Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers
Initial Experience
For
those of you who don't know, this is a sequel to another Sonic
fangame/mod, Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart. Even though it seemed like a solid
game, I never got into SRB2K because it just didn't seemed particularly
derivative of Mario Kart gameplay wise. As far as I can tell, the main
appeal of that game was its wide array of mods, but even that just never
happened to get me very interested. (Side note: There doesn't appear to be a much discussion online about what makes SRB2K good.)
But
then Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers released, and I heard it had a ton of
new mechanics, alongside a ton content, and some more fleshed out single
player offerings. Despite being interested, it still took me like 9
months to bother to play it much.
As
this game released, I heard 2 very loud complaints, people really
didn't like how a ton of core features were locked behind progression
requirements, and people thought the game was too hard. Thankfully I
went into the game knowing of these issues, and late enough to where the
devs addressed some of the difficulty, and cheat codes were posted
online so I didn't even have to bother legitimately unlocking most
things. But then I did cheat, and the amount of content was frankly
daunting, that's part of why I put this game off for a while.
Unlocks
Recently
I decided to delete my save data, so I could try unlocking things more
naturally. Having unlocks to work towards ended up vastly improving my
motivation to play. I didn't bother with all the unlocks though, I got
about 60-70% of the way to completion, then cheated to unlock the rest
with Keys. I would've been down to do more knowing what I know now, but I
was really confused by some of the types of unlocks. In particular,
there's a lot of stuff related to collecting medals in the time trials,
but I was under the impression for a while that they were related to
beating the dev times. The developer times got really tough to beat
though, so I only ended up besting 2 tracks:
Robotnik Coaster (the second one) took me like a week.
It very much seems like this game tried to capture the mystical sense of discovery that Super Smash Bros games have had (later in this post I hide characters, so you can discover them yourself spoiler free if you're into that sorta thing). Plenty of the unlocks are pretty menial, but it's like going on a treasure hunt, the journey and the destination can make each other a little more fun. Though with so many Challenges to unlock stuff through, it's a shame that so many of them involve doing the same things over and over across different tracks.
I also wanna shout out the Keys mechanic, since I find them to be such a reasonably generous rework to Gold Hammer system in Smash games. Instead of only obtaining like 5 in total through specific Challenges, you can get an indefinite number of Keys simply by playing races (or other gamemodes I guess). It took me a bit to realize though, the Keys kinda substitute the abundance of really easy Challenges in Smash. In Smash you can generally stumble your way into completing a ton of Challenges, which in turn will give you hints towards other more difficult Challenges, but in Ring Racers if you don't just start unlocking random Challenges with Keys, it takes a while to start picking up momentum, especially since so many Challenges require unlocks from other Challenges.
Tutorial
One
very disliked aspect of the game I've been glossing over is the
tutorial. I'm inclined to agree with most of the complaints over it, it
was annoyingly long, in part due to the chatty character writing (which I've heard jokingly described as a slow burn fanfiction),
and its overly challenging at times. I've heard some people say the
writing was actually perfect for the characters, which reminded me, I
don't even like most Sonic character writing in the first place, so
perhaps this game's writing didn't have much of a chance in my heart in
the first place (just like most Sonic fanfiction).
As for the
challenge, I think I get what the devs were going for, I imagine they
wanted to ensure players actually learned the mechanics, but it ends up
bloating the length of the tutorial, probably even moreso than the
dialogue, and it adds friction to what people expect to be (and generally expect should be) the
easiest part of the game.
I replayed it at one point, after having a
much better grasp on the game, and another issue I'd like to point out
is the weird prioritization of mechanics. In particular, the tutorial
spends a lot of time teaching players about Tricks, which are good to
know about, but often goes completely unused in stages, and are pretty
straightforward (and and probably could've just used a better visual prompt instead), but then it completely skips sliptides which I believe are pretty useful in most stages, and are incredibly unintuitive to try and figure out without a tutorial (tethering is also completely unexplained I believe). There is an Online Manual, although I don't think that really justifies stuff not being explained ingame.
Mechanics
Once you get a grasp on them, this game's mechanics are pretty cool. The Rings are basically a boost mechanic, the general resource management tied to them is interesting, but there's a couple of nuances that really elevate Rings into feeling unique. Thinking about it, most of the standout mechanics are various types of boosts; there's not just a singular boost mechanic that everything feeds into like in Crash Team Racing.
There's some other things interesting as well though, like Sliptides which allow you to situationally improve your turning, the Insta-Whip (which while I understand the reference, I'd argue is a misleading name considering you have to charge it) which grants players a way to attack without items, and Directional Influence (like that mechanic in Smash but reformatted for a racing game) which lets you angle the direction of your bouncing during hitstun.
Character Stuff
My last major issue with the game is the character stats. I hate character stats in pretty much every racing game (my
favorite implementation of them is Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled
which, after an update, allowed you to simply choose stats completely
independently from your character), but this game ties stats
directly to characters, with no extra options like karts or anything in
case you hate a character's stats. It also doesn't help that the
character select screen doesn't properly convey all the stats, so I was
left puzzled for a while on how the speed stat wasn't just a net
positive. The online manual
explain the stats better, but I think the extra info could've fit on
the character select itself, especially since Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart
apparently does just that.
Seriously,
why does the Ring Racers screen have so little information? It doesn't
even tell you character names (which would genuinely help with
completing challenges).
Tracks
The
tracks are really cool. There are so many varied twists and turns to
make each level feel distinct, they're designed with plenty of
opportunities to use the game's distinct mechanics, and on top of that
it was just really cool as a Sonic fan to see how a ton of levels were
adapted into tracks. I imagine the game probably would've felt too
gimmicky and derivative if every stage was like this, but City Escape is
a really cool, albeit example of how it can feel like you're just
playing on the original level. It's tough to pick out a favorite though,
since there are so many (153) of them.
Difficultly
Back
on the game's difficulty, I played every track on Relaxed, which for
the most part wasn't too bad. It was amusing just how particularly
obvious it was when CPU's sandbagged:
Sonic had a much higher Speed stat than me, I shouldn't have been able to shoot past him.
One issue with it though was the game speed. Certain areas just don't feel like they were designed with Gear 1 speed in mind:
The way respawning worked was weirdly hit or miss. Sometimes the game sends you crazy far forwards, and sometimes it just leaves you right in front of your point of failure multiple times:
One thing that feels rather obvious to recommend, is to play with people in locally. It feels a lot better going up against the game when people are there with you (especially if don't particularly care about beating each other and try to collude against the CPU's). Multiplayer made my experience a lot more fun.
Items
The
item balancing was a little strange, at least coming from other kart
racers, but I think it works well for the most part. Speed based items
are way stronger than offense based items, and there are very few
defensive items. The Speed items are particularly strong because there's
a gate mechanic with the primary purpose of blocking you off of
lucrative shortcuts unless you use a speed item (there are other methods of crossing them, although the start of race boost is the only commonly usable alternative I believe).
What I think is most interesting though is how the strongest items
aren't the easiest to use. The Garden Top and Fire Shield stand out to
me as having the greatest comeback potential, but if you don't have the
skill to use them effectively in the tracks, then you'd probably just be
better off with Invincibility. This doesn't make comebacks entirely
skillful though, it just means that they have a higher skill floor than
using a Bullet Bill in Mario Kart.
I ain't calling this particularly skillful.
One really nice touch on the items
also is how some of the strongest ones will forcibly run out if you pass
first place, so you can't just frontrun with the Top super duper hard.
That also leads into design choice which I find particularly fun, the
Top and Fire Shield don't naturally run out unless you're in first
place, so at least if you're loosing, you get to keep those items (unless you don't know how to use them properly, in which case you can immediately waste them).
At the end of the day though, the items you get are still random, so
sometimes you get the Top in second place, sometimes you get the really
weak Ball Hog in fifth place.
Battle Mode
By far the biggest hindrance in my ability to play this mode is that CPU's aren't available in it. That, plus the fact that I haven't seen anyone in a Battle Mode server, has led to me only being able to play this mode in a 1v1 setting so far. Unfortunately, it's not very well balanced for a 1v1 setting, in large part due to the UFO powerups which grant massive advantages to the player that claims them first. I imagine having some more settings would've salvaged the 1v1 gameplay (the absence of item settings, alongside the absence of CPU's, feels strange considering Race has them), since the mechanics seem pretty interesting.
I actually didn't find this menu until after I played, but just so you know the Random Item Toggles do not include UFO power-ups.
My least favorite part though was the UI. A lot of UI elements were just unclear in what they were conveying, in particular the Target markers, which indicate Chaos Emeralds, but from what I can tell they don't distinguish between Item Monitors and Players with Emeralds, and the markers dissapear when you get too close which made me think I wasn't actually reaching the things they were marking. The Chaos Emeralds themselves also add to the confusion, sometimes the go straight to your inventory, sometimes they drop out of broken Moniters and you have to go pick them up, but both take a second so every time I broke an Emerald out of a Monitor, I'd take a bit sitting there just to check and see where it went. The most egregious part of the UI though was just how cluttered it got on spitscreen. Sure, it has a lot to display, so clutter is to be expected, but why are so many things overlayed on top of each other on the right side?
The nearly completely covered match timer on the top screen leads me to believe this maybe wasn't playtested.
Online
I don't have a ton to say about it, but the bit if Online I have played so far was pretty good. I had some disconnects, but my setup ain't very good for internet connectivity anyways, so I'm not gonna fault the game for them. I applaud it for being a fangame in which the online simply works. You don't have to download or launch some extra application, or some nonsense like that (I can't stand joining a Discord to matchmake), you just simply click the Online mode like a normal retail video game, and there are plenty of publicly hosted servers to connect too. It's also nice that you can play Online with local splitscreen players.
Presentation
Perhals the most immediately appealing part of this game is how it looks. It captures the elusive Sega Saturn sort of magic in which everything looks super colorful, and the 3D models are charmingly low-poly, and cartoonish in their lack of fidelity. In most of my clips I have the 3D character models enabled, because I absolutely love them.
The character sprites are great as well though, so I'm cool with re-enabling them from time to time. Despite being having roots in Doom, and going for a retro aesthetic, this game didn't have great performance, at least on Linux, the framerate would drop below 30fps at times.
The original music tracks don't stand out as something I particularly like, although the game mostly just lifts music directly from other games, and I like the music of those other games, so I do have an enjoyable time with the music. The music definitely sticks out to me as the most derivative aspect of the entire game though.
I also wanna note one character particular just has Ryuko voicelines from Kill La Kill IF, and I find it to be a surprisingly perfect feeling fit for the character.
Mods
Being derived in part from Doom, this game's intended to be highly modable, and there's a scene that cares to mod it, so there are quite a few cool, and funny mods. I'm far more interested in the funny mods, since this game already has nearly every Sonic character I care about, as well as Popful Mail who I'm in large part attached too due to my online username. There's a Sage mod which I like though.
Unfortunately due to mod support not as admirably convenient as the Subscribe button in the Steam Workshop, I ran into some hiccups along the way of downloading them. The main issue was just trying to find where the directory for the game was on Linux, since seemingly every single tutorial online is on Windows. Eventually I realized the download page for the game mentions where to install mods, it's buried in some hidden folders:
Then after that I ran into some trouble because some mods only work when you unzip them, some only work when you don't unzip them, and some only work when you partially unzip them.
Once I got them working, mods are a blast, and there are plenty of silly ones just like I wanted:
Here are some of my favorite mods (click on the images to get linked to them):
Conclusion
This game's really cool and interesting. I can definitely see myself coming back to it plenty of times, and getting better at it in the future. It very much feels like it's probably a lot of people's dream game.
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