Wishes are interesting things. People all have different wishes based on priorities, and some don't do it at all. Like praying, many ridicule it and say it's a matter of luck. It's often called childish, cheesy, clichéd, any manner of derogatory term like that.
And yet, there's something magical about finding a four-leaf clover and frantically scrambling for a desire, or spotting a shooting star and desperately wishing for your dreams to come true.
And really, if you mix in hard work with a bit of luck, can't you help your wish come true?
Whether you're a little kid that wants to beat his friend at something, or a lost traveller that just wants to go home, wishing can be a good comfort. Even if it isn't technically granted, you can get the motivation and hope needed to get things done.
While wishing isn't necessarily the most prominent thing in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, they make some interesting allusions to it. For instance, the Japanese version was actually called Shooting Star, making an interesting reference to the age old wishing tradition.
But enough about that, let's make a wish to learn more about the Sonic Riders' sequel for the Wii!

Graphics 7/10
Alright, this game came out for the Wii in 2008, and all things considering, they aren’t anything too special when compared to other games that came out around that time. Sure, they’re perfectly serviceable and you can clearly see what’s going on at all times, but the models are a tad blocky, and lack the amazing lighting details that Sonic Unleashed has (Although Sonic Unleashed admittedly came out roughly 9 months later). Even the CGI doesn’t look quite as good, though it still looks quite nice. I personally wish all the cutscenes could be CGI, because it looks so much better than just using in-game models.
The courses themselves for the most part look very diverse, even from their counterparts. They aren’t exactly the most detailed courses you’ll ever see, and the textures are a tad dated, but it still looks very acceptable and at some points, even pretty. One of my favourite courses to look at is probably 90’s Boulevard because while it’s night time, lights are on everywhere and the whole place looks so alive. The added lights give you a true sense of riding in a busy city at night and it’s pretty glorious, even if it’s hard to take the time to appreciate it in the middle of a race.
As for cutscenes, this game continues the weird sonic tradition of having the beginning cutscene and the ending cutscene(s) in glorious CGI, while the rest of them are stuck with in-game models. While the models look perfectly fine, it’s a definite drop in quality. Despite that, the animations for said cutscenes are really glorious and rarely feel truly awkward. The Babylon Rouges in particular are very lively with their animations. In fact, one of my favourite cutscenes to look at is the Babylon cutscene right before Security Corridor where Jet is really well animated while he’s annoyed/enraged. It makes me marvel at how far animation has come since the old N64.
As previously mentioned, the character models look perfectly fine, though they are a bit blocky and are lacking a bit of lighting detail compared to that of Sonic Unleashed. The extreme gears, from what little you’ll see while racing around as a blur, are sleek, fashionable, and have pretty lights that are presumably where the air goes out. All extreme gears look overall serviceable and pleasing to the eye, particularly the ones that belong to flying characters.

Sound 9/10
At the end of every sonic game, they always pull a switch, where the music will turn from this catchy, easy to hum along to theme and all of a sudden take on this weird, dramatic tone that feels out of place compared to the rest of the soundtrack. Well, Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, has this same dramatic, orchestrated style throughout the whole game. However, unlike other sonic games, it doesn’t feel like the most generic thing in the world. It also brings in a bit of the Sonic Rider techno style along with it as a Bass, creating something catchy, AND dramatic to enjoy. This creates my favourite Sonic Riders soundtrack by far. While the events do stick to this atmospheric, yet dramatic soundtrack, the courses themselves are a whole different story. They all create a much more lively, fast paced beat that is great for racing too. One of the best songs that demonstrates this is Blast Town. It is lively the whole way through and uses a brilliant combination of Bells and Brass to make the whole course feel like a big casino from the past.
As for the voice actors, they all sound great! They brought in the same cast from the previous game, and decided to make Jet’s voice not nearly as screechy. He’s now much more bearable to listen to, and I can now enjoy the story without cringing every time the hawk opens his mouth.
As for sound effects, half the time, they tend to be drowned out by the music. However, you can still vaguely hear whenever your character lands. As a sidenote, every item you get from the capsule creates a different side effect, so you’ll be able to tell what you get just from listening to the sound effect you get when you retrieve the item.

Addictiveness 3/10
Like many others of the racing genre, most of the side content in Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity consists of getting new characters and extreme gears. However, getting new extreme gears (aka boards and bikes) is really weird, because you actually have to GRIND rings for them. This is the first game I've seen since the Nintendo 64 that makes you grind to get new rides.
When you're done both story modes (which shouldn't take more than an hour and a half) you can also go through each course and do some side missions to unlock more characters. There's 6 side missions per course, and some will really eat up your time when going for Extreme rank in every one of 'em.
Outside of that, the only reason you would come back to the game is for Normal Racing and the World Grand Prix.
While Normal Racing is self-explanatory, the World Grand Prix might have you wondering what it is.
Well, in Sonic's story, you'll notice that there are 8 courses (Only 6 of which are in the story). Well, in the Babylon Story each of those courses have a 'dark version' of themselves with a darker colour palette and a very different layout, but with a similar feel, theme-wise.
In World Grand Prix, you can choose to either play all of the Sonic courses in a row, or all of the Babylon courses in a row.
It's basically like the Cups in Mario Kart, but with only two tournaments, and more courses per tournament.
However, the only thing mentioned that takes a lot of time is the missions. But those are not only extremely finicky, but since they don't take long to complete they don't hold your attention very well. As I said before, they aren't even really worth doing since they just unlock a character or two that have similar stats to every other character.
Even though unlocking everything takes a good chunk of time, unless you really care about having every character and every extreme gear you'll find that's there's very little that's worth coming back to.

Depth 7/10
Zero Gravity, while not necessarily the biggest game, has some interesting depth hidden in it.
For one, there's a mechanic called Gravity Control that is exclusive to this game. With this special new mechanic, you can use it to do two things. You can either use it to suspend time and allow you to turn 90 degree angles without bumping into everything, or you can use a sub ability of it, called a Gravity Dive. The Gravity Dive allows you to rush ahead in a straight line at a faster speed than normal.
One thing I love about these mechanics is the creativity they allow for courses. With Gravity Control, you can go off a ramp and then use Gravity Control to stop in midair and go onto another little side track that often acts as a shortcut. Because of these little shortcuts that are scattered everywhere, it means there are tons of different routes you can take on any course. They all take different amounts of time as well, so the game encourages you to experiment with every route possible in order to find the fastest one.
One change from the original Sonic Riders is that instead of the board running on air that you need to conserve, the Gravity Control gimmicks require GP (Gravity Power) to use. Gravity Control doesn’t last very long, so it consumes very little, but Gravity Dives absolutely guzzle it down. There are four ways to regain GP. Depending on your reflexes, you can get some GP at the start of the race. You can also either do a successful trick off of a jump, get some GP from item capsules, or do a special little thing called a Meteor Burst.
Now, when you do a Gravity Dive, you may notice that trains come off of tracks, and an assortment of other obstacles will surround the path ahead of you. If you hit these obstacles, you’ll not only get more GP, but you’ll also get a quick speed boost! This is called a Meteor Burst, and is a super useful thing that you’ll want to master.
Another thing that adds depth to not just Zero Gravity, but to the rest of the Sonic Rider games, is the idea of Speed, Power and Flying characters. In games like Mario Kart, this kind of thing would just mean that Speed is faster, Flying has better handling and Power would be very heavy. While it’s still technically true with Sonic Riders, the different classes do so much more. Depending on which type your character belongs to, you can open up so many more potential routes within every stage.
Speed characters have the ability to grind on rails and can even jump from one rail to another (This earns GP). Flying characters can fly off of certain ramps and fly through rings to give them access to super special shortcuts (This also earns GP). Finally, Power characters can just smash into any obstacles. That’s about it, but there are a few walls here and there that allow only Power characters to go through without slowing down every time they hit an obstacle.
However, most characters can’t do these things right away. This is where Gear Change comes into play. Gathering rings while racing will give you access to different modes that can give you various bonuses. While the extreme gears that you buy/unlock can have any number of different bonuses, the default gears have three different ones; Speed Boost (Increases the overall speed), GP Gauge Boost (Increases the size of your GP bar), and Gear Modification. Without Gear Modification, most Extreme Gears cannot Grind, Air Ride, or smash through obstacles. It thankfully doesn’t take many rings to access any of these except for the GP Gauge Boost, which costs 75 rings.
Finally, now for the controls. Like plenty of other Wii games, there are three controller options to choose from. You can either use the Gamecube controller, hold the wiimote sideways, or hold the wiimote forward.
The Gamecube is by far the best option. B uses Gravity control, A lets you jump, X lets you Gear change, and R allows you to Gravity Dive. It’s simple and intuitive in every way.
Holding the Wiimore sideways is a neat second. You tilt the wiimote from side to side to turn, you use the 2 button to jump, 1 to utilise Gravity control, A to gear change, and you shake the mote in order to use Gravity Dive. If anything, using this option make the game feel a bit more like Mario Kart.
Holding the wiimote forward, however, is the clunkiest thing you could possibly imagine, however. It’s nigh impossible just to go in a straight line, let alone turn, or d a Gravity Dive or do ANYTHING. You control it by point your wiimote at the very middle of the screen in order to go forward. You then point it to the left or right to turn, and it is way too sensitive. If you can make it past the starting line with this option, you deserve serious applause.
That about wraps up Depth for this review. It has a surprising amount considering it’s just a racing game and all.

Story 7/10
Much like Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity has two story modes, Sonic's Story and Babylon's story. However instead of Final Story, the Babylon one covers the real ending.
In Sonic's story, you'll play as the typical trio of Sonic, Knuckles and Tails. It starts off with a nice CGI cutscene of a strange ring shaped meteor falling from the sky and a cryptic scene of thousands of robots activating before the scene cuts away to what is presumably the next day. The Sonic gang is driving around and talking about this meteor Tails found last night and gave to the blue hedgehog. The news is also broadcasting that the robots from Meteotech are on a global rampage, so Sonic, Knuckles and Tails go to check it out, only to be ambushed by said Meteotech robots.
After a short, intense chase sequence, Sonic and crew are blown out of the building. Since Sonic apparently can't use his Extreme Gear to cushion his fall and the other two are too lazy to save him, it looks like this may be it for the blue hedgehog. However, the strange meteor saves him and he safely lands on the ground, where you start your first race.
It's now up to the three to figure out why the Meteotech robots are rampaging, and what the mysterious meteor that Sonic holds really is.
The Babylon story is a bit weird, since you can only play it after you beat Sonic's Story, there's spoilers abound pretty early on. For whatever reason, it covers the beginning as well as the end, which also an interesting choice.
The Babylon story starts off with the Babylon Rogues (Jet, Wave, and Storm) in some sort of ruins. Jet, the leader, deactivates the trap and grabs something that looks suspiciously like Sonic's meteor. Wave and Storm hang back, before Wave sees a shooting star and begins to make a wish. Storm, clearly the brightest of the bunch *rolls eyes*, makes fun of her for it before he sees that Jet is making a wish too! A wish to be faster than Sonic. More shooting stars begin to fall before they hit the earth in the distance, creating a small earthquake AND activating the previously deactivated trap (which is some really big boulders that fall down, apparently).
Once again, it looks like some main characters are going to bite the dust, but they're saved by the meteor that Jet grabbed. It forms a shield around them and lifts them into the air, repelling the rocks with ease. He then uses the power of the meteor to escape the ruins with his gang. Now, the Babylon Rogues are on a mission to find all five meteors, or Arks of the Cosmos as Jet calls them, for an unknown reason.
An interesting note is that the two stories intertwine with each other very tightly, yet the two teams only interact twice. They come across each other once roughly in the middle and then right at the end.
The story is refreshing for a racing game. Of all the genres to have a story that surprised me, it was the racing genre. The plot was rushed and crammed into 13 race courses, so there wasn't much room for the characters to show their characters much. What we did see was in-line for the typical sonic crew, though. They also included foreshadowing of all things.
I'm surprised at how much they crammed into such a short storyline, but I feel it could've done with a few more courses to help lengthen the plot.

Difficulty 3/10
This game is brain-numbingly easy for all but one course. The AI is incredibly slow and the timed story missions are easy to beat, even when you mess up a bunch like I did. The courses are easy to navigate as well. There's no sudden drops if you take a wrong turn and if you do come across the rare obstacle, it's always easy to dodge.
There's also only one attack item in the whole game. It acts almost like a bullet bill from Mario Kart, except you can also access shortcuts from it. Basically, once you're in the lead, you'll be staying there unless you lose on purpose.
The only difficulty in this game comes from three things: playing with friends, some of the bonus missions, and a few bad cases of rubberband AI. (For those unaware, rubberbanding is sort of a racing game term where the computer likes to make an opponent zoom past you at inhuman speeds before slowing down and giving you an easy pass and repeating the process)
Quite frankly, I have no idea how the AI can be more than a minute behind you every time. There's next to nothing slowing it down, and they don't zoom right into walls or anything. It's a bit befuddling, but at least with your friends you should get a harder race or two.
The missions are a bit harder, as more of them involve precise steering (like the ones that involve collecting rings or smashing everything in one go) or precise timing (the ones that involve doing tricks or completing a lap within a certain time).Those are harder to do, particularly if you want to get the Extreme rank so you can unlock every character, because they require more skill and you need to rely on what YOU can do, rather than just breeze through and laugh at the AI.
As for rubberbanding, this is where the AI gets REALLY odd. Throughout most of BOTH story modes I never encountered any rubberband AI... until the very last race in the Babylon story.
You see, in the last race, you get an almost boss like race, where you need to be first to hit him in a certain section in order to deal damage. However, RIGHT before that certain spot, the AI likes to all of a sudden rubberband and somehow go faster than you possibly can, making the boss much tougher to hit for no real reason.
The AI also sometimes enjoys randomly rubberbanding in free mode, but otherwise, the game is fairly easy.

Things not covered above
*The Rainbow Road of this game, Astral Babylon, is absolutely insane. It’s the most simple track by far, but the computer difficulty randomly ramps up and makes it incredibly difficult to win without knowing the course back to front (Which, thanks to some secret shortcuts is surprisingly hard.)

+ Two robot characters, SCR-GP, and SCR-HD, have this unique thing to them where, while they can’t use Gravity Control, they don’t require any extreme gear and can automatically use the abilities that come along with Power characters and Flying characters, respectively.

Overall, I find this game to be a nice little 6.4. If you can find this game for really cheap, go ahead and pick it up, or better yet, rent it. It’s good, but too short for very much enjoyment.
Thanks for reading~

Great review!~ This was actually the first Sonic game I ever played (Outside Brawl or Mario and Sonic). It was confusing at first, but I loved it! You had lots of detail into every category, which is really good in a review.

A user of this : Thanks~ Yeah, this was probably my most detailed review yet. I'm proud of it though.

Ok...after finally sitting down and reading your review, your analysis on the game is not that bad. It's a little too long for my taste, but not bad. Your analysis for the most part has been quite reasonable  When people who want to consider if a game is good or not and whether they should it buy it or not, they don't really want to sit down and read a long article about it (unless your reputation has already been built from previous reviews that you are a great reviewer and they want to read what you want to say) and they would go from review to review to see if that opinion is consistent or not., so you don't want to get too detailed to the point that it drags (or worse, reveal the entire game in the article)

I would say that the one way you can kinda shrink down the long review is to only post support that is crucial in your opinion about the game. Sometimes certain information is important about the game, but not necessarily needed for your game. One way to help on that is to start to move away from the category by category breakdown. There are certain parts of your review that I feel that you are writing those categories just because it is part of the categories, but not necessarily because it is crucial to the opinion of the game itself, which can make it feel forced or fake in your review. 

play4fun : Thank you for the feedback. I was actually thinking about changing the way I do categories for my next one anyway.