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. Sonic's sole job is to go fast things like talking or making friends with a cavalcade of moderately creepy anthropomorphized critters just get in the way of being a big blue blur, screaming through checkerboard environments faster than any plumber ever could. His adventure games haven't been good for years, bogged down by laughably bad filler content and "storylines" that do nothing but dull the edge of a character that used to personify SEGA's version of cool.