Sonic Riders PC Review

sonic riders pcI am a big fan of Sega, I really like the Sonic series. It has its ups and downs and sometimes its major downs. Sonic Riders for the PC isn’t really much of a down. On the PC Sonic Riders isn’t very diffrent compared to its brothers on the console.

BUT THEY FIXED A BUG THAT WAS DRIVING ME NUTS! In the console version of Sonic Riders, if you went back to the menu after the race, progressed through the story line, viewed a replay, went to the “black market” it would save the game. The problem was that the game often forgot that it saved after the race and would save again. This would cause the game to save multiple times when it didn’t need to.

Anyway, Sonic Riders for the PC has some great controls, they are very simple and flow well. If you are going to play this game, it would be better to use a control pad then a stick (it will come in handy for those very tight turns you are normally required to make). All the levels are exactly the same as the console versions (despite the more detail in the graphics area).

But during their improvements Sega fell short on quite a few details. One the sound sucks. At certain points the music would stop and you could hear noise like the save noise, the menu sounds (not sure why this is). Drifting Controls and the Restore Air controls (when you lose control of your character just before the next lap line [if you have played the console version before you will know what I mean]) should have been fixed to support joysticks. When trying to map controls to my joystick I noticed that Sega accidentally typed in all caps…again. And oddly there is no option to shut up the stupid announcer (like there is in the console version) only, the option to make him (it’s actually an omochao [so it has no gender..somehow..]) quiet also kills all the character’s voices, sound effects, and menu noises.

On a good note, Sega finally rendered the cut scenes. Which before they looked like they looked like graphics from the beta version. That’s good. So to the ratings:

Sound: 3/10 -This is so unexceptible, the game sound and music don’t work well togther
Graphics: 7.5/10 -Better then the console versions
Controls: 9/10 -Fantastic!
Playback: 7.5/10 -Great! but it loses value over time
Improvement: 6/10 -Not much changed from the console versions

Overall Score: 7/10 – Sound was a big problem as well as new content (improvement).