Sonic Racing Crossworlds will have the biggest roster of any Sonic racing game to date.
As reported by Sonic Stadium, the game will launch with 23 characters out the date. This includes SAGE, Sonic Frontiers’ antagonist in her first appearance after her debut. The full list of characters is below:
- Sonic
- Knuckles
- Tails
- Amy
- Eggman
- Jet
- Wave
- Storm
- Shadow
- Rouge
- E-123 Omega
- Vector
- Charmy
- Espio
- Blaze
- Silver
- Cream
- Zavok
- Zazz
- Big
- Metal Sonic
- Egg Pawn
What’s funny is that Sega shared this information on the game’s official website, but subsequently took it down. It may be that they accidentally made the webpage for this information public too early. In any case, we know all of this now.
As they have pointed out, this is the largest number of starting playable characters for any Sonic racing game until now. Sega also revealed that they will have a lot more racers to add in the future. And what’s even more exciting is that they will include Sega characters outside of the Sonic franchise.
Now, Sega has gone crazy with their crossover characters for these racing games before. Some Sega racers include a lot of deep cuts include Opa-Opa, Shenmue’s Ryo Hazuki, Alex Kidd, Joe Musashi, Gilius Thunderhead, and Jacky and Akira from Virtua Fighter.
At least it makes sense for Jacky to be part of the game, but we do think Sega could try harder in picking out some newer deep cuts from their library. For example, we do wonder if we could get a Streets of Rage crossover with the police car that would intervene to help Alex, Blaze, and Adam.
They also added some representation for Daytona USA, Afterburner, and Crazy Taxi, but there’s still room to represent Sega’s other legacy racing and driving games, such as Hang-On, Enduro Racer, Sega Rally Championship, and Out Run.
And yes, Sega has also added in some out of left field non-Sega crossover characters, including Banjo & Kazooie, Wreck-it-Ralph, and former IndyCar driver Danica Patrick.
We’re not sure if Sega should be looking for real life racers anymore, but if anything, this certainly looks like an opportunity to add in some of the original human characters from the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, maybe the more ridiculous guys who would be fun to hear quips from, like Stone or Wade Whipple.
Sonic Racing Crossworlds is not just coming in at a time when Nintendo is launching a Switch 2 and a new Mario Kart. It’s also arriving at a time when Fortnite has introduced Rocket Racing, a free-to-play competitor that’s going to take away attention. Sega and developer Sumo Digital clearly knew they needed to step up, and we’re looking forward to seeing if they made a winner with this one.
