We hooked up two Xbox 360 wired controllers and went through some two player offline matches. If you're planning on buying this game, which you really should not, you'll want to use a peripheral controller. Your statistics can be boosted within every race by collecting rings, but it's not going to help all that much in your battle against the controls and, for some users, the framerate. That's yet more time you spend on auto-pilot. You tend to go faster in these wind tunnels since you'll move along a more precise line, so it's always worth jumping in if you happen to see one. If you fall behind you can hop into one and glide automatically along behind whoever's in front of you. This is helped by the wind wake created by boarders in front of you. Given how short the tracks are to begin with, you'll spend a surprising amount of time watching your character glide around on a rail.
While getting turbo lets you knock over opponents, boost speed, and slide turn, it's kind of pointless to play a racing game if you're frequently removed from controlling the character. There are sequences where you'll be put on an automatic rail and be instructed to wiggle the control stick or alternate between key presses to boost turbo (called air). Getting better equipment and using different character types can make the races easier to manage, but they're never close to precise. Trying to properly maintain a line through bonus hoops is frustrating because the jumping is so inexact, and the trick system is regrettably shallow. The air-boards Sonic and his buddies glide around on control poorly, bouncing awkwardly off walls and turning at strange angles. Even discounting the graphical issues, the gameplay makes it worse. When installed on a different computer with the only real difference being a Nvidia GeForce 7800, the game ran much more smoothly. Those impressions came from a rig running an ATI X1900 card. Something must have really been lost in its transition to PC. We booted this title up on Xbox to see if it was really this bad, but it controlled and ran much better on the console. For a game that looks so bland to begin with, there's no excuse for this kind of horrendous graphical performance. The Survival Race mode suffers so badly it's nearly impossible to play, and hopping on any rail is nearly as catastrophic.
If you've got two players, the framerate chops up even worse. For a title so reliant on fast-paced racing, it's amazing how much it slows down if playing solo, at least on some systems. So the game's got a lot of options, but little else positive.
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