One of the biggest questions I had when booting up Ridge Racer Unbounded for the first time was, “Why is this a Ridge Racer game?” The Ridge Racer franchise is an arcade drifting series that started with the PSone. But Ridge Racer is marked with some particular mechanics. One is to hit turns and then use automatic drift to go around the corner, chaining these together to drive faster than the folks that don’t drift. This doesn’t exist here, in fact, drifting usually slows you down too much. Another are fun cars named with brands that Namco owns, these cars are also usually crazy futuristic and cool. Neither of these things exist in Unbounded. In fact, Unbounded is more like a tame version of Burnout where the designers sometimes try to emulate existing vehicles in the world. Ridge Racer also usually has a very arcady Japanese feel, with a cheesy announcer and unrealistically bright world. This game veers more toward the unnaturally dark than the previous. What did naming this Unbounded do for the game? Considering the lackluster reception that all Ridge Racer games have received since the launch of PS3; I’m not sure I would be hitching my horse to it any time soon.
There really is no story in this game and the main mode for the campaign is simply to play race after race trying to get three stars; another words, win. The player does receive experience points one way or another. They just don’t receive the bonus for placing first, second, or third. As these experience points accrue the player unlocks cars, tracks, and track elements for the track editor.
The main race type in the campaign are Dominaiton Races. These races consist of 4-12 competitors(usually 12), there are some destructible elements in track. But as you hit other cars, exceed a certain amount of speed, or drift. You gain points on a meter toward power. Once you cap the power meter; you can hit a button and get a boost that also allows the player to go through some particular destructibles and this is also the easiest way to wreck other cars. To me it seemed relatively obvious that the game engine couldn’t handle all the destruction and 12 cars. When not in slow motion due to hitting a car or breaking through an animation inducing barrier. There is some SERIOUS slow down on the installed XBOX 360 version. The game probably goes from 30-60 FPS to 10 FPS.
In other modes, like Time Attack(beat a set time), Frag Attack(hit as many enemy cars as possible), and Shindo Racing(just racing with only boost and no destructibles); there isn’t this slow down. Mostly because most of these modes don’t have the destructible environment elements like there are in Domination Mode. Even when they do, there are much fewer of them.
All of the limitations of the engine don’t exactly hurt the game too much. But what does hurt the game as a whole is the silly difficulty level of the A.I. Mostly this is due to the fact that the A.I. cars don’t adhere to the rules that the player car adheres to. They can earn full power meter without drifting or meeting any of the criteria for it. When one A.I. car is taken out by another A.I. car they respawn directly back into the position they were when they were taken out. This also happens when the player takes out an A.I. car. While if the player is taken out they lose however many seconds it takes to respawn. This is not a matter of rubber banding A.I. The A.I. cars are extremely difficult to catch up to and pass considering most races the player is put last or near to last. There really doesn’t seem to be any difference in A.I. difficulty from the first city to the fifth or sixth city you get by unlocking. The types of cars may be different but in most cases this doesn’t really matter.
The player gets cars, tracks, and new track elements for the editor as they earn experience. But most the cars in the main Domination mode are only made up of one class and this class has one or two descent cars in it. They are all pretty slow and half are pretty fragile. Considering the crazy level of unchangeable difficulty it might have been fun to not lock cars into classes. Or maybe just make better Street Class cars. Because these are all pretty lame. Gaining track elements by leveling is a pretty poor idea considering you might not have earned some track pieces that you want to put on your track. Why require the track designer to make a multi-hour commitment rather than letting them just build a bunch of cool tracks. Beating your own track is a requirement to complete your track. Which is fine except that the A.I. difficulty is SO high even on EASY(which is only selectable in the track editor and no where else in the entire game); that I think many designers have simply created an impassable areas for the A.I. to run into and for normal players to go around. I’ve seen it quite often and I’m guessing this is the reason. Also, I’ve seen some completely ridiculous broken tracks that have made it through this race proofing concept. Which simply proves that the idea of holding the designers to the standard of the top racers is counter productive.
Which leads me to the online functionality. Which for most players is where the meat of their experience will be. The game allows the player to create tracks with a quick and easy editor. It takes around 15 minutes to make a descent track and run through it. The online is very good, downloading each track as you select it. From selecting the track to playing will probably only take a minute or two depending on your internet strength. In this area the game is great. This part of the multiplayer is set up more like the campaign where your goal is to beat the creator’s score on the track. Then there is the multiplayer mode where you actually race head to head with other people. You can do this on user tracks or tracks from the campaign. And this would be great too, but I can’t comment on it. Because try as I may, I couldn’t get one single solitary game with other people. Not even one. Which this is probably Namco’s fault for not doing any advertising at all for this game and then there being some kind of shortage or distribution problem. But whatever the reason there was no one online during launch week or the week after launch.
I did have a great time playing through most of Ridge Racer Unbounded and I think anyone with a liking for Burnout or Split Second should definitely give it a look. But what I found was that the longer I played it, the less I liked it. Without any of the real trappings of Ridge Racer this game seems like it could have used an identity of it’s own to hang it’s hat on. With it’s wonky difficulty, bad framerate dips, lack of online community, it doesn’t seem like this game was built to last. The game was a great idea, but the implementation could probably use further testing. 8/10…
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