Ridge Racer Unbounded Review
I feel it’s important to state up front that some reviews of Ridge Racer Unbounded will be a cautionary tale for developers about the importance of including a tutorial. Diligent critics such as myself will labour away at Bugbear’s new arcade racing game for hours on end and their experience will be horrible. It will be a war of attrition and nothing will make sense. Envisaged as a counterpoint to the traditional slide-happy Ridge Racer – a sort of evil twin with destructible scenery and violent takedowns – it feels like a poor cross between Split/Second and Burnout 3. By drifting, drafting and smashing through scenery, you fill a Power meter, which you can then deploy to either create shortcuts through smashable walls, set off explosives, or crash into other cars directly to “frag” them – Unbounded’s version of the classic Takedown. But it’s all so perilously bland. You can blast your way through all sorts of buildings, highlighted by on-screen icons when you’re powered up, but the carnage lacks the punch of Split/Second’s collapsing airports or MotorStorm’s apocalypse, and the shortcuts you create seldom give you much of an advantage anyway. The takedowns, meanwhile, require little skill and hardly feel explosive; they’re more like mild prangs elevated to slow-motion extravaganzas so as to inject spectacle into otherwise-flaccid racing. Read more…
