Hands-On with Ridge Racer Unbounded

Ridge Racer Unbounded, the next game in this classic arcade racer series, is being developed by Finish company Bugbear, who created FlatOut. It’s certainly not at all like Burnout in that it doesn’t have a power gauge to fill up, it doesn’t reward you for swerving wildly around the track and you definitely don’t use your power gauge to take out your opponents.

Oh, that’s right. You do. But actually… it really isn’t as much like Burnout as it looks. Yes, Ridge Racer Unbounded stays faithful to its own heritage in that you jam your finger on the accelerator and don’t let up until you’ve crossed the finish line. That’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Unbounded’s big feature lies in destruction. Fill your power bar by drifting crazily around corners and and by plowing through freeway support pillars as if they’re made of cheese. Once the gauge is full, use it to destroy doorways, monoliths and iconic entrances to reveal magnificent hallways and open up shortcuts along the race track.

The thing is, these good bits are all set pieces and in my experience, there aren’t that many of them on a track. Yes, you can destroy post boxes and fancy fretwork and the aforementioned pillars all around the track by simply driving through them but these do bugger-all to the race beyond leaving debris about the place. Smashing through all the supports on a freeway won’t drop the road onto your opponent’s hood and charging through picnic tables will mostly leave you with bits of picnic table obscuring your view.

If you drift around corners as well as ploughing through outdoor cafés, it really doesn’t take much to fill up the power bar and the opportunies to use it well are few and far between. You see, this isn’t a boost gauge that we’ve seen in so many other games. It runs for no more than a seconds or two and its main use is for blasting through the predetermined sections of building for the shortcuts.

In any multiplayer race, chances are the race leader has already powered his or her way through most of the shortcut entrances on the first lap, leaving you with, frankly, bugger all to use your own power on. The most you can hope for is that you manage to get alongside an opponent and power into him on a corner but with the incredibly wide tracks, you’re probably better off just being the better driver. After the first lap, the whole destruction/power thing loses its appeal and the game feels much like a straight racer.

As with all racers these days, you gather points to rank up and unlock cars and city blocks for the track-building section of the game. Points in Unbounded are tied to destruction rather than winning – it’s entirely possible to finish a race with triple the points of everyone else but still come in last place. This gives laggards a reason to stay in the race instead of rage-quitting, at least until they unlock what they need.

The time attack mode is quite the challenge. As you can see in the video above, Unbounded tracks are built from city blocks. The time trial track I played was a mix of skyscraper-lined streets, steeply-banked superspeedways and rooftop ramps. Plonked together with little obvious rhyme or reason, they’ll keep you on your toes at high speed, if only to avoid slamming into the raised edge of a speedway where you were expecting a flat road.

Ridge Racer Unbounded looks like a promising racer with some great urban environments. I have my personal doubts over the fun factor of the power gauge but with hundreds of user-created tracks, I expect arcade fans to be playing this for a long time.

Ridge Racer Unbounded is released on the 30th March 2012 for PlayStation 3, PC and Xbox 360.