Sonic Free Riders, a game that screams urgency as if it's propelling you straight to the ER! The constant barrage of "Ready?" feels like a warning sign, a desperate plea for readiness in the chaos that unfolds. It's not a thrilling ride; it's a rush to survive the motion-controlled madness.

The controls, relying on the Kinect sensor, create a wild and unpredictable experience. Maneuvering Sonic and the gang feels like trying to control a stand in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - a feat not for the faint of heart. The relentless "Ready?" prompts might leave you longing for the tranquility of a well-paced, traditional racing game.

Score: 3/10

I played this at a friend's house a long time ago and even then i thought it was really dreadful. I legitimately don't think it's possible to make a good Kinect game that wasn't basically a glorified Eyetoy game. The Wiimote gave us Resident Evil 4 Wii, Sin and Punishment II, Mad World, Red Steel 2 and No More Heroes. PS Move i suppose at least had PlayStation Home and a few lightgun games. Kinect gave us the worst Sonic Riders and Steel Battalion games possible and singlehandedly killed both franchises.

Also, even with the No-Kinect patch it's very mid, if anything it honestly kills the novelty and just feels like a worse Zero Gravity sequel.

I’ll be fully honest in saying that I didn’t fully complete this game. I played the overly long tutorial, a fair amount of missions and went though the different modes and tracks.

Sonic Free Riders is the third in the Sonic Riders hoverboard racing series of games. The mechanics of this are somewhere in between the two games. Crouching for a jump and timing your jump now gets you air again, which can be used for boosting. Quarter pipes on turns can also be used for a quick boost of speed, encouraging you to do tricks instead of just turning.

Collecting rings will upgrade your gear, giving you access to speed, fly and power shortcuts. Items also make their way to standard races, letting you attack other racers. The story mode features 43 missions, and will take a while to complete. The game itself actually seems to be pretty good, with some interesting track design and plenty to do and unlock. The main issue, however is the controller.

This game exclusively uses the Kinect, which is a very fancy webcam with depth perception and infrared sensors. You have to stand in a hoverboard pose and tilt left and right to turn and jump and spin to do tricks. It sounds simple, but it really does not work well at all. I could never get tilting backwards to reliably make my character turn, often resorting to repeatedly switch sides so I was always tilting forward. Combined with spinning while jumping, it’s a very exhausting few hours.

The game also repeatedly paused itself, I could never figure out not causing it – my only guess was Kinect not being able to detect me occasionally. It’s all round a frustrating experience, although me and my fiancée had a lot of fun laughing at the sheer absurdity of the controls and how bad they are.

It really is a shame, as I think this would have been a good game with a regular controller.

What would it feel like to be speed of light
And rule the night and day
Watch as it passes by, you're mad to try
But they just can't keep up
Into the free, into the me
Into the ever knowing
Felt so refrained, felt so constrained
But now i'm breaking out and
I'm falling free in the wind, in the wind
Free to be me in the wind, in the wind

Beg, borrow, steal, you make a deal
And with no hesitation
Crawl, walk, or run, you've had your fun
Of which is very certain
Into the free, into the me
Into the ever knowing
Felt so constrained, felt so to blame
But now i'm breaking out and
I'm falling into the free, to the free
Free to be me, I am free, I am free

Ok, listen, this game is great. While I have never been a fan of the Sonic riders franchise, I still can appreciate how fun some of the levels are.
This game is great in all sorts of stuff. It looks great, it sounds great, the level design is great, the boss fights are great, EVERYTHING IS GREAT.
There’s just a teensy weensy problem: You can’t play the fucking game.
It is impossible to make Sonic MOVE a single centimeter. You cannot turn, you cannot jump, you can’t do shit.
And I don’t know if you know this, but in order to play the game, you have to actually y’know, control the character.
It’s physically impossible to do anything in this game and for that reason, this is the worst video game of all time.
And it’s a real shame.

The No Kinect Patch turns this game from a dogshit mess with probably one of the worst control schemes ever made, into an actually decent racing experience. It's crazy the world of difference being able to play on controller instead of shitass Kinect makes. With that said, this is still the worst Sonic Riders game even with an added patch. The courses are basically glorified Kinect gimmicks and they'd honestly feel completely lifeless if you removed all the gimmicks. Not to mention the story is still boring. There's no memorable cutscenes or cinematics and it plays out entirely like a low-budget VN. That being said, I did have fun. Going back to get S Ranks on every mission in order to unlock Super Sonic was a pretty fun challenge especially with the game's somewhat unique Trick and Air systems.

I'm keeping this at a 1 star because I don't think a mod should have any bearing on what the base game should've been. Especially if that mod is the thing making it actually playable. With the mod, this goes up to a solid 3.5 star experience.

yeah this game is completely decent now thanks to the no kinect patch

just like with zero gravity, you can kinda tell that things have been simplified here and there to account for the control scheme and it kinda sucks that this even seemingly seeps into the story design, where now instead of actual races, 70% of the story is you doing missions like do so and so many air tricks, punch a bunch of rocks or something of the sort, after which the game asks as if you just beat people in a game regardless? then you have the actual races, which are fun but are all only a single lap long except the final race of each team's story and the ones you do in the final story.

despite all this, i had a good amount of fun and even though the story this time around was disappointingly nothing compared to both of the previous riders games, it lent itself to some fun character moments. i particularly enjoyed vector bantering with amy and cream in that regard. that aside, some of the race tracks were really fun, regardless of what i was asked to do on them for the story. i particularly loved metropolis speedway, that was super fun.

also, i'm 99% certain that the "i can't hear you, i can't see you" in the metropolis speedway music is the exact same vocal sample that was later used in the xenoblade x nla day theme. this is all i could think of whenever i was racing on that track

Some games are just flatout bad by design, but then you have those games hampered by factors other than the core design. Sonic Free Riders is one of those games, in particular a good game locked behind an extremely poor control scheme. Take away the agony of the Kinect sensor then... and there's a real fun game lying underneath. Perhaps not as fastpaced and mechanically deep as the first Riders game, but trades blows with Zero Gravity for 2nd place. There's things I like more about each, but I'm pretty happy with saying that once you free Free Riders, it's a pretty enjoyable experience.

Oh also, playing the mod on real hardware still requires you to have the Kinect hooked up, so when the credits rolled I got a "And Thank You" type message with a picture of my chair and fan... lol. The real MVPs of my playthrough for sure.