Reviews// Ridge Racer Unbounded

Ridge Racer is one of those games that has permeated the very core of gaming since time immemorial. Since the first time I went into the now sadly defunct Playland arcade in Wakefield's bustling Market Street, and saw the gleaming sit-down arcade machine, “Ridge Racer”, or “Lidge Lacer” as it is sometimes, lacistly called, has been one of the most fun and iconic racing games in the history of the genre - a genre which it virtually invented.

In the intervening 19 years the Ridge Racer series has spanned a number of games on a number of platforms, predominantly Arcade and Sony PlayStation but also making the occasional appearance on 360, Nintendo consoles and various handheld.

What has never changed though, is the central premise: Ridge Racer is about boundless vistas, sweeping curves and endless drifting. Another immutable aspect of the game has been the card carrying race-queen, Reiko Nagase. And a helicopter. Until now that is.

Ridge Racer Unbounded is a reboot of the rip-roaring racing phenomenon. Gone are the carefree arcade racing days of yore, in their place a futuristic post-utopian trans-Apocalyptic dystopia the like of which would be equally comfortable in a game like Infamous. The game starts with some scene-setting story exposition, narrated by a rooftop dwelling girl, slightly reminiscent of the chick from Mirror's Edge.

To be honest, I couldn't be bothered to listen to it, so keen was I to get racing. I think it was something about us being a band of merry automotive gypsies, living life on the fringes, alienated and disenfranchised etc.

Disenfranchised of all societal privileges, we race fast cars quickly around the deserted (but not dilapidated) streets of some urban mega-metro - Shatter City, in fact. Lawless and badass, we terrorise the streets, smashing things to open up new parts of the map and then we go online to play an endless supply of user generated maps.

Sounds awesome.

It's not. Quite.

Ridge Racer Unbounded has one major flaw: its learning curve.

We are an office full of Burnout, NfS, Motorstorm, Blur
and Forza freaks.

We even loved almost every previous Ridge Racer. Typically we can pick up a racing game and begin to win immediately. Not because of how awesome we are,but because of the typical difficulty curve of racing games.

But in Ridge Racer Unbounded, four of us couldn't win the first game the first five or six times we tried it. And once I did get us a third place, we couldn't win the next race.

At first, I thought, "This is cool, a racing game that really challenges us all, makes us take our complacency and re-evaluate the shit out of it". I thought we had a challenge on our hands. But soon the challenge became a drudge.

Then it became annoying. No matter how well we raced, the AI cars left us for dead. When we caught sight of them, they hit the power-button and time-lapse tail-lighted into the distance. When we did occasionally get in front of them, they casually smashed us out of the way to retake the lead.

It went from disheartening to enrgaging. Yes, joypads were thrown down, not in "Step Up" style street dancing challenge, but in frustration and rage.

And when you do get bored of being humiliated by the AI, there is no option to turn to your friends, colleagues or little brothers to re-affirm your self esteem by beating them in local two-player mode - there isn't one. You only option is to go on-line and be humiliated some more.

If I liken the difficulty curve of this game to a road gradient, you would expect it to be flattish at first, to give us an opportunity to easily win one or two games and get bitten by the Ridge Racer bug, before curving gently skywards, with a barely imperceptible increase in gradient.

Like the proverbial boiled frog, the standard arcade racer makes you blissfully unaware of its increasing difficulty. Instead, difficulty curve wise, Ridge Racer Unbound is like a rapidly boiling person, driving fast down a short deadend road into a vertical wall of disappointment.

But as disappointed as I was, as much as I threw the joypad at the TV, cat, passing strangers etc. I always picked it back up again, always gave RRU one more go.

Because despite not winning, the game was fun. And despite not winning, I could tell I was getting better. Which is interesting, because I have a motto: "If at first you don't succeed, give up and go do something you are good at". And while I was not good at RRU, I could not stop playing.

The game looks great. The cities are well designed and compelling. There's a smattering of deformable street furniture to smash through, a warren of hidden short cuts to demolish, and a range of great looking cars to race.