Game review: Ridge Racer Unbounded

The Ridge Racer series has been around since 1993, so a reboot was inevitable.

Ridge Racer Unbounded

£44.99, PS3/Xbox 360

The result is Ridge Racer Unbounded, an adrenaline-charged driving game that swaps out the effortless drift turns, techno music and colourful tracks of the earlier incarnation for destruction, tricky cornering and abrasive dubstep. The simplicity that made the original games such a joy has been replaced by today’s assumption that players crave unending chaos and constant noise to become invested in a game, and the abundance of shooters in the market now is partly to blame.

Regardless of this, Ridge Racer Unbounded is by no means a poor game, just an impenetrable one. For a start, the drift mechanic is infuriatingly hard to master, making entering and exiting drifts a deft balancing act that punishes the slightest lapse in concentration by sending you trailing down the pack. Second, the AI opponents are brutal and relentless, and third, you need to cause as much destruction as you can while focusing on finishing first to earn speed boosts and complete your race objective. The constant juggling act begins to wear thin rather quickly.

All of this combines to make a game that feels like it’s trying too hard to cover too many bases, and so will likely interest only hardcore racers, rather than being an all-access affair like previous games. It’s huge, so it’s certainly generous and it is heavily stylised, but one for hardcore series fans with a lot of patience, only.