Ridge Racer Unbounded

I've spent enough time with arcade racers to know when a game is pretending to be two things at once, and Ridge Racer Unbounded is unapologetically doing exactly that. Bugbear, the Finnish studio behind the FlatOut series, took the Ridge Racer name and rebuilt it from scratch as a destruction-first city racer set in Shatter Bay, an urban playground stuffed with smashable buildings, gas stations, and rival cars that crumple with enormous satisfaction. If you loaded this up expecting the breezy, neon-lit drift circuits of classic Ridge Racer, prepare for a genuine shock. This is closer to Burnout Paradise crossed with Split/Second, and that is not a complaint. The core loop runs on a Power meter you fill through drifting, slipstreaming, clean overtakes, and yes, deliberately grazing walls and obstacles. Max it out and you can either trigger a turbo burst or spend it on a Frag, which is Unbounded's term for a takedown: you line up a rival and detonate them in a gorgeous slow-motion crash sequence that never really gets old. Beyond the standard circuit races, the game offers Frag Attack modes (wipe out every opponent), Drift Attack events (chain slides to delay a countdown timer), and Time Attacks with arcadey time-modifier pickups scattered across insane ramp sections. The variety holds up better than you might expect from a 2012 arcade racer. There are four car classes to unlock across the career, Street through to Shindo, with around fifty vehicles total, so the progression loop has enough meat to it. The track editor is the sleeper feature here. It comes in two flavours: a simple tile-based builder where you snap road sections together like chunky Lego blocks, and an advanced mode that lets you go wild with loop-de-loops, falling debris, jumps, and destruction set pieces. The tracks in the career mode were actually built using those same in-game tools, which tells you everything about how capable the editor is. User-created tracks can be shared online and grouped into cities of six events, which in principle gives the game enormous long-tail replayability. In practice, the online multiplayer population has been thin for years now, so treat that as solo and local content rather than a live service. A few things hold it back from being an easy recommendation. The AI is punishing and inconsistent: one bad frag from behind can drop you from second to last with no real recourse, and the game offers no tutorial to explain its counter-intuitive drift mechanics. Holding the drift button through an entire corner rather than tapping it is the kind of thing you will only learn from a forum post, not from the game itself. The PC port also shipped with limited peripheral support. An Xbox controller works without drama, but steering wheel and non-Microsoft pad users historically had a rough time. There is no split-screen mode, which is a genuine miss for a game this chaotic and fun to watch. Online is essentially dead in 2025, so four-friends-on-the-couch is off the table in any form. If you are buying this for a multiplayer night, temper expectations accordingly. For solo players who loved Burnout's destruction sandbox and always wanted a track editor bolted onto it, Unbounded is a legitimately underrated gem that flew under the radar because the Ridge Racer branding scared off the wrong crowd and confused the right one. Go in knowing it is a Bugbear game wearing a Namco badge, and it clicks immediately.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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