After 5 years in development, a long-awaited Sonic fan game has finally launched under the title Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers, and it might just be the wildest kart racer I’ve ever played.
Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers, which you can download here, effectively looks like a souped-up Super Mario Kart, with sprite-based racers driving through 3D environments. But this thing goes far beyond anything that the SNES was capable of, with massive, sprawling tracks in varied environments. The very silly promo trailer below promises “200 crazy courses with over 20 unique items,” and I’m not about to doubt it.
It’s also dense with mechanics. There’s a drift system, plus a ring currency that you have to track in order to execute certain moves with your car. There’s an e-brake that can lock your car in place, a spin dash you can use to boost from a standing position, trick pads that let you choose different types of boosts to activate, an item roulette that you can hit to get whatever power-up you want, and a whole lot more.
That all leads to the biggest roadblock to enjoying Ring Racers: its 45-minute tutorial. It’s a lot to learn all at once, and it’s not helped by the novel’s worth of dialogue you’ve got to read in order to get through it all. The dialogue is charming, sure, but kart racers tend to be a pretty pick-up-and-play genre that you don’t expect a lengthy preamble for. It’s a bad first impression, and one that early players are roasting pretty mercilessly.
me obtaining my doctorate in driving video games after finally clearing the 45 minute tutorial of Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers https://t.co/aQMLuginzo pic.twitter.com/012V1am35UApril 25, 2024
“Why yes, I did finish the 45 minute Tutorial in Dr. Robotnik’s Ring Racers and only died 37 times why do you ask?” pic.twitter.com/gscXMAbbXQApril 25, 2024
robotnik ring racers tutorial pic.twitter.com/aKQy1tUHqEApril 25, 2024
That being said, the responses to the game itself seem pretty positive, and I didn’t feel like I needed a PhD to enjoy the one race I was able to play before my editors started urging me to get back to work. And it’s got the most important feature for any kart racer, too: multiplayer, including both 4-player splitscreen and 16-player online options.
Ring Racers builds on a lengthy Sonic fan game legacy going back to Sonic Robo Blast 2, a 3D, sprite-based platformer based on a source port of the Doom engine which was first released way back in 1999. That eventually spun off into a kart racer called SRB2Kart, and Ring Racers is a sequel to that game.
As the devs explain in the release announcement, “Thousands of hours of work – from the core development team, our dedicated tester team, the SRB2 development team, community contributors, independent musicians, and our volunteer moderators across the various community hubs – have culminated in this artifact of passion and dedication.”
If you’re used to news of Nintendo lawyers, you might already be counting down to an inevitable DMCA from Sega. But historically, Sega has been quite friendly to Sonic fan games. Perhaps the best example is the excellent Sonic Mania, whose lead developer Christian Whitehead came to prominence developing unofficial Sonic projects. Here’s hoping the company is similarly tolerant of Ring Racers, because it deserves to hang onto its audience.
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