If you enjoy the art of drifting, then you’ll probably want to test drive Ridge Racer. The series begun back in the good old Playstation days when playing games on the CD was in its infancy stage. But now times have changed as gaming is currently available at the convenience of your finger tips. Specifically, I’m speaking about the release of Ridge Racer for the Playstation Vita. So fasten your seat belts as this racing game will take you on a bumpy (and portable) ride.
Ridge Racer’s single player mode is limited to the ghost race and time attack. You won’t get any career campaign but that doesn’t mean you won’t have fun with the driving.  Just like the previous titles in the series, it’s your typical arcade-style racing that doesn’t have much depth. At times it will get your heart rate up, but that won’t last very long.
Ridge Racer is mainly about drifting. So if you pull of this art, you’ll be going places. Your car is equipped with nitrous slots that you can use to give that extra boost in speed. The AI can be quite tough since you may think you’re going to stay in first place only to realize that your opponents have zipped on by you. Some may view this as unfair, but others can take this as a welcomed challenge.
The main focus of Ridge Racer on the Vita is to get you involved with the online community. At first, the game introduces you with the choice of four teams to join. Each day, Ridge Racer will provide an objective for your team to achieve. This could be beating a certain team before the day end. Afterwards, your individual achievement gets included with other players within your team. This adds up regularly to your overall team’s ranking online. It’s too bad that there is no fulfilling reward to earn in this game, thus leading players to think that the objectives to achieve as a team are without purpose.
Besides your team improving in score, you’ll be able to level up yourself. Specifically, you can earn credits to make improvements on your car, including adding another nitrous slot. Your car will also have an increase in maximum speed. Although this is all fine and dandy, for online players, this can lead to unequal rivals. If you get one player who got into this game much longer than the other, it doesn’t really matter too much about the driving skills. Rather it will be more about who’s got more experience, which means whoever gets more goodies under the hood will prevail.
Ridge Racer for the Vita comes with three tracks and five cars for you to race. This is quite lacking in regards to the package because other Ridge Racer games have way more. However, you can always download the extra content available in the PS Store at a price though. Furthermore, if you get this game early enough, you get a gold pass which grants you access the extra tracks, cars and music for no cost at all.
But looking closely at the tracks, the graphics are smooth and the colors are really bright and solid. Ridge Racer actually looks very impressive as does the music. If you like to listen to electronic music from the Orient, you’ll be listening to the soundtrack in this game with glee.
Ridge Racer is ready to go racing and drifting on your Vita for $29.99. Normally this would be acceptable but you would also need to include the price of the extra content released for now and in the future. While the game is fun, the enjoyment isn’t maintained especially with the restricted content. Since you will most likely be paying more than once before you get a complete Ridge Racer Vita game, you probably want to look at your other car racing options.
