Ridge Racer Unbounded

Unbounded is only Ridge Racer by name, and takes its main game-play idea from Burnout. The overall aim is to race and come in the top 3, but on the way you can attain additional points by power-sliding and causing destruction along your way. Power-sliding subsequently charges your boost, which is then used to take out opponents, or plough through destructible objects or buildings to uncover minor short-cuts.

Initially, the game is extremely tough to come anywhere near the top 3, but you can accumulate enough points to progress through many of the initial levels anyway. By coming in the top 3, you gain a large amount of points, so after 10 races or so, you do need to go back and try and take the top spots to increase your total score and unlock more tracks. Luckily, you unlock better cars as you progress which helps stay competitive.

It takes a while to get used to the power-sliding because it doesn't seem as arcadey as you would expect. When you do start perfecting it, you will rapidly fill the boost bar and speed your way to victory. There are multiple game types, Domination is the main game type, Shindo races is racing with boosts, but you cannot use them to take down opponents or destroy buildings like in Domination. Drift races make you try and accumulate as many points as possible and aim for a target score. Frag Attack recharges your boost quickly, and you must chase a set of cars and take as many of them down and try and meet the target score. Time Attack has a course full of ramps and objects and you must navigate the course to meet the target times.

Unbounded is a very tough and challenging game but maintains its fun even after many retries. Also worth mentioning is that choosing to restart the race sees no loading times at all. Graphically, Unbounded is very impressive, and additionally, I love their decision to place items such as laps and time along the city walls, rather that being located on your HUD. Unbounded is a great game, but obviously the decision to call it Ridge Racer didn't go down so well with the fans as many people expected a different game. If you expect to get a game like Burnout rather than Ridge Racer, then there's lots of fun to be had with this.

There's one main ingredient I find missing in most modern racing games, it's speed. This games delivers on that in a big way. Also the graphics and game set-up with different goals to reach, like going fast, drifting much, fragging cars or just wreck mayhem gives a nice variety to the game while the speed just goes faster and faster. Also it's nice with a game that you don't need to click and load through several screens before you get to the racing, basically you can open a race within half a minute and the race takes like 5 minutes and then you can log out. That's anyway how I do it, not enjoying to be stuck too long in a game. Great game, one of the best racing game I have come upon since the 90s.