If you’ve played a Hazelight Studios game before, you know that the characters they create for you and your co-op partner come with unique personalities, backgrounds, and motivations that produce unforgettable moments as their stories unfold.
Hazelight Studios is keeping that trend up as they introduce two new player characters in Split Fiction, which is launching on March 6 on PS5. Take control of two unpublished authors, Mio and Zoe, who you will quickly find are worlds apart! When you first meet Mio and Zoe, they have been lured into Rader Publishing Headquarters with the promise of a potential publishing deal which goes horribly wrong, trapping them inside a simulation of their stories which you have to help them escape. In this blog, we’re diving deeper into their characters so that you can confidently pick your favourite when you get your hands on the game!
Mio Hudson – Science Fiction author
Reserved. Decisive. Realist. Introvert.
Raised in the city with her father, Mio has barely scraped by for the last couple of years. She isn’t looking for fame or recognition as an author, she’s just in it for the money. Her love for all things sci-fi is reflected in her literary works, taking place in neon-lit cyberpunk cities, harsh futuristic weapon plants, and even in the coldness of outer space.
Expect to see her love for sci-fi shine through in the abilities she gains inside the simulations, where she may become a gravity-defying ninja equipped with a lethally sharp energy sword, wear an advanced exosuit that grants remote control of drones, or dual-wield laser blasters in futuristic combat armour.
Zoe Foster – Fantasy author
Charismatic. Empathetic. Optimist. Extrovert.
A cheerful countryside girl with a deep need to prove to her family that she’s not a complete failure. Zoe hopes that a publishing deal will solve all of her problems. Fantasy is her favoured genre, with her portfolio containing works of fiction about escaping towns overrun by trolls, battling through forests against an impending ice age, and protecting the last dragons from extinction.
Given her love for the fantastical, you can look forward to seeing Zoe as a magical shapeshifter flying across the lands as a fairy, wielding a mythical sword whilst riding a dragon into a battle of the ages, or soaring between floating islands with a magical kite.
As our characters are clearly such polar opposite personalities, they have to come to terms with their differences, uncover hidden secrets about themselves, and realise that to escape the simulations they find themselves trapped in, they must work together and overcome the odds through the power of friendship.
During the game announcement at The Game Awards in December, Josef Fares revealed that the characters’ names mean a great deal to him, as Mio and Zoe are in fact named after his daughters!
Now for the tricky question for you and your co-op partner: who is going to play as Mio and who will play as Zoe…?
The Friend’s Pass
Like A Way Out and It Takes Two, Hazelight Studios’ staple feature, The Friend’s Pass*, returns again, allowing one player who owns the game to invite a friend to play online for free! Hazelight also plans to introduce crossplay, making playing with friends even easier across any platform.
Split Fiction is coming to PlayStation 5 on March 6, 2025.
*Friend’s Pass requires installation of the Friend’s Pass, persistent internet connection and applicable platform account. One user must own the full game in order for the co-op player to play the full game.
In an era of live services, MMOs, and generally disconnected online experiences, the idea of local multiplayer is quickly becoming a rarity. And while we have seen a handful of great couch co-op experiences pop up here and there, such as TMNT Shredders Revenge, Overcooked, and Hazelight Studios’ very own It Takes Two, I can’t think of anything I’ve played recently that resonated with me quite like Split Fiction. From its plethora of varying gameplay types, such as a twin-stick shooter, a pinball inspired puzzle platformer, and in one instance, a hot dog simulator, to its dazzling graphics and believable character dialogue, Split Fiction is looking to not only be another standout title in a year full of promising releases, but something that anyone who’s looking for a fun and unique local multiplayer game should pencil in on their gaming calendar.
In Split Fiction you play as either Mio or Zoe, two aspiring writers who are chosen to take part in an early test of a machine that will bring their stories to life. From what I saw, this plot device not only helps build the world of Split Fiction, but also provides a perfect excuse to seamlessly transition between its sci-fi and fantasy settings. During the few hours I got to play, jumping back and forth never felt forced or tedious, and while I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of fantasy unless the word “Final” is attached in some way, I never found myself getting bored of Zoe’s fantasy worlds. This was supported by Split Fiction’s well-written and believable dialogue between characters, which helped convince me that I was watching two real people who are polar opposites interact with each other in their own make-believe worlds.
If you played Hazelight’s previous games (It Takes Two and A Way Out), you probably have a pretty good idea of what’s in store for you with Split Fiction. A shared multiplayer experience on either the same or a split screen that’s full of cleverly designed puzzles that require teamwork and communication, all wrapped up in a nice-looking and well-written package. What sets Split Fiction apart from other couch co-op games is its clever integration of numerous gameplay styles, keeping the experience fresh and engaging.
What sets Split Fiction apart from other couch co-op games is its clever integration of numerous gameplay styles.
In fact, the variety of gameplay styles in Split Fiction is easily its most standout feature. And during my brief time with it, it was clear that this isn’t another standard two-player puzzler or beat-’em-up experience. Hazelight obviously took its time to refine the variety of gameplay types in here, because nothing felt like it was rushed or created in order to add variety for the sake of variety. One standout moment for me was a section where Zoe and Mio have to snowboard their way out of an active warzone, which felt more like a blend of Sonic Adventure Battle and SSX than your typical on-rails downhill spectacle. In this moment, Split Fiction introduced a points mechanic where I had to compete against my partner, performing as many grinds, grabs, and flip tricks as possible while trying to avoid death. While this mechanic has been done before in more games than I can count, the fact that this instance is just one of dozens really shows the potential of fun things to do in Split Fiction.
That’s not to say they were all hits, though. One section had us playing a hybrid of a platformer and pinball where I was controlling the ball and my partner was controlling the pinball paddles. This required some precise timing on both of our ends, and it was a creative way to introduce a slower puzzle mechanic to a game that has a surprising amount of action in it. While I found myself getting a bit frustrated whenever I messed up a badly timed jump, the satisfaction I felt once my partner and I finished any of the campaign’s collaborative tasks really elevated the experience.
And just to be clear: Split Fiction is 100% a collaborative experience that keeps you on your toes throughout; single-player is not an option. But unlike most co-op games where both players need to fight a screen full of enemies or break a bunch of blocks in order to progress to the next level, Split Fiction requires a heavy amount of teamwork and critical thinking from both players in its heavy action as well as its mellower puzzle sections. Throughout my demo time, I found myself communicating more with my partner and working together to try to figure out the puzzles and bosses because, refreshingly, Split Fiction does not hold your hand whatsoever. Thats not to say this is suddenly a soulslike in terms of difficulty, but there wasn’t a moment where the UI pointed us in the right direction or gave us a hint on what to do. Which is kind of the point of Split Fiction and co-op games as a whole, and definitely made my demo a really fun and rewarding experience.
In a time where every game can either be played solo or is completely full of NPCs or people online who don’t really want to interact outside of a few words here and there, Split Fiction really looks to raise the bar in what a co-op experience can be. I appreciated everything from its interesting use of multiple gameplay styles spanning across many genres, to its cleverly written dialogue and beautiful-looking worlds, plus the fact that it requires you to actively play with someone else and think outside of the box to solve its puzzles. And in a year packed with dozens of promising releases, Split Fiction is definitely looking to set itself apart from the pack in a way that few games can.
Gosh, haven’t done one of these in a while, have we? Or possibly one of these. Or these?! The silly amount of tags for this semi-regular format are surely proof of its enduring appeal, so we’re back in Hivemind form to talk about Obsidian’s latest RPG Avowed. We’ve all played it, and we all have mildly different opinions on it – the stuff that thrilling conversations are made of. Onward!
Nic: James did you work out how to freeze things yet?
James: I’ll explain this quickly so Nic can get on to complaining about Avowed having the wrong kinds of boxes. But yes, I did get stuck on an early main quest that required me to use ice magic to create frozen platforms for crossing water, an otherwise neat little systems thingy that had not been communicated or hinted at before that point, but was communicated and hinted at during the following main quest.
Otherwise, I’m having an okayish time? It doesn’t have the Skyrim-tier expansiveness I always hope for with these kinds of games, but its world is a pretty one, and it’s got some quality close-quarters mageing.
Nic: Look. I feel passionately about those crates. There are two types of crates. You can only smash the crates that have the special ‘smash me’ icon on them. I don’t want a crate to “come hither” me. Takes all the fun out of the petty vandalism.
If you have a soft spot for retro-style games, you might already be keeping an eye on Takaya Imamura’s upcoming adventure game OMEGA 6: The Triangle Stars. That game is based on a manga series created by the former Nintendo art director, and now Dark Horse is bringing that manga to the US for the first time.
Check out the cover art to OMEGA 6 below:
OMEGA 6 is written and illustrated by Imamura, with an English translation by Zack Davisson (H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space). Here’s Dark Horse’s official description of the book:
After awakening from a rejuvenating months-long stasis, androids Thunder and Kyla are ready to spring back into bounty-hunting action! With the aid of some peculiar magic fruits, the pair enter a nearly invincible berserker state. However, there’s a catch—once the effect wears off, they will age rapidly and become feeble until they can return to their recovery pods. Their current target, an assassin named Petrogaze, carries an appealing $300 million credit bounty on his head. The job seems easy: the duo plans to power up, bag the bad guy, and be home before dinner. But Petrogaze is much tougher than anticipated! Forced to consume their fruits early, the bounty hunters are suddenly on a life-or-death timer. Dinner’s gonna have to wait!
“I sincerely hope that my manga and games can be enjoyed by people regardless of where they live, and it would make me very happy if my work delivers an exciting and thrilling experience!” said Imamura in a statement.
“The videogame version is a totally different story,” adds Junji Seki, OMEGA 6: The Triangle Stars Director and President of Happymeal. “Set in the same world as the OMEGA 6 comic, full of drama-infused encounters and battles with the 100 plus unique aliens created by Imamura-san. I hope you enjoy the adventures of Thunder and Kyla in the game as well as the comic; you may even discover characters making an appearance in both!”
The OMEGA 6 manga will be released in October 2025, while the game hits the PC and Nintendo Switch on February 28.
HBO is still working on several more Game of Thrones spin-offs including one “very promising” show focused on the Targaryen line, though nothing has been greenlit as of yet.
Francesca Orsi, head of drama series and films at HBO, suggested to Deadline that, despite both current Game of Thrones spin-offs — House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — focusing on Daenerys Targaryen’s ancestors, the next furthest along show is too.
“We have other spin-offs that we’re working on right now, one of which — which I won’t get into — is very promising, and is still the Targaryen line,” Orsi said. “There’s a number of other spin-offs. We can’t really guarantee what’s going to go forward, but we are very big budget on the other ones.”
HBO isn’t just looking to expand Game of Thrones with further television series but also in the full scale movie space, as HBO and Max CEO Casey Bloys said in November it’s working to get a film off the ground with George R.R. Martin.
A series isn’t fully official until its greenlit, however, as HBO has so far developed myriad shows that never saw the light of day.
The latest Japanese charts are in courtesy of Famitsu, and you’ll never guess who’s snuck back into first after grabbing another star this week…
We thought its reign was over, but Super Mario Party Jamboree has knocked DK off the top spot this week with an additional 17,355 sales to its name. Donkey Kong Country Returns HD hangs around in second, and other familiar Nintendo faces pad out the rest of the top 10.
Anime action game Stellar Blade has been confirmed for PC release in June 2025. Developed by South Korean studio Shift Up and published by Sony, it’s about fighting monsters on post-apocalyptic Earth by means of combos, parries and gauge-based super moves. It’s got an open world full of NPC quest-givers and creatures designed by Hee-Cheol Jang, the mad scientist behind the menageries of Okja and The Host. It’s also got a protagonist we can summarise as Bayonetta played straight.
With Atomfallcoming to Xbox and Game Pass in just over a month (arriving on March 27), today we released the latest trailer for the game. Featuring brand new gameplay, the trailer highlights the main features that you will experience when you enter the quarantine zone.
I thought now would be a good time to give you more information on some of the game’s key features and what you can expect when you play Atomfall. For those who haven’t had chance to see the trailer yet, take a look:
The trailer starts at the very beginning of the game. You wake up in a dark and eerie bunker and are met by a wounded man in a hazmat suit who immediately asks who you are and asks for your help. The problem is you don’t know who you are, or how you got there.
He tells you that you are inside a quarantine zone, built around the Windscale Atom plant following a nuclear disaster.
Set in the luscious British countryside in 1962, Atomfall is a fictionalised telling of what happened five years after true events in Northern England. It is a game about investigation and discovery – as you try to uncover the mystery behind what really happened at Windscale, but also who you are and what you’re doing there.
There is plenty to explore beyond the rolling hills of Cumberland, including a picturesque village, bandit camps, caves, tunnels, and mysterious buildings and facilities left abandoned by the British Atomic Research Division. All of these will hold their own secrets for you to discover.
You will find clues about what has happened and learn more about the colourful characters you meet along the way – but there is no clear single “truth”, and different people interpret what happened in different ways. This feeds into the game’s ‘Leads’ system, our new take on traditional gaming quests.
Some information that you uncover will open a Lead in the game. You can choose to track this down to uncover further secrets and hopefully get closer to some form of the truth. All the Leads in the game are completely optional, and all connect in one way or another to the larger mystery. As a result, the path you take through the game and the storyline is entirely up to you.
Another source of Leads is the cast of characters you will meet along the way. One of the first you may meet is Nat Buckshaw, who you find playing his guitar in the ruins of an old house. He is an extremely talkative chap and more than happy to give away everything he knows just to have someone to talk to.
However, with Nat and indeed everyone you meet along the way, you can never be sure who to trust and whether they are trying to use you for their own means.
Some characters also act as Traders, for example Molly the Tinker, who can be found in the Dale. In fact, one of the Leads that Nat provides, helps you to find Molly. Resources are scarce in Atomfall, and money is useless, so all trade is done by barter – striking a good deal with a trader can be vitally important. Each of them will prize different sorts of assets. One may want food and bandages, while another needs weapons. Careful observation and making a balanced trade will enable you to get the resources you need to survive.
One valuable tool you can trade for is the metal detector (you can either find one as you search the countryside or barter for one.) The metal detector is a vital asset as you scavenge for further resources. Atomfall is as much a game of survival as it is exploration – the resources, weapons and ammo you find will be vital if you are to find out what happened at the Windscale nuclear plant.
To aid you in the hunt for resources, you’ll be able to find metal detectors. Once you have one, you will hear it beep as you come within range of something to find. You then need to equip it and use it to find your treasure – whether that be some scrap metal, medical supplies or ammunition.
And you’ll need all the ammunition you can find – supplies are tight! Gangs of bandits litter the countryside, and they will think nothing of attacking on sight. Whether you choose to engage or run for cover is your choice but there are likely to be times when you will have no choice but to fight.
Raising a gun to someone who is only armed with a melee weapon may well be enough for them to be the one who retreats. Whether your gun is loaded or not, only you will know…
No matter what, you will need to be ready to adjust your strategy on the fly, using all the tools at your disposal to make it out alive. Melee combat, both armed and unarmed, will be vital. Sometimes, aiming a swift kick at an opponent in order to stagger them back is all the time you have to reload, and can be a life saver.
You are going to have to find ways to adapt and make do with what you have as you track down leads in the search of the truth… or at least one version of it.
We have only scratched the surface of the challenges, mystery and intrigue you discover in the quarantine zone. We cannot wait for you to get your hands on Atomfallwhen it launches on Game Pass as well as on Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC on March 27.
A survival-action game inspired by real-life events, Atomfall is set five years after the Windscale nuclear disaster in Northern England.
Explore the fictional quarantine zone, scavenge, craft, barter, fight and talk your way through a British countryside setting filled with bizarre characters, mysticism, cults, and rogue government agencies.
From Rebellion, the studio behind Sniper Elite and Zombie Army, Atomfall will challenge you to solve the dark mystery of what really happened.
Player Driven Mystery: Unravel a tapestry of interwoven narratives through exploration, conversation, investigation, and combat, where every choice you make has consequences.
Search, Scavage, Survive: You’ll need to scavenge for supplies, craft weapons and items, and fight desperately to make it out alive!
Desperate Combat: With weapons and ammunition scarce, each frenetic engagement will see you blend marksmanship with vicious hand-to-hand combat. Manage your heart rate to hold a steady aim and ensure you have the energy you need to reach for your cricket bat and land the killer blow.
Green and Unpleasant Land: The picturesque British countryside, with rolling green hills, lush valleys, and rural villages belie the dangers that await you. Navigate cult-controlled ruins, natural caves, nuclear bunkers and more as you explore this dense, foreboding world.
Reimagining Windscale: A fictional reimagining of a real-world event, Atomfall draws from science fiction, folk horror, and Cold War influences to create a world that is eerily familiar yet completely alien.
It’s a great pleasure to see you with our first post of 2025. From all of us at Team Asobi, we wish you a wonderful year ahead.
Last year saw the release of Astro Bot, our biggest game to date. As well as picking several game awards, we have been blessed with countless comments and lovely words from you, the players.
This has made the hard work of everyone at Team Asobi even more worth it. So from the bottom of our lil’ robotic hearts, hearts, a huge thank you to you all.
And now, into the main news! To start the year on a good note, we are delighted to announce new Astro Bot content is coming starting today. You might have noticed that a, yet unreleased, level of Astro Bot was featured at the PlayStation XP Tournament Final in London, England on January 18. That very level, along with 4 additional ones will be coming your way inside the brand-new Vicious Void Galaxy, starting today.
As before, this new update is completely free of charge and a gift from us to you, the Astro Bot community.
These five levels will appear on a weekly basis as follows:
Feb 13:Tick-Tock Shock
Feb 20: Thrust or Bust
Feb 27: Cock-A-Doodle-Doom
Mar 6: Hard to Bear
Mar 13: Armored Hardcore
Note: All Astro Bot updates from February 13 to March 13 will be available every Thursday at 6:00am PT, 2:00pm GMT, and 10:00pm JST.
Unlike our last update Winter Wonder, which was a walk through the Xmas park, this new update features harder levels to test your jumping skills. Each level comes with a brand-new Special Bot to rescue and, once that’s done, can be replayed in Time Attack mode with online rankings. To access these, you will need to have completed the main game. So sharpen those skills again and let’s get rescuing.
“Tick Tock Shock”, the first of 5 new levels will release on February 13
But hold on, we still have more news. Alongside these five new levels, we are pleased to say that owners of the PS5 Pro will be able to enjoy an improved version of Astro Bot featuring a constant best resolution while still running at 60 frames per second.
That’s about all for this update. We hope you enjoy it. We want to take this chance to thank you, sincerely, for the ongoing support. We could not be happier with the way Astro was welcomed into so many new homes. Your comments, positivity and kind words have carried us through the months and continue to warm our little robotic hearts. Thank you for your loyalty and we shall see you around.
Let’s get the comparisons out of the way first; Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds feels closer to the Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed era of games as opposed to the more recent Team Sonic Racing, but has taken advantage of the enhancements that Team Sonic Racing brought to the table. While I’ve enjoyed both formats, the three-character mechanic of building a team to work together to coordinate racing and drift lines is gone. Instead, CrossWorlds goes back to Mario Kart’s everyone-for-themselves format. Like Mario Kart, it shares some similarities, from the items on the courses to the various shortcuts and cart customization. However, while it shares some DNA, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds evolves beyond what we’ve gotten from its now 11-year-old competitor. Now, one area that CrossWorlds may come up short in compared to Team Sonic Racing is so far, there is no sign of an adventure mode, but this was an early look, so that might be one of the many reveals that the team is saving for later.
While many elements mimic its competitors, the green and red rocket-powered gloves bounce off walls or home in on opponents, being the most one-to-one example to the shells in Mario Kart and the customizable car parts and wheels like we got in MK8. There is still enough here to help CrossWorlds stand apart from the crowd, though. Plenty of the elements core to Sonic games, such as the various wisp powerups like drill and tornado ability, knock other racers away and defend you from incoming attacks. There were also magnets you could throw out as hazards, which pull enemies towards them if they get too close, and their ultimate rubber band item to help those in lower positions catch up, the Monster Truck, which turns your car into a massive monster truck that knocks enemies away and allows you to drive over all terrains without penalty.
Beyond the items Sonic Racing CrossWorlds is all about – well, crossing worlds, with each race separated into the traditional three laps. Still, each lap feels different, thanks to the marquee CrossWorlds mechanic. At the end of the first lap, whoever is leading the pack will determine which course the second lap will take by driving through one of two giant travel rings that transport everyone seamlessly once they arrive at that point. The options for these are randomized, and sometimes, one of the options itself is a randomizer, so not even the leader will know what to expect if they choose it.
During my demo time, my second lap took me across stages themed with things like dinosaurs, pirates, or lava, where we spent most of the lap in a plane, another mechanic that I will get to later. There are also modifiers for the second stage, called frenzy, that will alter the lap, such as placing moving boost gates along the entire lap or granting a maximum boost gauge after drifting for only a split second and making the whole lap feel like I was back in the days of the snaking that plagued and ruined Mario Kart DS. Thankfully, frenzy modifiers are random, and across my 15 or so races, the instant boost frenzy only happened once – so I’m not worried at all about it becoming an issue in CrossWorlds.
After finishing the second lap, another transport ring seamlessly sends players back to the original course, but with some minor but effective changes to the course layout in key areas. Courses like Metal Harbor evolve, where you have to drive around the outside of a rocket launchpad on lap one, but on lap three, the rocket has launched as it did in Sonic Adventure 2, replacing it with a steep Half-pipe ramp that allows players to perform as many air tricks as possible to gain a considerable speed boost when landing on the opposite side. And that’s just one example! In another course with water segments, I saw gates open, allowing access to shortcuts or supercharged item boxes with a higher chance of granting better items. CrossWorlds is also hiding shortcuts around the map as well as shortcut rings that activate on the final lap tha would temporarily send me to another world. These secret rings are powerful shortcuts as they extended my lead in races or helped me catch up and made it more challenging for other racers to target me with their items. I don’t know what forces were causing these rings to appear as I raced, but they were worth the effort of being ready to take them.
Courses like Metal Harbor evolve, where you have to drive around the outside of a rocket launchpad on lap one, but on lap three, the rocket has launched as it did in Sonic Adventure 2.
Like the Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed games, portions of laps, or sometimes entire laps, place you in a plane or boat instead of a car. All of these vehicles have a unique identity, and while they share similarities, they have mechanics to help them stand out from one another. In addition to the standard drift mechanic you get in a car when transformed into a boat, you have a charge mechanic that jumps it out of the water, giving another opportunity to perform air tricks for speed boosts, which can help you regain some speed after hitting a hazard or being tagged by an enemy’s attack. While planes offer more routes than the other vehicles, they do so only if you spot the alternate paths, like a chain of boost gates underneath the road on Magma Planet where you need to dodge waves of magma to maximize the planes advantage. The variety of vehicles and paths gave me nostalgic notes of figuring out the best routes based on the vehicle I was in like I did in Diddy Kong Racing from my Nintendo 64 days but with all the updates to the formula you would hope for in a game released nearly two decades later.
While I was playing, I spotted some incredible inclusions spanning multiple generations that longtime fans of Sonic will be excited about. The roster of characters shown so far ranged from the expected heroes and regular all-stars Sonic, Tails, & Knuckles to less frequently playable characters like Cream, Omega, and even Zazz from Lost World. The rider you put behind the wheel also has unique stats that will affect how they drive each car, and even rivals like Sonic and Shadow have similar yet different stats, such as one having more speed while the other having more power or boost. Vehicles fall into five classes: speed, acceleration, handling, power, and boost, all of which have high stats in the matching category with the looks to match it, and I could quickly feel the change in my car as I swapped between them.
When racing in my power vehicle, which I had customized to look like a bulldozer, I felt thematically appropriate as I bullied other racers all while stealing their rings and giving myself a speed boost thanks to some gadgets I had installed, which I will also get to in a bit. Characters and types of cars have the most significant impact on your vehicle’s stats, which you can then modify by changing individual car parts like the wheels, and more. I picked my favorite Shadow and raced in four of the five vehicle types, all of which worked well enough to where I finished in first place for 75% of my races and top five in all of the rest except for one (where a well-timed item hit me and caused me to miss a ramp and fall off the map in the final stretch of a race). Along with changing out parts for stats, you can also deck out your car with decals and change the colors and materials to your heart’s content. Combining your character with car customization allows you to make your vehicle your own.
The last bit of customization comes from another mechanic called the gadget panel. It’s a powerful tool for changing how people race, granting abilities like an increased chance of getting certain items, adding a fourth level to the drift boost gauge, or granting you rings for performing specific actions. Every ability costs anywhere from one to three slots, and your panel to install them consists of two rows of three for a maximum of six slots. I started with only two slots, but after a few hours of racing, I increased this to five, giving me more options to slot in new abilities that changed how I approached races. Early on, I had opted for an ability that allowed me to grab rings from a greater range, which took up a single slot, but later on, I swapped to a pair of two-slot abilities that would give me a boost when colliding with others racers while also stealing 10 rings from them to help me reach my top speed sooner and also slowing my competition. Fortunately for my competitors and unfortunately for me, they caught on to my antics thanks to the ability to see other racers’ builds before a race, and shortly after implementing that strategy, nearly everyone else copied it, plunging our races into chaos like a 12-player game of bumper cars. Needless to say, this was a ton of fun as we all kept trying to ram into each other to get out in front of the pack.
Even though it was just a short test drive with my favorite hedgehogs and friends, I am eager to see what else hasn’t yet been revealed. The racing felt snappy and responsive, and each car customization operated as I expected. I felt like a superstar hitting enemies with the well-timed items I unleashed, and the new CrossWorlds mechanic was a blast, allowing me to learn courses while keeping each race feeling fresh, as I never knew what to expect on the second lap of every race. There’s a lot more left to learn about Sonic’s latest racer, but so far, so good.
Gosh, haven’t done one 
