents for you to race against but it isn't too difficult unless you push the difficulty up to expert which really gives you a run for your money. The missions on the other hand are objective based races, one example is collecting coins as quickly as possible within a set time period, it sounds fairly easy but you're given a rating on each mission and if you want to unlock everything you'll need to be earning triple-A's throughout. There are 60 missions to keep you busy and trying to get top marks on all of them is far from easy and extremely time consuming, while it's great to have such a vast number to go through it can become quite stale later on since you're usually just doing them alone and the game doesn't offer any sort of cooperative support for either doing them over the internet or through split-screen.

The core component in Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing is the racing experience itself and SEGA have done a great job with it. The vehicle you'll be racing in is specific to each character with a few variations in between and each has its own unique sounds to keep you entertained. You'll mainly be concentrating on getting your boost up in a race and to gain it you'll need to drift around corners which isn't only the easiest way to take a corner, but also the fastest, as you drift your boost meter fills up and the longer you drift the more boost you'll receive once you stop.