Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Feb 13, 2022

  I found myself craving an arcade racer recently and remembered I had this game in my library. I seem to have shelved it and not sure I remember why. After a few minutes playing it again, I got my answer. I'll skip my story section since it's pretty bare bones. What I will point out is Ridge Racer as a franchise is usually bright and colorful. This entry you can tell was inspired by games like Burnout and Need for Speed. It's a homunculus of all the styles put together, and I'm sorry to say it doesn't work. Graphically, the game looks beautiful, has a nice soundtrack, and the gameplay, at first, is pretty solid. You gain boost by drifting and tailing your opponents. You cannot use your boost until the bar is full and then you get a burst of speed. You can use your boost to break through buildings or obstacles to create shortcuts or explode your enemies. You can also just use it to catch up. My main problem with this game is the difficulty. You have to drive perfect or you are not winning or even qualifying to unlock more levels. If you crash once or drift out of control (which will happen a lot until you unlock more cars), you aren't winning the race. This makes for very frustrating gameplay, unless you like the challenge. My second problem is the level design. The game world takes place in Shatter City and after the first few tracks you will notice that all levels are roughly the same just different portions of the city. It's quite lazy and disappointing. Even though there are different events and modes, it doesn't help that you are literally playing the same level over and over but just in a different part that you couldn't access before. Now the one thing I will praise the game for is that losing isn't the end all to be all. You still get experience for the actions you take in a race and that goes towards unlocking new cars and items for the level editor. The level editor is a nice touch, and although it is bare bones with just you placing blocks, I still think it's cool to mess around and play with when you unlock new blocks. However, due to the servers being done, you can't play anyone or share levels so it'll be more of a couch fun thing. Final verdict? Unless you really want to challenge yourself with super hard AI and horrible drift controls, I can't really recommend this game. The price for admission isn't bad at $10, but just prepare yourself for frustration going in. I did enjoy pieces of the game, but the overall package was just too annoying to complete. Thanks for reading!
• ToastyEgg

  Jun 26, 2022

  Handling sucks and thats the most important thing, please dont bother with this even at such a low price.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 7, 2014

  As with all Ridge Racer titles, the game play is fast paced, arcade-like, explosive fun. Once you master the art of drifting (some cars are much better than others), you can start scoring huge drift scores and unlocking new cars, new races, new districts, and finally city blocks for the track editor (that allows you to make your own race track and share it online for others to race). You can even drive an American Truck and ram the police, and some of the time trials are nuts taking you through loop the loops, and insane angles. Despite all this, I found the game a bit too easy to master. If you liked Driftopia, you'll probably love this too. Personal Rating: A bit too easy, but nonetheless good solid fun. Score Rating: 75% - It's Ridge Racer, no surprises!
• gamedeal user

  Aug 8, 2022

  Overshadowed by NFS Franchise, I Believe :|

  <+> Good Graphics (Based on Release Year) <+> Do-able Car Handling <+> Nice atmosphere/ level design <+> Decent Progression System <+> Good Soundtracks <-> Pretty Underrated
• gamedeal user

  Sep 10, 2022

  A really, really underrated game. It reminds me more of Split/Second than a typical Ridge Racer game. It plays great on Steam Deck and is a hidden gem worth owning.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 10, 2014

  I just couldn't stand it anymore. That's my short-review of Unbounded. Is a long-review really necessary? *Sigh* Well if nothing can be done about it, let's dive in. I've been a Ridge Racer fan for quite a long time. Aside from Ridge Racer Vita, R: Racing Evolution, and maybe Rave Racer, I've played all the games. I'm extensively familiar with the series, but that's irrelevant. Unbounded is...I don't know what it is. Was it some game Namco bought and then had some RR music and cars included to tie everything together? I don't know. So yeah, if I compare this game to RR, or hell if I so much has even mention that game, then I've lost. Unbounded takes place in Shatter Bay, where a mysterious group is involved in illegal street racing. Apparently they hate the city almost as much as they hate each other. This is one of those racing games where not only can you obliterate your rivals, but you can also bust through cafes, government buildings, and construction sites for a shortcut. The similarities to Burnout are pretty obvious, though in this game "checking" a rival is a bit more binary. By catching air, drifting, and/or receiving various in-race awards, the player gets boost. Aside from a temporary increase in speed, anyone you run into during that brief period is going to get wrecked. This is about a 95% chance. If you're grinding next to someone (oh my) and you hit the boost, they're going to turn into flaming wreckage instantly. When not boosting you have a 5% chance of wrecking someone. This is a neat way to reverse all the dirty tricks that can happen in a usual race. Say you're one of two racers making a turn. You're on the outside, and the inside guy is using you as a buffer to avoid hitting the wall. This is a great time to boost because they'll suffer dearly. Also whenever you wreck an opponent, the game auto-corrects your car, so you don't drive into a wall or anything. Exploiting this mechanic can be quite handy. Your opponents can boost as well, and aside from the red trail there's no obvious indication that they've boosted. Something like a sound effect could have been really useful. As it stands you're better off handling the other racers with kid gloves (especially if they're cheating AI), because they could boost at potentially any moment and take you out. Boosting is also necessary for certain destructable objects. Their usefulness in the actual race varies, and they could just as easily glitch out and cause you to flip over or get turned around. To unlock more races you have to amass a lot of points, destroying stuff is how you get them. There are no shortage of tracks in this game. That's because they're all created via a track-editor. It's a neat idea but not really fleshed out. Basically each track is divided into sections. Let's say there is a straight-away, a curve to the right, a squiggly line, a hard-angle right, a dip, a long-easy right, a hairpin right, and that's the track. A lot of time in arcade-racers is spent learning the track itself, but with this game it doesn't seem to matter much at all. Instead you familiarize yourself with particular turns (the 1 or 2 difficult ones to be precise). While the track-editor allows further customization by adding objects and other tools, it's not as deep as it could be. Let's call it a limitation of the game-design. It's difficult to create ornate tracks when it's expected that a handful of racers are trying to destroy each other. There are a lot of created tracks floating around, and some are really interesting. Consider spending some time checking things out online. I don't like the handling. Normally I'd just tack this on to the end of a huge paragraph, but it's the #1 reason why I couldn't take anymore of this game. The main reason I don't like it is because it's inconsistent. With some games drifting has either A) a sizable learning curve, or B) can be picked up in the first few seconds. Both A & B work on their own. Daytona USA** is an A type, while Ridge Racer (I lose!) is a B type. Both games have appropriate learning curves, and mastering them is an exceptional feat despite the wildly different barriers of entry. Unbounded can't be an A type because the tracks aren't nearly as involved and well-designed. There's only so much you can do with such a base-selection of turns. Unbounded isn't a B type either because the cars have more weight, it takes more counter-steering not to lose control, and deciding between what type of brake to use to initiate the drift is more important. Essentially the system just doesn't gel for me, but I guess it doesn't matter. This game apparently considers good drifting somewhere towards the bottom of "things you should actually be concerned about in a race". In the career mode there are very few time-attack races, and even then they have gimmicks like icons you pick up to freeze the clock. There are drifting events too, but you don't think about applying what you've picked up in an actual race. It's hard to appreciate a good drift in this game, when it's usually more effective to barrel through the opposition with a boost. Sometimes the winner is merely the racer that managed to get away from the chaos. More often than not, driving skill takes a backseat. Altogether Unbounded just isn't satisfying. It never flicks the "Hell Yeah!" switch in my brain. Quad-kills, surviving a brutally difficult platforming section, or just executing the perfect drift through the hardest turn, these are just some of the many "Hell Yeah!" moments. Unbounded has never in my 7 hours* of play elicited that same response. I do all these supposedly awesome things but it's just not exciting at all. *Yes I realize that by playing the game for a sizable amount of time, I've opened myself up to comments such as "If you didn't like the game, why'd you play it for that long?" I was ready to quit this game after 2 hours, but that wouldn't be fair would it? Although, I probably should have beat the game, but playing Unbounded for 10+ hours is just too much to ask of me. Sorry. **In Daytona USA it's called power-sliding. It's the same but different. DETAILS.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 26, 2022

  It's a decent racing game. I still don't get it why the reviews are so bad. The only reason could be, the people who hate this game love riding cocks but cars.
• SteveQuestionmark

  Nov 19, 2022

  The handling is fine. You all just suck at it.
• dragondan2453

  Jan 3, 2023

  Ridge Racer Meets Burnout with Mediocre Results. Better off getting your racing fix elsewhere.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 19, 2014

  Its not a ridge racer game. Its burnout meets trackmania without a clear focus. The game is based around beautiful destruction physics but in order to destroy other cars, you need to drift, chase, or destroy items. Destroying items is worthless since you get a fraction of the boost needed, so you tend to be drifting a lot. However the ai just gains boost at a steady pace, meaning they will just boost whenever their meter is full. The boost itself is odd, its designed around strategic use to either power through a corner, destroy a city target to get more speed/shortcuts, or take out a racer but instead the game requires you to be constantly boosting in order to keep up. As well, there are no mechanics to allow players to catch up. None of the short cuts drastically change the map and the leader can use his boost to open it up anyways so there is no way for someone behind him to catch up unless he messes up. Given the nature boost is gained, the late game is also to the favor of the leader as there are less targets available and players are more spread out. Combat is also weird. There are no rewards for damaging cars, and you don't get boost if you frag someone in a special way ala burnout. Also unlike later burnout entries, there is only one type of car per race. As a result, cars with good acceleration and speed trump all else since they can drift fine and use boost to make up for any lose of speed. The game does have one very interesting part and thats the special events. These include some trackmania esque maps where you have to get to the finish line while hitting targets. But what sells the game to me is the sense of destruction. The objects you destroy remain on the track making the track feel more and more wartorn and whenever you destroy a car you see an amazing slow motion view of it bouncing. It never got old for me. As for the default levels, they are pretty generic and some end up being confusing since they reuse prefabs in an unusual way. The events aren't always balanced, either, some will prove to be a pain since you just don't have the right car for it or others are so easy because you can use a car that the level wasn't balanced for. The star is the player-made levels, of which there are tons, which use the ingame editor and allow for a nice variety of fun and bizarre levels. The game to me seems like a case where there was a pre-existing game that was adapted with the ridge racer brand and then rushed into development. I say get the game if you like arcade destruction racing , the 10 dollar price tag is appropiate but with games like carmageddon and NCG, there are more focused alternatives.