Namco should be slapped on their botties for letting what could have been a tremendous title go to waste and with good reason sent to their room for the rest of the month.

One question deserves to be continually asked: Why oh why would you give away a game with so much history and so much of a following and allow it to be utterly ruined? It is the equivalent of having a million pound winning lottery ticket and giving it away to an alcoholic.

Imagine this: you have an incredible franchise that you develop over the years. Sure, it may not be realistic enough to warrant the title ‘A Driving Simulator’ but hey, it is a fun arcade racer, the graphics are top notch, the speed and the flavour of racing is such that you build a world-wide following of fans that stay with you over three generations of consoles. At the last hurdle, maybe time is the issue or resources either way you allow another developer to step in and as such they drop the ball, next thing you know it is 3 nill to your opponents…

I really wanted this game to be good, I really did. So much so that when I read some of the other reviews on the game I refused to believe them. When one of my friends pointed out that the key to the game is about learning how to use the ‘Drift Button’ effectively. Inside I jumped for joy; maybe it was a whole misunderstanding for the other reviewers but now, two whole days later, I realised he was under the same deluded self deception as me. You see, gamers like us who grew up on the whole Ridge Racer series just don’t want to believe their beloved franchise is in the pan. But trust me, for this game it is; it is in the pan with a little bit of extra virgin oil and under a high heat.

I’ve always said that I would put the boot in when it came to crap titles but the only thing that is worse in this world than a crap game is an expensive crap game. Oh and this game is crap with more crappy pieces than a crappy bits lunch box meal made by a crappy deep fried chicken chop shop that is crap. You see I wouldn’t enjoy this game if it came as a PSN cheap download – the fact that it costs £40 is plain pathetic and a waste of money. I actually owe it to gamers to stop them going out there and buying this tosh.

Where do I start? Ridge Racer Unbounded tries to bring in core elements of Split/Second and Burnout series to the franchise of old. By itself this should not be a nail in the coffin. Like Split/Second you can open up shortcuts around the track by filling a power meter which generates by sliding and tailing other racers you can use this power in one of four ways; to provide a quick boost, open up shortcuts, smash into your opponents or create explosions. Unlike Split/Second however, you don’t trigger the explosions or shortcuts remotely: you smash into them to explode them or open them up. The problem here is in the execution. Question: When is a shortcut not a shortcut? When you take it and more often than not it puts you behind the competitors…duh… It’s an idea that sounds pants on paper and in reality is pants to see. Practically all shortcuts I have seen besides looking good, offer very little else. The explosions are nothing to write home about and have none of that ‘Ream-ability’ factor seen in Split/Second.

Secondly is control. Ridge Racer has always been renowned for its pick up and play capability. It is an arcade racer; mistime your brake and you don’t always screw up or end up in a wall. Unbounded follows this legacy; in fact most of the walls are destructible, which to its credit is a nice touch, but rather than keeping with the common traits of the genre i.e. gas, brake, boost, what we have here is an addition in the form of a ‘slide button’ that is supposed to allow you powerslide round corners. You see, if you hit the brake, handbrake, or hit a wall you lose a lot of speed but if you power-slide you lose just a little bit of speed but go into a wide angle slide in which you will hit the wall anyway. Makes sense doesn’t it? I thought so. Adding to this is that your opponents never make mistakes – the AI difficulty is incredible and there are no options to change it – this all means you will be sitting there for a long time playing the same tracks again and again just to qualify one race. Now some of you might be forgiven for thinking ‘I bet you he is just having a moan because he is not good at racing games’ but the reality is I have played and completed most of this game’s competitors and it is their qualities that make this game pale in comparison.

Graphics is average. Split/Second (a game that is almost a year and a half old) and Motorstorm Apocalypse easily outdoes this title in terms of quality and execution and even with Unbounded’s exploding walls or vehicles it brings nothing that hasn’t been seen or done better elsewhere. And what happened to the 3D? Is this yet another title that had dropped the notion of 3D gaming?

Music is poor. A classic element of Ridge Racer was the banging tracks and cheesy voice over. Thankfully the voice over is gone but where are the tracks? A host of Japanese unknowns and a couple of drum and bass tracks are all you get for your money. My gosh, that is such a wasted opportunity; Namco could have done remixes from the whole of the franchise, even SSX had tracks you knew or could dance to. This is just a really appalling effort.

To be fair to Bugbear, they have tried to introduce variety into the game and franchise but I don’t think they really spoke to the fans, or truly had a grasp of what made the original games so much fun. The only thing I could say I liked was the game’s much-hyped track editor. After all who wouldn’t want to build a Ridge Racer track from scratch? I found it flexible and easy to use, putting together a decent course in a very short space of time which was great, obviously, but the underlying problems that affect the racing on the ‘actual’ tracks still applied. Ho-Hum…

My Verdict

Ridge Racer Unbounded is nothing but a shame and a waste of money. I simply cannot recommend a game when I know there are superior, cheaper alternatives out there. Even if you find it out on your travels as a cheapie, avoid like the plague. You have been warned.

2 out of 10