Rather than spreading out a good thing, though, the boss battles and knockout challenges drag the whole experience down. The races are so good that if they were the only thing burned onto the UMD, SR2 might actually have been an instant recommendation, but rather than concentrating on building wildly imaginative courses and trusting that the game's smattering of characters, power-ups and special attacks, developer Backbone Vancouver tried instead to inject a little more variety into things. It's all pretty simple stuff, but thanks to some solid track designs it works quite well. Aside from the myriad pathways, grind rails, bounce plates and so on, the only other element of strategy comes in crossing a boost zone, where you can get a kick either straight up or forward by pressing X or O, respectively. These never seemed to help when I was trailing the other player, but they were damned effective when used while in the lead. Also scattered throughout the levels are a handful of weapon pickups that are mainly offensive (stuff like fireballs and the ability to freeze a player). The only character that doesn't have their own powers is Metal Sonic, who pulls a Mokujin and just copies the ability of the character he's racing.
Once it's powered up, you can get a speed boost, completely mangle another player's controls, turn invisible, fly, send out a shockwave and so on. Each of the racers has their own special ability, unlocked by collecting rings. The races are fairly straightforward, hold-right-to-win affairs, but a few wrinkles are introduced to keep things competitive. In fact, the tracks in Sonic Rivals 2 are damn near some of the speediest, coolest uses of 2.5D I've seen in a long, long time, often incorporating classic elements like corkscrews and jump pads to make for blindingly quick sprints through a handful of environments that pay homage to previous games.
Sonic Rivals 2, thankfully, almost completely repairs the basic racing concept and, even better, manages to improve upon it with multiple paths and plenty of catches so that one missed jump doesn't suddenly mean precious seconds shaved off the race time.
It's something that the first game hinted at, but botched in execution once you factored in cheap deaths and pointless pitfalls that slowed the races to a crawl where memorization by trial-and-error was the norm. It's Sonic (and, much as I hate it, friends) hauling ass through a bunch of tracks at ridiculous speeds. That's exactly why the concept of Sonic Rivals is so sound.
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