I’m sure if anyone has had the pleasure of checking out Namco’s latest Ridge Racer offering titled, Ridge Racer: Driftopia, but if you haven’t then consider yourself lucky. The only thing that this game has that is worthy of the acclaimed Ridge Racer series is it’s name sake and the music. The game play is terrible, the graphics are moderate and oh the micro-transactions are bad… real bad. So when I originally saw the email stating that Namco-Bandai was taking the servers for Driftopia off-line I thought to myself, maybe they got the message and understood that this game was bad. Either way it doesn’t matter as the game is going away, permanently as of August 15th, 2014. So why am I so against this game? Well read on true Ridge Racer believers.
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And I’m not saying this cause I hate Ridge Racer as I don’t. I grew up on Ridge Racer and I love the series and which that Namco-Bandai felt the same that I do. Instead they felt confident that this excuse of a game would pass as a decent Ridge Racer entry.
Well you were wrong Namco-Bandai. Dead Wrong!
What made Ridge Racer so much fun to play was it’s SOUL! Yes the majority of RR games had a soul, they had flair and personality. If you’re a fan of Ridge Racer then you understand what I mean. Now look at Ridge Racer: Driftopia. It’s not fun to play unless you like crashing into stuff and if you like that then at least go check out Ridge Racer: Unbounded which is marginally better and that’s a slim margin folks. The backgrounds are typical city locales, most of the music was either ripped from Unbounded or other earlier entries, the cars handle terribly and overall game is just no fun. Don’t believe me? Go check out the Steam Community and see for yourself. I’ll even point you in the right direction – here!
Repair kits? Car Packs? Free 2 play (Free 2 win)? MICRO-TRANSACTIONS???? It was bad in Ridge Racer: Vita, it was bad in Ridge Racer: Unbounded, it’s bad in Ridge Racer: Slipstream and it’s still flipping bloody bad here Namco-Bandai. All the hell you did was take Unbounded and slap on more Micro-Transactions and made it Free to play. How lazy was that? Ridge Racer: Driftopia, more like Ridge Racer: Craptopia.
This isn’t Need for Speed, it isn’t FlatOut or even Burn Out! This is Ridge Racer! Please take all development away from Bugbear and move it back in-house and get the team that knows the history of Ridge Racer back or at least have the people who would be working on it study up on the series. Please give Ridge Racer back it’s soul and give us, the fans a proper Ridge Racer and not this crap.
The only saving grace is that the game is going away and that’s a good thing. Trust me!
