Ridge Racer: Unbounded, is like none of its predecessors, it has been overhauled and now has a fierce, rebellious feel to it. They have moved away from the clean-cut circuit racer that we all know Ride Racer as being and now it’s all about Rampaging through the city of Shatter Bay, this is what we have all been waiting for! In concept, this is a lot like Burnout Revenge, but it has a few more things up its sleeve than Revenge did.
The game itself is a very nice looking spectacle, the environments are well crafted, and the cars look good. There is no real storyline, you have a brief introduction at the start, explaining who “The Unbounded” are, and then you have a series of events and eventually you dominate the city and take it as your own, but who really needs a storyline on such a game?
The events consist of 5 event types; Domination Race – Destroy anything and anyone who gets in your way to win! Time Attack, Drift Attack, Frag Attack – Destroy a certain amount of cars in the allotted time, and plain old, no thrills, Racing, known as “Shindo Racing”. These are good and are very challenging, but sometimes it can be too hard and can get very annoying after a while.
The gameplay itself is okay, however, the steering is a bit crude and the drifting can be very hard to handle, but with time, you get used to it. There are some more annoying points about it though, the Power boost that you use to generally frag others (although you can also frag them without) and destroy buildings and other destructables, has a very annoying camera, when you do destroy something or frag someone, it also slows down majorly a lot of the time, this can ruin your race or time trial and make you have to restart, also sometimes, it places you in the most annoying places which make you crash, as you can imagine, this gets very agitating!
The online play is ok, but nothing special, I do like the fact that you can compete to beat other people’s times they set on their City they created. The City Creation Tool itself is a good feature, there is nothing special about it, it is basically like a scalextric track set-up, you choose the pieces you want and build it, but you do need to bear in mind such things as tunnel entries and exits and other pieces like it, also there is a build limit, and this is a bit of a bummer, as you may not be able to build the track you want!
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Overall the game is brilliant, both in concept and in parts of the execution of it, but it can be VERY annoying, if you are willing to look over the flaws, it is a great game and very amusing.
