If Mario Kart is the Mario of kart racers, this is the Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze if kart racers, for all of the impressive good and odd quirks that might entail. Which is weird to say it's not the Sonic of kart racers, but we already have Riders for that, and Riders is off doing Riders things.
If there is something that All-Stars Racing Transformed is utterly unparalleled in, it's spectacle. The race courses that the game chooses to bring out don't just spread across Sega's history, but prove to be ever-evolving set pieces rather than simple circuits. Tracks very often crumble to pieces by their third lap, some invading force like the eruption of Death Adder's volcano, or the assault of the Death Egg crumbling away Sky Sanctuary, or a massive zombie dance party within the House of the Dead will cause the entire stage to morph, with first-place's reward being able to see exactly how everything changes and falls to pieces for leading the pack. It makes every single track exhilerating, as you wonder just how it's going to change, what laps will be the same and which ones will morph, what kind of set pieces will be thrown at you next. In terms of a first impression, All-Stars Racing Transformed is the top of its class; if you wanna play a racer for just two hours blind, this is absolutely brilliant.
But then ASRT decides to marry pretty fabulous track design with an engine that takes the greatest advantage of it. ASRT is patterned far closer to a game like OutRun than Mario Kart in terms of vehicle handling, and it makes every single turn feel silky smooth, figuring out just how much you wanna throttle or let off the gas and break respectively. The fact that it has essentially a revert for drifting to make s-turns a combo opportunity is absolute icing on the cake - driving is an absolute joy and is allowed to be endlessly more complex than the game's predecessor. This then leans into the game's main gimmick - your vehicle transforming mid-race into planes and boats - and these are handled pretty darn well too! The layouts of each course allow for a sort of freeform shortcut-making, where you need to decide how stringently you're gonna follow the suggested route that has turbo boosts and how much you're gonna try to cut corners to save time. The transitions between these sections are all absolutely seamless, and figuring out where to save items, what turns are the most dangerous, where your specific character can save the most time - THAT is when ASRT is at its absolute best.
Unfortunately, there are a few issues that hold it back. While ASRT's ambitions are incredibly lofty and the actual racing mechanics fairly solid, it doesn't quite adapt to the physics of these tracks particularly well. Any sort of diagonal surface is liable to cause a car to veer out of control, most notable in water sections where ramps can cause vehicles to launch real high into the air or stall out entirely. As the game is built on momentum, any time that it comes to a hault, it SCREECHES to a stop. But hey, that's no problem, this is a kart racer, crazy comebacks are a part of the whole shebang... except no, the item system is exceptionally poor. A vast majority of items are single-target, with the game essentially having two Green Shell variants (three if you count a forward-thrown blowfish), a red shell, a purely defensive item and two self-boosting items. As all of these only interact with either yourself or a single other racer (usually whoever's right in front of you), the middle of the pack is even more of a nightmare here than in other kart racers, where wild swings in position simply aren't possible and whoever's frontrunning is probably gonna have an easy time of things. There are two excpetions - the hornet swarm, which creates a skill check for the front of the pack to deal with in the form of walls of bees with a few gaps to race through, which can either turn things around or do absolutely nothing depending on player skill, and the all-star item, a Starman equivalent with some extra bonuses per character. The All-Star is basically the only comeback mechanic, usually only dropping once per player per race (if at all), so knowing exactly when to use it is paramount in a way similar to Mario Kart's Bullet Bill... but the lack of guarantee of its drop, dealing with everyone else's all-stars in the meantime, and need to still jockey into a good enough position to use it without the ability to use other items to hope for first makes it rather a struggle. Compounded with single-player AI that absolutely loves targeting you, specifically, and any issues with courses essentially leaving you in a position of "get All-Star or suffer", and it can make for real hopeless situations in instants, far more often than contemporaries like Crash, Mario, Diddy Kong, or even the game's own prequel might put you in.
Ultimately All-Stars Racing Transformed is a Sega love letter, through and through. It has incredible ambitions, and when it reaches those heights, it is an absolutely irreplaceable experience. Seriously, Burning Depths might just be the best kart racing course I have ever experienced, it is such an exhilarating rush with beautifully turns, and I'm uncultured and don't even know what a Burning Rangers is! But it does crumble under its own ambitions at times, with moments where the game stops working, odd gaps (why did you take Billy Hatcher out but still have a Billy Hatcher course that was a lot of new assets for the water section... which also is probably the glitchest part of the game?), and the crime of not having a race track for my beloved Space Channel 5. It is the best at what it does and sometimes pretty bad at what it's going for, and if it decided to stop being a kart racer and instead be purely focused on its racing elements, as the boost race sub-games imply, it might've just been the best mascot racer out there. As-is, it simply has to settle for being better than almost all Mario Karts and having some unforgettable moments more than worth showing off. What a terrible fate.
If there is something that All-Stars Racing Transformed is utterly unparalleled in, it's spectacle. The race courses that the game chooses to bring out don't just spread across Sega's history, but prove to be ever-evolving set pieces rather than simple circuits. Tracks very often crumble to pieces by their third lap, some invading force like the eruption of Death Adder's volcano, or the assault of the Death Egg crumbling away Sky Sanctuary, or a massive zombie dance party within the House of the Dead will cause the entire stage to morph, with first-place's reward being able to see exactly how everything changes and falls to pieces for leading the pack. It makes every single track exhilerating, as you wonder just how it's going to change, what laps will be the same and which ones will morph, what kind of set pieces will be thrown at you next. In terms of a first impression, All-Stars Racing Transformed is the top of its class; if you wanna play a racer for just two hours blind, this is absolutely brilliant.
But then ASRT decides to marry pretty fabulous track design with an engine that takes the greatest advantage of it. ASRT is patterned far closer to a game like OutRun than Mario Kart in terms of vehicle handling, and it makes every single turn feel silky smooth, figuring out just how much you wanna throttle or let off the gas and break respectively. The fact that it has essentially a revert for drifting to make s-turns a combo opportunity is absolute icing on the cake - driving is an absolute joy and is allowed to be endlessly more complex than the game's predecessor. This then leans into the game's main gimmick - your vehicle transforming mid-race into planes and boats - and these are handled pretty darn well too! The layouts of each course allow for a sort of freeform shortcut-making, where you need to decide how stringently you're gonna follow the suggested route that has turbo boosts and how much you're gonna try to cut corners to save time. The transitions between these sections are all absolutely seamless, and figuring out where to save items, what turns are the most dangerous, where your specific character can save the most time - THAT is when ASRT is at its absolute best.
Unfortunately, there are a few issues that hold it back. While ASRT's ambitions are incredibly lofty and the actual racing mechanics fairly solid, it doesn't quite adapt to the physics of these tracks particularly well. Any sort of diagonal surface is liable to cause a car to veer out of control, most notable in water sections where ramps can cause vehicles to launch real high into the air or stall out entirely. As the game is built on momentum, any time that it comes to a hault, it SCREECHES to a stop. But hey, that's no problem, this is a kart racer, crazy comebacks are a part of the whole shebang... except no, the item system is exceptionally poor. A vast majority of items are single-target, with the game essentially having two Green Shell variants (three if you count a forward-thrown blowfish), a red shell, a purely defensive item and two self-boosting items. As all of these only interact with either yourself or a single other racer (usually whoever's right in front of you), the middle of the pack is even more of a nightmare here than in other kart racers, where wild swings in position simply aren't possible and whoever's frontrunning is probably gonna have an easy time of things. There are two excpetions - the hornet swarm, which creates a skill check for the front of the pack to deal with in the form of walls of bees with a few gaps to race through, which can either turn things around or do absolutely nothing depending on player skill, and the all-star item, a Starman equivalent with some extra bonuses per character. The All-Star is basically the only comeback mechanic, usually only dropping once per player per race (if at all), so knowing exactly when to use it is paramount in a way similar to Mario Kart's Bullet Bill... but the lack of guarantee of its drop, dealing with everyone else's all-stars in the meantime, and need to still jockey into a good enough position to use it without the ability to use other items to hope for first makes it rather a struggle. Compounded with single-player AI that absolutely loves targeting you, specifically, and any issues with courses essentially leaving you in a position of "get All-Star or suffer", and it can make for real hopeless situations in instants, far more often than contemporaries like Crash, Mario, Diddy Kong, or even the game's own prequel might put you in.
Ultimately All-Stars Racing Transformed is a Sega love letter, through and through. It has incredible ambitions, and when it reaches those heights, it is an absolutely irreplaceable experience. Seriously, Burning Depths might just be the best kart racing course I have ever experienced, it is such an exhilarating rush with beautifully turns, and I'm uncultured and don't even know what a Burning Rangers is! But it does crumble under its own ambitions at times, with moments where the game stops working, odd gaps (why did you take Billy Hatcher out but still have a Billy Hatcher course that was a lot of new assets for the water section... which also is probably the glitchest part of the game?), and the crime of not having a race track for my beloved Space Channel 5. It is the best at what it does and sometimes pretty bad at what it's going for, and if it decided to stop being a kart racer and instead be purely focused on its racing elements, as the boost race sub-games imply, it might've just been the best mascot racer out there. As-is, it simply has to settle for being better than almost all Mario Karts and having some unforgettable moments more than worth showing off. What a terrible fate.