I'm not entirely sure why they've put Sonic and friends on hoverboards, but it works. It's a bit of a stretch in the Sonic universe, but it works. Simply because Sonic has always been about ridiculous speed and hip style, and over the years he's become more and more of an extreme sports hedgehog. He's been grinding on rails with his shoes, doing tricks in the air, and even riding on snowboards. So seeing him on hoverboards seems fine to me. Especially since this game is set in the future. The characters are decked out with new shoe designs and sport slick shades.

I'm so happy Sonic Team has gotten rid of the irritating plastic shine that's been on the last couple games. In fact, they've finally fixed the character structures of every member. They're tall - have great posture - and aren't rubbery and bouncy when they walk. It's excellent. I'm very happy that we're moving into better times.

The in-game cutscenes are well done - and everyone has great animations. They've also included some amazing CG cutscenes. They had some excellent CG animations in Shadow (the unfortunate highlight of the entire game) and they've done some really nice work in this game as well to advance the story - which introduces three new characters.

Wave the Swallow / Jet the Hawk / Storm the Albatross

The problem with these new characters is that they take up personalities that already exist in the Sonic world. Jet is like Sonic, Storm is like a mix between Big the cat and Knuckles, and Wave is a combination of Rouge and Blaze. They've basically been created to be a counterpart to Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles. In fact, when you've got a character created off of an animal like an albatross - that's when you know you've got too many.

I want to like these three - I mean they look interesting - but the way they behave in the game's storyline is lame. Sonic's crew behaves normally, but these three are simply used as childish humor with funny little slip and fall behaviors that are irritating to watch as a young adult. It also doesn't help that Storm sounds like a stupid idiot. It's slightly better than Big the cat - but still doesn't work. When are they going to figure out that big strong characters don't have to sound like a stupid ogre. Jet has the most potential of being "cool" but he has a really irritating voice as well. It tends to crack a lot. A voice like Shadow's would've helped a lot - but then again - we already have a Shadow - so why even introduce Jet?

The controls for the game are fairly simple. You jump, you boost, you make hard turns, that's pretty much it. They've added some twists to it though. The first is riding turbulence. Whenever somebody boosts or does hard turns, they leave behind long streams of air. You can jump onto these streams and ride their path from behind. What's cooler is you can do tricks off of them like a half pipe. It's really a very neat idea - and works really well. For instance - if you really suck at the game, just keep jumping on everyone's waves - you'll get sucked towards them on their path and keep up with everyone. It's especially nice on sharp turns since they've got the work cut out for you.

Air is an incredibly important part to this game. You have an air meter on the bottom right corner that slowly decreases as you hover about. Once it hits zero - your character picks up their board and takes the course on their feet until you either find a pit to recharge, or you earn air.

You can earn air by doing tricks off of jumps. The tricks aren't really complicated - you just tilt different directions on the control stick to perform different tricks. The system is pretty simple - it certainly could've used a little more depth (like adding a button press in there for a different trick) but it works fine.

Riding someone's turbulence is a nice addition.
(click for a larger image)

You can boost - which uses up a part of your air tank - and also doubles as an attack. It'll knock your opponent around a little bit - and may also take away some rings. Unlike previous games - rings are actually important and difficult to collect, but upgrade your level. For every race you start out at level 1, but then by collecting a set amount of rings - you can level up. Each time you earn a larger air tank that can hold more air, your boosts become longer, and your attacks do more damage. Once you're up to level 3, your character just flies - and the animations for their boost change - often making them look a heck of a lot cooler. Using these rings, you can also purchase new hoverboards (aka Extreme Gear) to be used by certain characters.

The mechanics of the game are a little rough to get use to. I've had a lot of people try to pick it up and play it, but they bonk around into every wall. It's certainly not easy to fall into on your first try like Mario Kart because it requires a bit of practice and technique to really master every turn and trick. There are somethings that are not clear, and I had to read the instruction manual to figure it out. They weren't necessarily confusing, in fact they're pretty simple - they just failed to let us know about a few things. Thanks.

There are three different character types - Speed, Fly, and Power. Each one can take advantage of certain types of shortcuts in each level. Speed characters can grind on rails, Fly characters can fly through speed-hoops in the air, and power characters can break through certain walls, and knock away objects like cars and blocks that would normally knock your character around a little bit. Surprisingly, this adds a lot of depth to the game because each track feels fresh when you play it with a different character. You may become really good at grinding a certain rail for a shortcut when playing as Jet, but when you go through the same level as Knuckles, you've got to learn where to take advantage of his power ability instead.

I was a bit confused about flying at first, because every time I went off a special Fly ability ramp I would drop like a rock. But it took a moment to figure out I had to pull back on the control stick to fly up, instead of holding forward to drop. Information like that would have helped from the start. I was also very happy that the power characters don't require you to punch objects at a certain time. If you run into a police car, your character will automatically knock it out of the way - which is critical in my opinion. Nothing would be more frustrating than having my power ability be useless because I wasn't prepared to punch something.

I've had a good chance to try out some multiplayer with some friends and I'm happy and sad about a few things. First - it's great that you can have four player split screen battle. And it still runs at a smooth 60fps - there's no slowdown or frame-rate drop. Unfortunately, I have no idea why Sonic Team made everyone's screen so cluttered with information. All the graphics are the same size but squeezed into a fourth of the screen. There's no reason why they couldn't have resized some of the graphics, or created more compact versions of them.

The screenshot to the right shows this off well, but it's missing one important thing: when you do tricks, the name of each trick shows up on your screen in really big letters. Just try fitting Four words with the same font size as the time in the top middle and you do not see where you're going.

What seems like an attempt at putting more variety into multiplayer mode - they've also included a "survival mode" where you attack other players in the same sort of style as Mario Kart's balloon battle. It's okay - but the game wasn't really built for head to head battle so it's a bit awkward.

The multiplayer is smooth, but cluttered.
(click for a larger image)

As with past Sonic games, they've also included a mission mode. There's a total of 100 missions with bronze, silver, and gold rankings - and I thought these were fun. They're generally about the same 7 types of missions (from finishing under a certain time to collecting scattered items) but the different tracks make certain ones more challenging than others. Unfortunately they decided to try to give a reason defined by the story as to why you're doing each mission - and it really doesn't work. At one point we saw one that said, "Destroy at least nine robots to lower Storm's morale."

There are a total of 16 tracks - or in other words - 8 tracks with two variations. They remind me a lot of levels from Sonic Adventure 2 specifically. There are a total of 17 characters total that are unlocked over time. Although I must say - There's no reason why they make you unlock them the way you do. I beat the game to unlock 5 characters at once, and complete 100 missions to unlock three characters at the same time. They really could have spread them out a little bit more. I don't want to give anything away - but there are some extra characters in there that are really cool - a really neat treat that Sonic Team went out of their way to add in. Sonic fans will appreciate these.

The most interesting character to play as is Shadow. Reason being is because his default hoverboard isn't a hoverboard. It's actually his shoes. Shadow skates around the same way he always has and it's incredibly awesome. What's even better, is that you can use the same shoes on pretty much any character, which eliminates the complaint that you have to ride on hoverboards. I prefer to have my characters use the shoes because it's more of a natural Sonic feel to me. In fact, it frees up some of the characters animations - for instance - Tails is no longer stuck to a hoverboard while flying through the hoops, the skates allow him to fly like he always has. The shoes really work best on Shadow because he's always been the one that sort of "skated" around as opposed to "run" like all the other characters do.

Now there are some fairly irritating things - but thankfully, due to the fact that this game is actually good, as opposed to Shadow, I can forgive them.

For some reason they felt that when you attack another opponent - your head should get really big and yell. In fact, I believe Jet even sneezes with a giant head. Thankfully, leveling up to level 2 and 3, grants different attacks. For instance - Sonic spindashes, and Knuckles punches people. Some attacks are really sweet. But seriously - the giant head thing has got to go.

Dr.Eggman. Enough with that name already. Unfortunately, I think we're stuck with it from here on out.

If you're going to have one boss in this game, (SPOILER) don't make it a genie.

It's really frustrating when I want to make a hard right turn by steering right and pressing right trigger. But pressing right trigger by itself is also the break - so when I slightly press the trigger before I hold the control stick to the right - I slow down to a crawl instead of making a sharp turn. Hey, you know how you mapped boost to both B and X? Oh and Y isn't even used? Yeah, put brake on one of those!

When I'm buying things in the store with rings,
I'm "buying," ok?
Not "exchanging".

The big head thing is stupid. Period.

A second opinion by Matt Rose -

I am no Sonic fan like, say Ray, and I laugh very hard along with all the great rips being made against the Sonic Team’s greatest abortion, Shadow the Hedgehog. However, Sonic Riders is a bit different.  When it comes to Sonic games, I always envision a story with a setting around speed and outrunning the clock and, well, racing.  Maybe not racing as in the Grand Prix, but that works too.

The graphics were not as good as they should have been.  In 2006, the textures should not become pixilated when your character gets too close to a boundary and water should appear very fluid.  I know this might sound really picky, but after the awe-inspiring sight of water in Crystal Chronicles, any game with crummy, tile-like water just looks dated to me.  Graphics are expensive and I do not think I am asking for Doom 3, I just want something that doesn’t look quite as primitive.  I know somewhere, deep down, Sonic Team loves their games, so let’s try and bring the hedgehog into the twenty-first century, shall we?

The controls can be both forgiving and frustrating.  On one hand I picked up the controller and dove straight into the game, only worrying about learning the subtle tricks and techniques as the races became increasingly challenging.  The boost and trick systems are well tied in together and encourage close, competitive races.  However, there are instances when the racer will inexplicably slam into jet streams as if they were stone walls, or even sail right through one end to fly off the other.  The fact that some ramps do not allow tricks to be executed off of while other times tricks can be conducted off of abrupt edges in the road is counter intuitive, despite making sense balance-wise.

The levels are interesting and I think there are enough of them to avoid repetition.  The level designs are actually pretty good; each course has its own unique feel and the courses themselves are laid out pretty well.  Even though the courses have two sides, they are very different and never feel like “the same one but with a slight difference” (well, excluding the Babylon Garden course). To even add more to replay value, each course contains paths designed for each of the three classes of characters: hoops and ramps for fly characters, grind bars for speed characters, and various obstacles to smash up with power characters.  I have never played any Sega games, but I found it really cool that they built a theme-park of sorts on the themes of their past games.  Although two courses may have been a bit much, but that was probably a result of courses having a “Hero” and “Babylon” mode.

I am not much of a fan for the parallel stories that these games seem to relentlessly use, but at least this title can agree on its own ending.  How many ways did Shadow save the world?  Wait, or did he even choose one of those dozen branches?

Matt's Score: 7.9/10

Ray again. I want to spend some time looking at IGN's review of Sonic Riders in which it gave the game a 6.2 out of 10. Personally I think that is ridiculous. Trust me - I have no problem admitting when a Sonic game is bad. A Score of 7 I could understand. But a 6? Point 2? That's getting close to a five - and this game is far from mediocre.

"...using too much boost causes the characters to run out of energy and they'll need to stop for a recharge, a tedious, unnecessary process that slows the racing experience."
The recharge takes a maximum of 2 seconds to recharge a full tank. You don't have to use a pit stop. I find it easier to grab someone's wave and earn air from doing tricks on it. Once you get good enough - you pretty much never run out of air.

"Once inside a turbulence system, participants could set their controllers down and advance anyway."
There would be nothing more frustrating than jumping on someone's turbulence pipe, only to fall off because it's hard to balance. The turbulence system needs to be this way. It's a trustworthy air pocket where you know you can jump on it and be safe for a limited time. Only in very rare instances has something weird happened while riding someone's turbulence.

"The audio portion rocks out with typical cheesy guitar riffs, but also features a few surprisingly ambient and worldly tracks that in our opinion better fit with the themes of the different locales."
I don't know what they're talking about with this one at all. I know Sonic has a tendency to have 80's rock music - and trust me, it can be cheesy - but this game is straight-up techno. Every single track has a heavy techno beat - and while some may be a tad bland, none feature cheesy guitar riffs.

"Sonic is one of the fastest videogame mascots alive, so why has he been made to ride a sluggish snowboard in this new racer?"
Sluggish? For some - this game is a little bit too fast and hectic. When the characters run on the ground it feels natural - and it's a little slower than the boards move. Plus we aren't forced to ride the hoverboards - Shadow's shoes (plus more for purchase) allow characters to skate their way to the finish.