The Sonic fandom continues to amaze me. For every mountain of lewd fan art and crappy original characters created by fans, you get an incredible fangame that absolutely trumps official efforts from Sega themselves.
Pulling off a kart racer in the Legacy DOOM engine of all things is a seriously impressive feat.
I like the fact that Eggman is not the villain in this. I'd like to see more of this in future Sonic games. We've seen plenty of times where other videogame mascots have teamed up with their arch rivals to stop a greater threat.
Update 26th April 2024: As has been pointed out to me overnight by a thousand helpful, furious strangers, describing a Sega fangame (one with Saturn button prompts, no less) as "SNES-style" is a crime deserving of imprisonment in the deepest depths of the Labyrinth Zone. Speaking as a former Genesis/Mega Drive diehard, I can only hang my head.
My understanding is that they reconciled both names some time ago, the character's in-universe real name is Dr. Ivo Robotnik and Eggman is the moniker he's known for.
I see Robotnik as an entirely separate character to Eggman. The AOSTH/Mean Bean Machine character was a bumbling idiot, and Robotnik Prime from SATAM/Archie Comics was a brutal overlord.
It's essentially a sequel with very different mechanics. Also there's a proper singleplayer campaign with bots, different cups and achievements. It's a bit difficult but I'm having fun with it.
The onboarding is... Pretty rough though. The tutorial is actually half an hour long.
It's a bit more difficult than most kart racers, yeah. I would recommend the previous one (SRB2K) instead. Super Tux Kart is alright too, probably more fun for kids than for you though. It's very basic.
It has waaaaaaaay more mechanics than other karting games. Stuff like fast dropping, spin dashing, like 5 levels of drifting, boosting to pierce shortcut gates... You really don't need to know half of it, but the tutorial does go over everything.
My biggest issue is the amount of buttons and the mapping. Other than that, the tutorial dies di a decent job at teaching the player. I believe there is a way to skip the tutorial but others would have to comment on that.