i downloaded this last year but never played it because i was nervous. this is the follow-up to Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, which i long posited was, for some goddamn reason, despite being a mod of a Doom engine Sonic fangame with the name Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, the best kart racer around and i'm not kidding. it was originally planned as a big update to SRB2K until eventually it was spun off into its own thing which was exciting. but then i heard things about it that weren't so exciting
the biggest deterrent was the description on the game's website, really driving home the point that this is NOT a baby game for babies who want to have a good baby time, if you play this game you'd better be prepared to go to hell forever. they really wrote "not a pick-up-and-play experience", already a terrible thing to come out the gate with but especially so for a successor to your game that was absolutely a pick-up-and-play experience. it was Mario Kart dude
the opening sequence is long-winded but extremely charming. i want to help these boys with whatever they're tinkering with. but i was worried when after all that i was presented with the 'begin tutorial' button, because if it took that long to go through the menu part of the game how long would the game part of the game take. the answer is very long, and it apparently used to be even very longer. i remembered reading a thread of people's impressions and just about everyone remarked on how overwhelming it was right off the bat
why are there so many mechanics. you cannot fathom what someone could possibly mean by their kart racer being "inspired by fighting games" until you play the tutorial for Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers. i was also confused about the line regarding minimizing randomness until i saw that i have to actually time what items i get from boxes. i'd say there's equal amounts neat new stuff and unnecessary tacked-on complexity. i almost feel as though it wasn't intended to be so technical but then they got in one (1) outside playtester and realized ah oops
well i'm finally fully primed to tackle some real races. but then i play the first couple cupple cups and not only do most of those mechanics not show up at all but there are also a ton more the tutorial did not cover. so the verdict is that the tutorial is good at showing off Tails/Robotnik banter but bad at being a tutorial
i want to stop complaining about being too dumb for this game for now and start talking about how perfect everything else about it is. if you hooked me up to a big machine and studied my brainwaves over an extended period of time you could not formulate an aesthetic more suited to me than what this game has going on. i always played with the OpenGL renderer that makes it less Doom-y and more Sonic R-y and the vibes are immaculate
i loved how SRB2K looked and felt but it did always come across like the modded mod of a modded game (with mods) that it was, largely because of it not having a dedicated singleplayer mode so the focus was on joining community servers that turn it into Mugen Kart. here however. well i don't even want to want to play online because it's probably filled with people who know how to play
