Review: Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds Mega Man Pack

On September 25th, 2025, SEGA released Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds for nearly every platform imaginable. Unlike previous Sonic Racing titles, however, this one had more of a long-term plan: Downloadable content, and lots of it — at least, when compared to previous entries. Enough to warrant a Season Pass, to be sure.

Fast-forward to March 26th, 2026, and SEGA collaborated with Capcom to release the latest DLC pack for the game: Mega Man.

Naturally, the teasers for this have drawn plenty of attention from the fan community, but is it worth getting? That’s what we’re here to discuss.

But first, maybe you haven’t played Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds yet? If that’s the case and you’re wondering just what this game is all about and how it resembles and differs from Mario Kart, then I invite you to check out my handy review over on TMMN’s sister-site, PoisonMushroom.Org. As for this article, this is focused primarily on the Mega Man content, with a little extra info about going the Season Pass route.

With the Mega Man pack, you get two additional racers for your roster (which SEGA has also been kind enough to make free additions to over the months since the game’s release), Mega Man and Proto Man. Interestingly, they each represent different racer types: Mega Man is classified as Power, while Proto Man is classified as Speed. I suppose there could be debates over why they should be swapped, or the same, or even have been from the other remaining types (Acceleration, Handling, and Boost), but that’s what they are.

Unfortunately, there are no voices for the characters here, and no witty rival banter between Mega Man and Sonic, or Knuckles and Proto Man. They make sounds like teleport noises when doing tricks, but no voice clips. This is actually the case with all the other DLC characters (including SEGA’s own first-party characters, like Tangle and Whisper, whose new voice actors debuted just before their DLC release), so it’s not exclusive to the Blue Bomber and the Red Rocker. If anything, that was probably extremely convenient for all involved, considering the current situation regarding voice actors for the Classic series. (On the other hand, it’s not like most of the Mega Man games haven’t recast the characters with every new appearance in the west, anyway.)

There is a third character, of course, though you don’t race as him, but with him: Rush, who’s fresh off the Mega Man: Battle & Chase tracks in his Rush Roadstar form! He’s classified as Acceleration (Note: You can mix and match different classes of driver and car to different results), and like the other vehicles in the game, you can use him in customization, swapping out the front or the back, as well as changing the color scheme and adding decals to further make him “yours”.

Here’s my personal color deco, further augmented by a few decals for the purposes of this review:

If there’s one thing that disappoints here, it’s that Proto Man doesn’t get a ride of his own. He’s usually seen riding an Extreme Gear (hoverboard-type vehicles from the Sonic universe, Sonic Riders in particular), and while that works… look, we’re all thinking it. Mega Man not only has options for this, but several options for this — enough that it’s almost crazy (but make no mistake, it’s a welcome “deep cut” sort of crazy) that they bypassed all of them in favor of the Rush Roadstar. In Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, Proto Man had the Proto Jet, there’s the Rush Jet of course, and while I know people are getting tired of Mega Man 2 callbacks, let’s face it: With that version of Wily’s castle being the racetrack here (spoiler for the next part of the review), Item-2 would have simply made perfect sense (and it’s even colored like Proto Man, to boot, and he and Knuckles rode some in Worlds Collide).

Despite that block of text, I don’t feel like this really diminishes the package, it’s just that this was not simply low-hanging fruit, it felt like the branch holding the fruit drooped right into the basket. That they didn’t go for it is, to borrow from Sonic lore, “strange, isn’t it?”

Anyway, we’ve got a car, and we’ve got two drivers, so what else does this package give you for your hard-earned zenny? How about an entire new race course?

Straight from Mega Man 2, it’s Wily Castle! I remember imagining how a race track based on this setting would work back when word was starting to get out, and it’s very much like the one in my imagination. Not a perfect recreation of what I imagined, mind you — for instance, the Mecha Dragon is replaced by the Yellow Devil from the first game — but the idea, the spirit is very much intact.

Here’s how racing through the track breaks down:

You start the race at the outer perimeter, just like where you beam down in Mega Man 2, only Wily Machine 2 is hovering overhead, complete with an animated model of Dr. Wily himself in the cockpit. In a neat touch, there’s an E Tank sitting off to the side of the track.

When the flag drops, you’ll be racing past the various outposts you climb in the original, while Mets litter the track, and can hide inside their helmets to deflect your attacks. You can even see the Sniper Joe lookouts that you climb past/through in Mega Man 2 dotting the wall.

You pass some Tellys to go into the castle, but as noted above, instead of Mecha Dragon lying in wait, it’s Yellow Devil in a big spike pit firing bolts of energy at you. If you hit him with an item, you can get a bunch of rings, which help you go even faster. Go off the track, and you’ll die in the classic Mega Man fashion as an explosion of circles (before respawning back on the track like nothing happened, of course).

Further in, you’ll pass a large version of Dr. Wily’s Teleport System — aka the Boss Rush Room. You’ll move on to the room where Mega Man fights the holographic alien (you can see the projector in the ceiling high above), and Wily Machine 2 is back here, hovering overhead once again and opening fire at you and the other racers. More Mets abound here as well, and as with Yellow Devil, shooting Wily will get you more rings (and a panicked expression from the mad scientist, if you can catch it).

After this, you’ll come to the gate which takes you to one of the many CrossWorlds for the second lap (see the PMO review for more on that), and the gate there brings you back to the start.

The third and final lap is a little different from the first time around. In addition to sped-up music, your machine will convert to flight mode as you enter the castle, and you’ll now have to dodge pieces of the Yellow Devil as they fly from left to right and right to left. Towards the end of this lap, blocks will also be littering the track as you make your way to the finish line. I think these blocks are unique to this track, yet I’m not sure I’ve been able to pinpoint a specific block type they’re referencing from any of the games; they have a sensor in the middle, and feel like they could reference anything from Guts Man blocks to Boobeam Traps.

It’s a fun course, and adding to the fun is an exclusive item that you (unfortunately, but I suppose understandably) can’t use on any other track: The Mega Buster! Pick this bad boy up, and you’ll have three shots of compressed solar energy you can fire straight ahead of you, allowing you to clear Mets, the aforementioned mystery blocks, or pelt Wily and Yellow Devil for rings.

Accompanying your journey through Wily Castle is — what else? — a remix of the theme of Wily Castle from Mega Man 2, arranged by Takahiro Kai, the SEGA composer best known for his work on the Like a Dragon series, and who acts as the Sound Director & Lead Music Composer for Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. Here are all the tracks you get in the pack:

• Wily Castle Intro – Arranged by Takahiro Kai – Jukebox Only
• Wily Castle – Arranged by Takahiro Kai – Jukebox Only
• Wily Castle: Final Lap – Arranged by Takahiro Kai – Jukebox Only
• Dr. Wily Stage 1 – Capcom Sound Team
• Dr. Wily Stage 1: Final Lap – Capcom Sound Team
• Mega Man: Character Select – Arranged by Takahiro Kai – Jukebox Only
• Mega Man: Result – Arranged by Takahiro Kai – Jukebox Only

Now, I may have this backwards, but I think that the Jukebox Only tracks can only be listened to on the Wily Castle track and in the big collection of songs, while the Capcom Sound Team stuff (i.e. the original NES versions) can be added to your list of songs to play in place of the standard choices for each track. I don’t know or understand why it would be that way (I’d think the opposite, if anything), but that’s the way it is.

And finally, you also get six Mega Man emotes, featuring the 8-bit version of the Blue Bomber as a means to chat with other players in online multiplayer.

You can get all of this for $5.99 USD/$7.99 CAD, and I think it’s a pretty good deal — especially if you’re like me, a big Mega Man fan who enjoys Sonic Racing games as much or more than Mario Kart. However, that’s not the only way you can get it.

There’s also the Season Pass, which not only gets you the Mega Man pack, but also additional packs for Minecraft, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Pac-Man, which are all available now, while Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Nightmare and Avatar Legends still to come in the third quarter of 2026 (oh, and Sonic Prime is in there somewhere, too). That’s 18 additional characters, six additional vehicles, six additional tracks, and a bunch of other goodies (emotes, songs, etc.) thrown in as well, all for $29.99 USD/$39.99 CAD.

If you’re a fan of these other franchises, I think the pass is definitely worth it, but that’s going to vary on a case-by-case basis. That said, it does add a nice bit of variety to a game that’s already pretty packed with options from the jump.

Oh, and if you’re going digital, you can purchase a Digital Deluxe Edition for… well, I’d give you a price, but it seems like it’s different on every platform I look at? Weird.

If you still aren’t sure what to get, you can watch my wife and I play through all of the currently-available DLC tracks (including, of course, Mega Man) on our recent live stream of “Nadia & David’s Mega Man Mayhem“, and if you’re still not sure, there’s a free demo available to try on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch platforms as well.

No matter which way you go, I think you’re going to get a good value for your money. So check it out!

The Xbox version of the game was played on a Series X for this review.

Thanks for reading! And in case you haven’t heard, re-upping our hosting for the next few years took a big bite out of our bank account, so if you like what we’re doing here, would like to see us expand our breadth of content (such as with projects like this post), and can kick in a few bucks to our Patreon or buy us an E Tank on Ko-fi, we’d greatly appreciate it!

LBD "Nytetrayn"

David Oxford, or “LBD ‘Nytetrayn’,” as he is sometimes also known, is a freelance writer of many varied interests who resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

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