looking at: Ridge Racer: Unbounded

Unsullied

cars only seem to ever come in one paint colour.

The nice thing about racing games is that you really only have to play them for about an hour or so to figure out what's going on with them. At least, that's the justification I'm going to use to write this review because honestly, after an hour I just don't want to play Ridge Racer: Unbounded anymore. This is easily one of the worst racing games I've ever played.

This is the first racing game I've reviewed here at LAATIAB, so I want to set a precedent here: I like racing games and racing simulation games. I love Mario Kart, Burnout: Paradise, and I really enjoyed GRID 2. I've played more Need for Speed games than I can remember, and I've likely logged over a 100 hours in Burnout 3 for the Xbox as a kid. I like racing games, I get racing games, and playing racing games is usually a good time for me.

Unless it's Ridge Racer: Unbounded.

Which is a stupid fucking name.

Off the Ridge

smashing through obstacles will give you shortcuts, often in the form of ramps.

The Ridge Racer series is huge, and stretches back to the early 90's as Japanese arcade and console games. Some of the old games are extremely well liked, and many of the PS2 entries in the series top out that console's best racing games list, no easy task considering some of the other games on that list. I can't say I've played any previous RR games, so it's perhaps unfortunate that Unbounded is my first experience.

This is the thirteenth console entry into the series, and by it's own description it breaks away from some of the conventions of it's predecessors. Judging by my experience with it, that number is rather unlucky, despite the pedigree going into it. Not even Bugbear, the company behind Flatout 2 or the upcoming Wreckfest could save this wreck.

Let's start off with what works. Graphically, RR:U is pretty good looking. There's an odd orange filter on everything, but reflections look good and the cars all look great, even at high speed. Even at high speeds my framerate was really good, and it's an overall decently optimized game. There's almost no graphics options whatsoever, so you better hope your system can run it.

The other thing I liked about RR:U was the idea of destructible terrain. This is something Bugbear seems to have taken from their Flatout games, and here they've gone above and beyond. Tracks will have destruction points that you can boost into, provided you have some boost saved, to create shortcuts or destroy several opponents at once. These are hugely satisfying to activate and I went out of my way to try and activate them if I could.

Cliff Diver

The game looks great, to bad it's all for naught.

Ok, that's the good, here comes the bad. That is, pretty much everything else.

First, and probably most importantly, are my issues with the controls. The actual layout was ok, but controlling the cars themselves was a chore. I wasn't stupid enough to try to play the game on my mouse and keyboard, but on a controller cars felt sluggish, and unwieldy. Trying to drift was a death sentence, and more often then not resulted in my completely spinning out, unable to recover easily and moving me way down the rankings.

I really want to make sure you understand how bad this drifting is. It's hard to explain accurately in words, or even video, and the only thing I can suggest is playing a really good racer, like Burnout: Paradise, then playing RR:U and you should instantly understand. Trying to use the handbrake as suggested by the game was a no-go, as it would send my spinning like a top. Trying to use the brake peddle wasn't much better because it didn't do anything to slow me down. Trying to take a turn well in RR:U was nearly impossible, and I'd either end up sliding into a wall or spinning out.

This all brings me to my second issue, the game is fucking hard. Coming from Namco Bandai, I was actually surprised not to see From Software's name on it, since it feels like it would fit in perfectly with their Dark Souls series. The AI kicked my ass, no matter what car I used or how I changed my tactics. It took me four tries to beat the first race, and subsequent races took even longer, to the point where I gave up completely to write this. I don't know if it's weird rubber-banding, or the bad controls, or both, but I was just never able to create a solid lead, the few times I did manage to get ahead.

Cars feel sluggish and unresponsive.

Maybe it's because all of the cars are just awful. It's usual for the starting cars in a racer to be junkers, everyone expects that. You have to earn the better cars, either by earning money and buying them or unlocking them through challenge. But it seemed like non of the AI had any problem, and they all started with top of the line racing machines while I was stuck with 1995 Oldsmobile Royal 88. Loosing a race still gives you XP that's used to unlock new cars, so maybe if I had farmed the same failure over and over eventually I could have placed, but that's a bad way to structure a racer.

Sound effects weren't bad, you could hear the rumble of the engines and the sound of squealing tires, but the music was just annoying. As far as I could tell there wasn't any licensed music anywhere in the game, likely because between EA and anyone else competent a lot of music was taken. Instead there's just endless techno music that made me feel like I was in a shitty nightclub with people I didn't like being around. There's no option to supplement your own soundtrack either, so if club music isn't your scene you'll need to alt-tab out to not want to kill yourself.

The map making feature is powerful and simple to use.

Mechanical Failure

This happened every login attempt.

Maybe one day I'll review a good racer here on this blog. I hope so, because there are a lot of racing games I really like, just this one wasn't one of them. It's worth noting that there are. or rather were, multiplayer features. I say "were" because every attempt to log into the RR:U servers failed instantly. The game is on sale right now, so it's possible the servers are overloaded, and you could still play single-player just fine, but I think the servers are probably just offline and no one is playing this game.

There's also a track creation tool that's actually pretty cool. It reminded me a lot of the create-a-park modes from old Tony Hawk games, only for race tracks. There's a lot of room to play around with it, and you can create some cool tracks, but it's nothing we haven't seen from Ubisoft's superior TrackMania series, and doesn't have nearly the visual charm.

Ridge Racer: Unbounded has the distinct honour of being one of the worst racers I've ever played. At least Diddy Kong Racing on N64 had a charm factor, but RR:U is just a bad, poorly made, and un-fun racer that pales in comparison to better racers. When it comes to fun racing games, this one doesn't even cross the start.