Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds year 2 preview – the Fortnite of racing games

While Mario Kart World’s DLC plans remain a mystery, Sega has unveiled even more post-launch support for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, that’ll last throughout 2027.

In a world where video games that were intended to see long-term support can be shut down in just a month or two, because they weren’t overnight hits, it wouldn’t have been surprising if Sega moved on from Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds once it reached the end of its season pass.

By Sega’s own admission, the game wasn’t selling as well as the company wanted, so it was a welcome surprise to see a second year of DLC be announced during Summer Game Fest. Unlike some other publishers, Sega seems to recognise that if you want a successful long-running video game, you need to put in the work.

We were offered a hands-on preview of Sega’s year two plans for CrossWorlds (which will have been formally announced by the time you’re reading this) and on one hand, it has a lot of fun content scheduled that is sure to appease the fanbase and keep them coming back well into 2027, but how many new fans it will gain is another question entirely.

For the most part, year two doesn’t look that different to year one. A bevy of free Sega characters will continue to be added as new racers, such as Bayonetta and Persona 3’s Aigis, alongside crossover characters and racetracks via a second paid season pass.

The first two of these crossover DLC packs – Godzilla and Evangelion – were what we got to sample and the Godzilla racetrack, where the king of kaiju stomps around the iconic City Escape level from Sonic Adventure 2, made for an enjoyable spectacle, both in how it adapts the level into a racetrack and how Godzilla himself serves as an obstacle and not just window dressing.

We probably would have got more of a kick out of the Evangelion track if we were more familiar with the source material, but the way you race through Tokyo-3 as it is also attacked by a big monster, culminating with the EVA-01 mech running past you to save the day on the third lap, made it feel like a theme park simulator ride.

While these are clearly the bigger selling points, there’s a huge amount of free content planned alongside further Sega characters. Sega is leveraging its partnership with McLaren to add one of the manufacturer’s race cars (as well as dress Sonic up in the McLaren team outfit), although we imagine fans will be more charmed by the new vehicles based on the old Mega Drive, Dreamcast, and Saturn consoles.

The most intriguing inclusion is the new Duel Rush gameplay mode, which is a pure 1v1 experience. Given how chaotic normal races can be, Duel Rush is meant to be more skill based. Items and the performance boosting gadgets are still available, but you can see what items your opponent has and vice versa, adding an extra degree of strategy not present in normal races.

Whether the mode is executed well is something we unfortunately can’t answer since we were paired against someone who didn’t seem to be as experienced with CrossWorlds as we are.

As a result, we comfortably won all our races without even needing to rely on the unique duel boost, which gradually charges up and is meant to serve as a comeback mechanic. The mode is clearly best reserved for players of equal skill level since otherwise one player is going to cleanly stomp the other.

Even so, we wouldn’t mind seeing Sega and Sonic Team experiment with other gameplay modes, if only to bolster CrossWorlds’ rather shallow single-player options.

Given how much Sega is promising for year two, it’s easy to feel like it’s doing a better job at post-launch support than Nintendo is with Mario Kart World, which has only seen a drip feed of very minor free updates since it launched last year.

That comparison isn’t entirely fair, though. At 15.39 million sales, Mario Kart World has unambiguously been more successful, especially as it’s only on one console. It’s no surprise then, why Nintendo doesn’t seem to be in a rush to sell DLC while Sega is pulling out all the stops to bump up CrossWorlds’ sales.

This isn’t to say what Sega is doing is wrong (and it’s not even new for Sonic racing games – the 2012 game had real life NASCAR racer Danica Patrick and Wreck-It Ralph), but when you look at all the collaborations the company has paid for, we can’t help but smell a hint of desperation.

It’s also emblematic of the Fortnite-ification of pop culture in general, where crossovers do the bare minimum by having a bunch of disparate characters share a setting without doing anything interesting with them.

And as proven in recent years, that strategy isn’t even working for Fortnite. All the money Epic Games has spent on including Star Wars, Dragon Ball Z, Ariana Grande, and so much more (including Sonic) has only resulted in an unprofitable business and rampant job cuts.

All this begs the question of whether this reliance on crossovers genuinely works and will benefit CrossWorlds in the long run. Are Godzilla fans going to show up en masse for a game they’d otherwise skip, just because he cameos in a track? Would a surge of McLaren fans justify the money spent on adding a licensed race car?

If anything is going to help bolster CrossWorlds’ sales, it’s going to be the permanent price cut, without a doubt the smartest part of Sega’s year two plans.

Going forward, the standard edition of CrossWorlds will cost £34.99, which is far more enticing than its original £64.99 price tag. Sega is also selling a new year one edition of the game that comes with the first season pass for £49.99 – £30 less than the same offer for the original £79.99 digital deluxe edition.

Even if you include the year two season pass, which is £24.99, you’re paying £74.98 altogether. Basically, anyone who skipped CrossWorlds at launch is going to feel very vindicated about waiting.

We maintain that even without all the DLC, CrossWorlds is a great alternative for those who felt short-changed by Mario Kart World and it’s certainly one of the best modern multiplayer racing games thanks to a still active online player base.

By the end of 2027, it also stands to be one of the most content rich racers, unless Nintendo suddenly starts dropping DLC expansions for Mario Kart World next year.

Maybe none of Sega’s year two plans will pay off and it will cut its losses come 2028, but we appreciate that an attempt to support and bolster CrossWorlds is being made at all. It’s more than many other games have got.

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