For kart racing fans who have played Mario Kart 8's courses to death and need something new and fresh, Team Sonic Racing comes along to satisfy your pallette.Before you think it unfair to compare TSR to MK8, the makers of this game make little effort to hide that Mario Kart is exactly what they are aiming for. Just look at the items in this game (called wisps). 80% of them are borrowed from MK. Missiles that bounce off walls (green shells), crimson eagle that chases opponents (red shell), boost (mushroom), cube (fake item box/banana), rhythm (blooper), drill (bullet bill), bomb (bob omb), ghost & lightning. Quake is like blue shell but way better since you actually have a chance of dodging the pillars. A lot of the courses look like combinations of MK levels. There is a haunted house/sand level and a volcano level with a molten monster that looks suspiciously like the one in Bowser's castle.The good news is the courses look gorgeous and are a blast to play. The controls are silky smooth and there is even a second control option for MK veterans (x on PS4 to accelerate, r2 to drift, l2 to use items). They really nailed the feel of the drifting! This is probably the first non-MK racer that got the drifting perfect. It's better than the last Sonic Racing Game. I watched footage of the upcoming Crash Team Racing remake and it looks jerky af. This is smooth turning around all the corners.The bad news is the roster dropped all those cool and random characters from the last game and the tracks are a bit less fun and creative than those in Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed, where they had the whole SEGA catalog to pull ideas from. While Nintendo expanded MK8 to include Zelda, F-Zero, Splatoon, Animal Crossing and others, Team Sonic goes the opposite direction and just focused Sonic franchise characters, half of which are obscure even to fans (Zavok anyone?)The new elements in this game are the team mechanics. Certain actions add to your team meter so you can pull off a team ultimate (sorta the equivalent of a star in MK). These actions include following in the trail of your leading teammate for a boost (fun), skimming past a spun-out or slower teammate for a boost (good, but hard to execute), taking out rivals, and giving away and requesting items to and from teammates (not bad, but this really incentivizes you to get rid of your items when sometimes you'd rather keep them). You'll learn these pretty quickly and they add some freshness to the race. One piece of advice is to request items from teammates as much as you give them away. Sometimes you'll get triple items and then you can use two and give the last one away.You also get a lot of content in addition to the Grand Prix mode. There is an adventure mode filled with challenges to keep you busy. The more you play, the more points you get to unlock kart customizations. The gold medals and higher difficulty can be rather insane, but none of it is required to beat unlike S&ASRT where characters were locked behind impossible challenges. Another piece of advice is, in adventure mode, press square to start if you want to see the story. I pressed x to start through half of it before I realized I was missing the all the dialogue.I almost forgot to mention the music, most of which is phenomenal. Kudos to the composers. Fans will love the remixes of old classics as well as the catchy new tunes. Even the brief music that plays during team ultimate is specific to each Sonic character and usually a nod to the game in which they originally appeared.Finally there is a top-quality kart racer good enough to be a companion to MK8. Sure it has its faults. The dialogue (that plays not only between races but throughout races) can be incredibly cheesy for instance (I'm looking at you, Amy), the tracks aren't as memorable or original as MK8 or S&ASRT and the roster would benefit from some more SEGA. But, the new team mechanics are mostly great and this is without a doubt the most polished and best-playing kart racer outside of Nintendo. For costing around $30-$40 at release it is a no-brainer for fans of the genre