Domination is the main attraction and, by far, the most entertaining. The game’s single player is broken down into various race types.
From lap progress appearing inside turns, to the streaks from the back of your car when you boost ahead, Unbounded definitely has style. The simplicity is refreshing, and instead, keeps the focus on the slick visual style.
You can choose to Dominate Shatter Bay, Dominate the World, Create a City or View Your Progress. Instead, you get a menu with four options, all straightforward with no frills. The game doesn’t confuse you with various menus and confusing objectives. One of the first things that jumped out at me with Unbounded was its straightforwardness. At the end of the day, the only thing you need to remember about Unbounded is that the Ridge Racer moniker is something you should simply ignore.
#RIDGE RACER UNBOUNDED REVIEW SERIES#
Instead this entry in the long-running series feels more like a mix between Burnout and Split/Second, focusing more on taking down opponents in combination with an incredible sense of destruction. This was definitely not your typical Bugbear title, nor is it anything even closely resembling a Ridge Racer game. When the culmination finally arrived, I was in shock. But it doesn’t manage the crucial task of giving you a reason to play it instead of the current standards of arcade racing like Split/Second, Midnight Club: Los Angeles, or Driver.The illegitimate child of the Ridge Racer series.Īs a long-time fan of both the Ridge Racer series and developer Bugbear, the news that they were merging piqued my interested in Unbounded ten-fold. This arcade racer deserves credit for elevating the Ridge Racer name above the level of a punchline. The scripted sterility of a Ridge Racer and the destructibility of a FlatOut go together like peanut butter and fish oil. It’s too bad the studio that made the FlatOut series has come to this. You can make your own tracks, assuming laying tiles in a line satisfies your desire to make tracks. The multiplayer, which is currently a ghost town, includes challenges that remind me a bit of the multiplayer in SSX, except that you’re playing Ridge Racer Unbounded instead of SSX. Winning races gives you stars that unlock later races on later levels, although Shatter Bay - yeah, that’s its name - has an oppressive sameness after about ten races. You earn experience points to unlock cars even when you lose. Ridge Racer Unbounded, a game of often arbitrary and nonsensical rules, is anything but unbounded.Īt least Unbounded has a decent meta-game. Unless the side of the building is a scripted destroyable wall and I have enough explosion juice. But it stops cold when I clip the side of a building wrong. My Lamborghini-alike plows through a steel staircase as easily as a fruit cart. But I do appreciate some level of consistency.
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Why is a steel girder as sturdy as a toothpick, but the wall of a coffee shop requires a full load of explosion juice? I don’t need realism in my arcade racers. It also lets you drive through concrete barricades and steel girders with impunity. After all, you can’t very well riff on Split/Second without riffing on Burnout. Ridge Racer Unbounded lets you use your explosion juice to ram other cars for a gratuitous Burnout style takedown. Split/Second is Irwin Allen to Ridge Racer Unbounded’s Dennis the Menace. Breaking incidental details and busting through the occasional wall to make a shortcut is all good and well if you haven’t played Split/Second, where destruction consisted of crashing airplanes, toppling ocean liners, collapsing skyscrapers, and crumbling dams. That means you’ve probably played the far better Split/Second, which used the same basic concept to spectacular effect.īut the destruction in Ridge Racer Unbounded is simultaneously more modest and more ridiculous than Split/Second. If this sounds familiar, congratulations. As you drive around with a full load of explosion juice, destructible bits of the track light up. The basic conceit is that as you drift - it wouldn’t be a Ridge Racer unless it pushed you into its featherweight drift physics - you build up explosion juice. To Namco, unbounded apparently means “moderately breakable within carefully scripted confines”. No such thing is true in Ridge Racer Unbounded, a game that take place entirely within the confines of its mostly narrow city courses. The implication is that you’re in a world without boundaries (note that unbound, as in “unrestrained”, is a different word with a different meaning). The unbounded in the title is unintentionally ironic. It instead takes a cue from actually good arcade racers.
This latest Ridge Racer from Namco finally does more than shunt you down narrow sterile roads with only a contrived drift mechanic where the gameplay should go. As far as Ridge Racers go, you could do a whole lot worse than Ridge Racer Unbounded.