Namco Bandai tested the waters for build-your-own racing with the PlayStation Vita version of Ridge Racer, a game that was sold with a minimal amount of content at a cheaper than average price point and was then supplemented by paid DLC packs. Now the publisher is outright embracing a true free-to-play model with the next Ridge Racer.
Scheduled for digital download release on PC and PS3 later this year, Ridge Racer Driftopia is a free-to-play racer in development at Bugbear Entertainment, the same studio behind Ridge Racer Unbounded. The visual similarities are readily apparent. What’s not so clear yet is how much content will be included in the base game, and how much additional purchases will cost. Players willing to invest in microtransactions will be able to purchase additional cars, experience point boosts, repair kits and booster packs containing special ability cards.
What do you think? Interesting concept? Or is Namco Bandai bastardizing Ridge Racer too much at this point? To me it seems like a quick cash-in attempt to bide time until the next real Ridge Racer is ready. I mean come on, there has to be a new Ridge Racer in development for the launches of the PS4 and next-gen Xbox, because no console launch is complete without a Ridge Racer.
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I admit that I’m not much of a gear head when it comes to driving or playing racing games. I find that arcade racers that lean a bit toward the realistic but offer plenty of spectacle are games that sit just right in my wheelhouse. Kart racers are usually too “cartoony” and suffer from rubber banding which ultimately causes more frustration than fun. Realistic driving simulations can be fun but I often find myself quickly being inundated with jargon that comes off as complete Greek. Sure, I’ve replaced brakes on an old car once or twice, but I also drive to work everyday fending off the speeding morons on the Detroit Autobaun more commonly known as 696. Driving in a realistic world happens everyday, albeit in an average four-door coupe. I don’t need to play a video game to escape into a dramatic racing world that I’ll never experience first hand. Instead, give me a game that has enough real world handling, but a bit more excitement and no real consequences if I accidentally ram my car into another vehicle or a building.
Ridge Racer Unbounded pieces together almost the perfect amount of real world driving, spectacular crashes, unlockable course building and online racing to build the engine of a competent arcade racing simulation. Unlike traditional Ridge Racer titles, Unbounded feels more like the next Burnout title, but with some of the original drifting tendencies. The game loads with a bit of a bland menu offering up single player, multiplayer, creative and statistic selections. Choosing single player, a map of fictional city Shatter Bay is displayed with nine regions in the city hosting seven specific events in each.
The individual events include Domination Race, Shindo Race, Drift Attack, Time Attack, and Frag Attack. Domination races are your general race events mixing demolition crashes, drifting for power boosts and finishing third, second or first. Shindo racing is all about style and drifting behind the wheel of beautifully designed high-end sports cars all the while trying to fill the boost meter to stay as far ahead of the rest of the racers as possible. Drift Attack revolves around trying to drift for a certain distance to gain third, second or first place. The longer the drift, the more time is added back to the ever-diminishing timer. Drifting is fun, but I find that the other event types are more engaging.
Time Attack reminds me of TrackMania and the crazy courses with half-pipe ramps designed to force high speed racing while the car is upside down. As with the drifting races, Time Attack has a countdown timer which can be stopped by collecting blue icons floating throughout the race. Frag Attack is just what it sounds like: Race against the clock while trying to take out as many other racers before the timer stops. The twist to Frag Attack is that sometimes you are racing in a huge semi, crashing through barricades, sidewalk debris, and bridge support columns, all for the sake of filling the boost meter to charge at police vehicles.
Now I’m not condoning reckless driving, but there is a child-like giddiness that builds as you speed through a detailed city block, ramming other race cars and bursting through entire buildings to open shortcuts that driving in the real world just would never allow. The fun factor in Ridge Racer Unbounded is spot on. The challenge is then balancing fun with actually coming out on top in any given race.
As I mentioned earlier, each region of the city has seven unique races. During each race, points are earned for fragging other cars, bursting through buildings, hitting jumps and staying in the air for great distances, drifting for long stretches or just driving at top speeds for long distances. Adding to those points are the place finishing points. Third place nets 5000, second 10,000, and first earns 15,000 points. These points are then applied in two different areas. Events in each region unlock by gaining a specific number of points. Your driver also levels up with the points earned from each race.
Leveling up the driver unlocks new car types which allow different (and sometimes better) cars to choose from within each race event. With this type of point system in place, Unbounded offers plenty of replay value, but it can also be a bit frustrating. I found myself replaying the same races several times over and over again, often times restarting if the initial start didn’t fall in line right away. All for the sake of unlocking additional content. Fortunately, the point system for leveling up the driver accumulates and continues to build at the end of each race which means that better cars are just a race or two away if one particular event is unbeatable with the current supply of cars. Unfortunately, however, if the points earned in a race are not more than the previous run, those points don’t add up. Thus later events in a particular region remain locked until enough points are earned.
Multiplayer in Unbounded consists of racing with live opponents as well as racing on user-created tracks. Points earned during these races apply toward your driver level and the system can almost be gamed by finding certain player created levels that do nothing more than artificially boost points and provide cheap power leveling. I’m not saying that is a bad thing. In fact, I think some of the most fun I have had with the game is playing player-made tracks that seemingly have destructive boost points every three or four seconds causing a cacophony of slow motion destruction and chaos. The player created levels are great, but getting into online matches is even more fun. Maybe I’m a bit jaded after having no fun with the online Twisted Metal experience, but it is nice to load up Unbounded, select multiplayer and just hop right into a match without waiting for a game to start.
Track creation is handled by first picking which type of race (Time Attack, Domination, Frag, etc.) and then creating the general shape of the track. Then the track editor switches to placing various objects throughout the course, either explosions, barricades, or jumps. The editor itself is fairly simple and easy to use, and any objects placed on the course are either green (meaning they can be added) or red (meaning there isn’t enough room for that particular object). Once the shape is set and any obstacles are put into place, the editor allows players to test the track before publishing for public sharing. As you level up as a driver, track editor themes and objects become unlocked.
Load times throughout the game are a bit of a disappointment. Events take a while to load, but resetting while a race that has already been loaded takes only seconds (which is a great thing for perfectionists). After events are complete the game saves progress, but at a snail’s pace. While the races can take a few minutes to run, I felt that a lot of my time was spent staring at loading or saving screens. One other thing I feel I need to call out about the game is the over use of orange in the color palette. Many of the races are set during dusk and a range of orange hues shower the screen somewhat dulling an otherwise vibrant game.
Overall, Ridge Racer Unbounded is a fun fusion of arcade-style street racing and community-driven track creation. Mixing Burnout with Ridge Racer works well, but fans of the Ridge Racer series may not be getting exactly what they think they are. Anyone looking at Unbounded to be the next installment of “traditional” Ridge Racer, may initially be put off by the sudden changes. Gamers looking for the next shiny new racing game to drive, however, shouldn’t think twice about taking Unbounded for a joyride.
Pros:
+ Fun, destructive racing
+ Track creator is easy to use
+ Lots of variety in race types
Cons:
– Load times can be a nuisance
– Heavy reliance on orange
Game Info:
Platform: Reviewed on PS3, also available for PC and Xbox 360
Publisher: Namco Bandai
Developer: Bugbear Entertainment
Release Date: 3/27/2012
Genre: Racing
ESRB Rating: Teen
Players: 1-4
Source: Review copy provided by publisher
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This is a modern arcade racing game that ships with three tracks. Assuming you are reading this relatively close to release and are presently standing in front of a bargain bin looking for advice via a smartphone on whether or not to buy the game in your hand or a pair of Cinnabons from the store next door, about the best you can hope to do on price is $25. Those two sentences ought to give you a decent idea of whether or not you are down for some Ridge Racer on your Vita at this point in your life. Or, if you’re reading this in the future, more into an old Vita release or sticky fingers and diabetes.
Whether or not it was a good idea is questionable, but the idea behind this release of the classic franchise and its reduced price tag is that more tracks and cars will be released as time goes on. Players can “build their own” game as it were, picking and choosing from the new tracks and cars that are put out online post-release. It is an interesting concept. All but a few racing games lose their appeal four months or less after a retail release as by then everyone way into the game has raced through all of the tracks hundreds of times, unlocked all of the cars and tuned a particular favorite to the point where young John Travolta will sing its praises. So unless the online scene is there, players will put the game down until another game in the franchise comes out.
Portioning out the content, to people with an internet connection, is a way to extend the lifespan of a racing game. The problem is that the initial investment here still is fairly steep for what one gets. There can be a ton of modes and songs and different looking cars to race, which there are not a ton of here, but it does not get away from the fact that there are only three tracks. This game should have either cost less or there should have been more given to players upfront. Early adopters, or those that can find an unopened, first run, hard copy, do get a Gold Pass to a few new pieces of DLC. Most significantly, this DLC will increase the track count from three to six and add five more cars to the player’s garage. But apparently this golden ticket was only valid through March 31st, which means anyone contemplating a purchase now is looking at three tracks for the upfront cost of $25-30, plus an additional — and completely optional — fee of $7.49 to buy the pass separately. A Silver Pass also just released this week (late April 2012). This grants access to three more courses and cars, as they are released over the coming weeks, for another payment of $6.99. (The same DLC cars and tracks are also sold individually for $1.49 – $2.49 each.) Copper, Platinum and Solid Hydrogen – that last one should be super cool and as dense as the other releases – have not been announced or priced yet, but if and when they are, I would guess they will contain a similar amount of content for the same price. A little arithmetic reveals that Namco is one more release away from equaling a full retail price when all content is bought separately. Which leads to the reasonable inference that there will be at least two more releases like the ones out now.
Even if there was only one track, it would become clear after the first turn that the gameplay in this Vita release of Namco Bandai’s signature racing series is not any different than it has been in the last couple of years. Writing less generally, the gameplay is the same as it was on March 22, 2005, the date when Ridge Racer was released for the PSP in North America. It looks a lot better, but it is the same basic game. For those that haven’t played one of these games before, the big thing that distinguishes Ridge Racin’ from cross country, NASCAR or futuristic hover machine racing is the art of the drift. More so than other racing games, anyone who decides to buy this game will come to understand that this series is about as arcade as one can get when racing without there being guns on the cars.
I assume the game has a button that activates a car’s brakes. I have no idea if it actually does because if you are using the brakes in Ridge Racer, you are playing the game incorrectly. Or, if not wrong, then not in the way that the development team envisioned. It is almost as if they answered the challenge to make a racing game with only a D-pad and one button for Nitrous and one for acceleration. This game series is very much about cars speeding down straightaways and then stopping the gas for a split-second while turning into a curve to drift through a series of hairpin turns while losing as little velocity as possible. A car racing on a ridge in Namco’s world will only slow down if the driver has made a mistake and gone off the road or when the car is drifting (and even then, not a lot). There is something very appealing about Ridge Racer that is maintained in this game. Shooting around corners while feeling like the car is barely under control with techno music mixing with the squeal of tires is as fun as ever, but it is not something that players have not seen many times before. This is one of the better racing games out now for the Vita in terms of just the racing itself, and from the looks of the release calendar it is likely going to remain that way for some time.
It is difficult to say whether or not the game looks good as this is a launch game (or at least a title released in the “launch window”) and so it is hard to tell if the graphics are nice for the system. Since all three of the default tracks appeared in Ridge Racer for the PSP, it is easy to make a comparison between the two. Unsurprisingly, the Vita game is significantly better looking than the very old PSP game. The deaf cows by the side of the road in Highland Cliffs look like actual animals, fireworks will occasionally pop off in the night track and look nice, and the road looks like a road with tire marks and streaks, not a dull gray river. The hardware improvement and the bigger screen show off just how much better the Vita is visually than the PSP when the two titles are run side by side. The cars themselves look a little jaggy in the menus but once in the race, they look fine. Only when the Nitrous is engaged does the game create a good sense of speed with motion blurs and dulled edges of the screen, mirroring the focused eyesight of a driver going two hundred plus miles an hour down a track. The menus are slick and controlled with the touch screen with big attractive icons.
The online interface is a disaster. Unless you have a dude in the room that wants to race, the options include Ghost Battles, racing against a collision-less car someone ran in the past, or online racing via Wifi. When racing one on one against someone’s ghost car, it works fine with the form and lines used by the other racer are replicated perfectly. The problem is tied to the way that cars are upgraded in the game. All cars have upgrade paths and a global system to determine how fast they can go. So, the longer and better one races, the better the cars will be. As it is easy to imagine, if someone just starting out racing against super high level racer-runs, they will get stomped and not have fun. There is no filter to show only ghosts that are level appropriate, meaning 500-odd ghosts have to be sorted through to find one that is beatable. In order to get the equivalent of experience points, racers have to battle ghosts or complete races online, and to get the most points, victory is required. Grinding against superior ghosts for points necessary to even stand a chance is not fun.
The online against other people is similarly problematic. On the plus side, here there is a filter to show only other races with drivers of the same level. The problem is that there usually are no racers of the same level online given the, what I can only gather to be, limited user base. Additionally, whenever a connection is dropped or a lobby fills up, or one wants to go back, the online menus will forget all other lobbies and dump users back to the main menu. “Frustrating and inexcusable” or “kind of online interface I would have expected before the year 2000” are phrases that come to mind. If there was a big, fat “Quick Match” button it might be OK, but there is no such feature. Assuming one can get into a game with appropriate opponents, it works well. As it seems that Online play in its various forms is the focus of this title, it is a huge shame that all the menus and syncing get in the way of playing the game because when the game finally gets started it is a lot of fun.
There is also a bunch of artificial social networking jazz heaped into the game where players are placed on teams apparently based on where you are when the game is first fired up. The Japanese team is winning those online leaderboards by a substantial margin as one might expect given that Ridge Racer is more popular over there than in America and Europe. Things that could be called “tweets by people good at Ridge Racer” can be read in the form of interviews with dangerous, top racers. But they aren’t tweets because then Namco would have had to integrate the game with an online network someone might care about. It is difficult to see users with access to real, uncut social media caring about any of this racer faction war.
Ridge Racer for the Vita is a good game to have installed on the console to play for a race or two between games with a little more meat on them or maybe in between matches on a regular console or PC game with the suspended Vita on a table nearby. For just ease of use, most are going to want to stick to the single player matches than wrestle the almost inaccessible online. In the context of once off meaningless racing, it is worthwhile and the price helps ease the lack of features and content. But if you’re swapping out Vita cards exclusively and know that your game playing does not incorporate two games running at once, you’re not going to want to put this card in a lot, maybe not at all, given that there is not a ton to do. Anyone on the fence might be best served to wait until some sort of ultimate edition comes out which contains all of the content to ever be released at a price that will probably be less than all of the packs bought separately.
Pros:
+ Classic drift racing is out, again, just in time for a launch window
Cons:
– Online mode is not easy to use
– Strange content release model makes it difficult to recommend to those that want a complete racing experience without buying a bunch of DLC
Game Info:
Platform: PlayStation Vita
Publisher: Namco Bandai
Developer: Cellius
Release Date: 3/13/2012
Genre: Racing
ESRB Rating: E10+
Players: 1-8
Source: Review code provided by publisher
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