Game #994: Ridge Racer Unbounded

  Not my Ridge Racer.

 Last year, Ridge Racer quickly made itself a place in my heart, with simple but fun gameplay, and I had fun watching the series evolve. And then came Ridge Racer Unbounded, the entry that pretty much killed the series.

 Unbounded is not like other RR games, going for a more urban set-up. I think there's supposed to be some kind of story, but what matters is that the game is divided into 9 districts with about 7 events each. There's no offline multiplayer, which is absolutely idiotic, and the progression is very weird. After each event you are graded with up to three stars, and that usually unlocks new events, but you can also brute force your way through the game, as just completing a race nets you some XP. As you earn XP you also earn access to new cars. 

 This also means that there are no proper 'races', in Single Player all you get are the nine districts and all the events each one contains. No 'free racing' nor anything fun.  Adding to this... is that there's no way to change the difficulty setting. The game is brutal, the AI is relentless and cheats a lot, sometimes it feels like they charge their turbo way faster than humanly possible, and cars with low top-speed will just pass you by because screw you. I looked this up, and even people that liked the game admit that you will probably have to retry many stages. And that's the thing... Right now I don't have a ton of free time, and I sure as hell am not willing to spend that much time on a genre I don't even like all that much. I don't care about racing games, I don't care about 'gittin gud' at them, so I didn't even bother to finish the game because I got tired of making a single mistake that would cost me the entire race and force me to retry.

 And I'll give it this, the game is very pretty, but it's also very dark to point that sometimes it's very easy to crash against walls you thought were openings. Know what could've helped? A mini-map of the track to see where you are. On the flip-side, adding to the visual eye candy, the city is very destructible, which makes races very exciting.

 To add to this... there's no tutorial. I found some people saying that you must hold the drift button all the way through the curve, others that you should use the breaks and the accelerator WHILE holding down drift, others that you shouldn't... What worked for me was letting go off the accelerator and holding down the drift button for a little while and then pumping gas once I was ready to get out of the curve, but even then, I crashed a lot. In other words, it's hard to understand how this game should be played, and there's no in-game guide to help you. Good luck!

 While RR has always focused on drifting, this one is focused on destruction. Certain actions, such as destroying the city, drifting or tailing other racers fill your POWER gauge, once full you get a turbo. If you catch an enemy from behind while turboing you'll wreck them. You can also use it to open up "shortcuts", except that they are barely shortcuts and are mostly just to let you chain POWER. It's fun seeing you destroy walls and what not, but the fact that they don't feel very useful makes them lose their fun quickly. Touching back on the unfairness of the CPU, if you get wrecked you'll probably find yourself back quite a few positions, while it's not weird to see a CPU enemy you just destroyed pass you by after a few seconds. It's crazy.

 Ridge Racer Unbounded doesn't feel like any other game in the series, and it's also unapologetically tough, no tutorial, no explanation, no way to change the difficulty setting, it's just you and your skills, which admittedly, might be exactly what some people want. Not me, though. That said, I think the game looks pretty nice and races can be rather exciting thanks to how destructible everything is. Honestly, this game wasn't made for Ridge Racer fans, and it's missing both accessibility options as well as features(Multiplayer, Free Races) that made the other Ridge Racer off-shoot, R: Racing Evolution, palatable even if it wasn't your thing.

 5.5