Ridge Racer Review - Pie Reviews

[Elliot]

Ridge Racer, developed by Cellius and published by Namco, is a member of the Ridge Racer series of racing games that date back all the way to 1993 and a launch title for the Playstation Vita, one of the four racing titles initially available (see my WipEout 2048 review for info on another). It is, perhaps more interestingly, an utter failure as a game in almost every single regard, except as a near-perfect example of how not to make a game.

It is perhaps interesting to contextualise this remark by looking at the developer Cellius, whom you've likely not heard of. They were, to paraphrase Wikipedia, formed in 2007 as a joint venture between Namco, with a 51% stake in the company, and Sony, with the other 49%, to take market share from Microsoft and Nintendo by using the PS3's Cell processor, hence the name. It takes them five years to produce their first game, it doesn't even run on the Cell processor, and it's as abysmal as this. I would usually be without pity, except that I could easily believe that this fiasco was, in fact, well intentioned and more incompetence than malice.

The drift mechanic in action.

The gameplay seems, the first few times you try it, to be very much like any other racing game with a drift mechanic - you tap the brakes to go into a drift wherein the handling changes and you can turn corners easily by controlling how angled your car is against the turn. I honestly thought for almost the first hour of play that it's your own skill making the drifts succeed and your car glide around corners. It's only when you make your first horrible mistake that should lead to you crashing headlong into a barrier that you realise that you are playing almost no part in the drift, and that the game is essentially a digital version of Scalextric, where as soon as you enter drift mode you are glued to the track and you no longer have to concern yourself with petty things such as steering. You can spin your car round and round in drift mode, no joke, and you will continue straight along the track with only a loss in speed as your punishment. It's bizarre.

You would think, with good reason, that this would take most of the skill out of the game, and it mostly does, but there is still some skill to the game, albeit in different areas. The challenge shifts to when and where you employ your nitrous in order to recieve the best returns in terms of speed gain and nitrous recharge (as nitrous only charges when you drift, and charges much faster when you drift immediately after you've used your nitrous), as well as where you approach corners from to ensure that you don't still crash into the barrier despite your automatic steering.

It would be unfair to say that this set of mechanics, whilst certainly odd and unique, weren't fun - whether or not they're overly simplistic, I gather from my past experiences with the Ridge Racer series (although they were very brief) that this has been the meat of the series since its inception, and a series does not run for almost 20 years on a set of mechanics that are not fun. This is easily the best aspect of the game, and I would be able to say that gliding around the tracks at 200 miles per hour was brilliantly, idiotically marvellous, were it not for the fact that even this is flawed. The ultimate charge (the faster nitrous charge you get when you've just finished boosting) seems to not work for some period of time after you crashed into a barrier, but there's no visual representation of this, nor does the game ever explain this, nor is the time it takes for this to wear off consistent - I assume this mechanic was intentional, but due to its inconsistency and lack of explanation, it feels broken. The other irritant is that at lower speeds the game refuses to go into drift mode, so that with a completely upgraded machine, you struggle to start a drift at the speed that was, pre-upgrade, your machine's top speed. It's stupid things like this that really irritate in an otherwise brainlessly fun driving system.

Another of the game's three included tracks and another of its five included cars.

The game's problems only become worse once you remove yourself from the microcosm of "the race", however. The amount of content included in the game is appallingly little - there are three tracks in the whole game. Three. The game launched at a lower price than every other launch title on the Vita, but that does not even begin to make up for the disgraceful lack of any acceptable amount of content. WipEout 2048 launched £15 higher, and had 10 tracks, and I thought that was too few for the price (though only slightly, and it was mitigated by the HD Fury DLC which was free for those that owned the PS3 content). ModNation Racers Road Trip had something like 25 courses for £15 more! There is no justification for selling a game with a measly three tracks. There are also only seven cars (two of which are unlockable) and a paltry few game modes - time trial, AI race, ghost battle, online race and ad hoc race (it is very much appreciated that there's an ad hoc option with no bloody trophy for having close-by friends with Vitas though). There is simply not enough to do in the game to keep it entertaining - you will have seen every track, both forward and reverse, within half an hour if you want to.

The game tries to make up for this lack of stuff to do by having this framework of global teams that each player belongs to and trying to foster competition between the teams with daily objectives and leaderboards and such. This is perhaps the most laughably idiotic mis-step of the whole package. Firstly, you are required to be online to sign up for a team when the game first starts up, which means that you cannot play an otherwise offline-friendly game if you can't connect, rendering the whole thing useless for those without a connection - it's basically the PS Vita equivalent of the PC's online activation DRM. When you're signing up, there's no explanation as to the difference between the teams in terms of player count or player skill or anything (as it so happens, Squaris GP is the trophy hunter team, you want to join them if you're plat-hunting, Trianchor Alliance is the pro MLG team, and the other two are just there because reasons) so you're picking at random. Then, once you've picked, you realise that there's no point to the whole thing anyway - there's no reward for doing well, no reason to compete. It's a boring, unrewarding metagame that does not offer sufficient motivation to play the same three courses over and over again.

This isn't the only form of persistence in the game, though - there's also what was described by Eurogamer as "without question, the worst upgrade system seen in a mainstream video game in recent memory", a quote that I think sums up the thing perfectly. Each upgrade costs an amount of points it takes four races to obtain, and over 80% of the upgrades are pointless "blank" blocks, or blocks with "tips" that don't say anything meaningful and are laughably stupid. In order to be competitive, though, you have to have all of these upgrades, so before you can have a hope of not losing spectacularly online, you have to play through roughly 280 races, each of which are about 3 minutes or more, to get all of these upgrades. The early upgrades are all worthless and there is exactly one setup that you can be competitive with - the whole thing needs completely rebalancing.

The interface looks pretty but handles like a nightmare. Incidentally, those three are the upgrade kits you need to compete online.

The game's user interface is also poor. I won't expand on my general gripe of Vita games that are otherwise controlled by buttons having touch only menus as this isn't the time or place, but expect to get your screen mucky with fingerprints when navigating round the thing. That would be fine were the interface quick and elegant, but it's neither. In certain places it feels overly twitchy and you'll swap between screens when you didn't mean to, like the event setup screens, and in other place it feels like it's weighted down with bricks so you can't scroll properly at all, like the upgrade screen. The game limits you needlessly in the menus - going into a ghost race, you can only use the last car you selected and the last track you raced on, so if you want to change either you have to go and set up a spot race with the settings you want then quit out. This is just fucking incompetent design. You can't search or sort through online data, so you just get lumped with a blob of unsorted crap that the game gives you, which in the case of the hidden "duel" events can actually severely effect the gameplay by hiding ghosts from you that you really do need. Also, why is there what amounts to softcore porn in the background of the main menu?

It's frustrating to see that the game could have relatively easily been redeemed into a quality, fun experience - add more tracks to the core game, make some sort of single player campaign mode that lasted through 10 hours of events, give some cool unlockables for helping your online team, explain the game mechanics better so people will understand what's going on, fix the awful upgrade system so it's not such a grinding chore and make the user interface more intuitive and usable. I have to wonder if Cellius were just sitting on their hands for four years before they decided to do anything at all.

So we're still using the two-perpendicular-sprites trees in 2012? Eat a bag of dicks, Cellius.

Graphically, it's not bad - it doesn't look quite as PS2 as something like Dungeon Hunter Alliance, but it doesn't look even a jot better than Ridge Racer 7, which was a PS3 launch title. Compare it to something like WipEout 2048 and it can't dream of holding its own which, as something that was half Sony developed, is pretty unacceptable. There's not much more to expound on this aspect of the game, it's just mediocre, with a bland art style.

The sound design is, you guessed it, pretty bad. There's a DJ-like-thing that doesn't ever shut up, and both the male and female voices (which the game lets you choose between) are so obnoxious and annoying that I had to mute them by the fourth race, which mercifully the game lets you do. The car sound effects are quite loud and roary, but nothing spectacular. In terms of the music to the game, I know I'm making a lot of WipEout 2048 comparisons, but the 7 techno tracks included here, whilst actually not bad, aren't nearly as pulse-poundingly awesome as those included in the anti-grav competitor. There's a load of DLC music on the PS Store that's all free, so if you're a fan of techno and dance, it's probably worth grabbing them, though I didn't bother to download them in order to conserve memory card space.

Finally, it would be remiss of me to not mention the two major DLC packs, the Gold pack and Silver pack (which are now bundled in a sort of Ultimate Version with the game for £20 in the Store, but if you own a physical copy, they're still full price and only available separately), which each give you about 5 new cars and 3 new tracks. I haven't tried them myself, not wanting to give Cellius any more money than the £10 I paid for the game, but they're about £6.50 each, and they give you slightly more content, whilst bringing the price of the game in line with a much better racer like MNR or WO2048.

In the end, there's not enough redeeming value in Ridge Racer to recommend it to anyone - yes, at its very heart there are some good mechanics, but in almost every meaningful way it fails at being a good game, or even a passable game. If you want to sample the delights of Ridge Racer as a series, then pick up Ridge Racer 7 for dirt cheap or get the new (and from what I've heard excellent) Ridge Racer Unbounded on PS3. Ridge Racer is a terrible product and deserves to be ignored by everyone.

Edited August 6, 2012 by Pie

[Jarred_450]

sorry the game sucked. your description of the driving/drifting sounds like the cars racing in the speed racer movies released a few years ago.