GameLight - Ridge Racer Driftopia

Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/226410/
Source: Youtube Channel gametrailers

Namco Bandai Games are on fire with the Free-to-Play games with Tekken Revolution out and a Soul Calibur: Lost Swords on its way.  Ridge Racer Driftopia was announced earlier this year as a Free-to-Play racer and showed up on Steam Early Access yesterday.  I quickly downloaded it and tried it out last night to see what the game was all about.  I'm not a huge racing fan unless I have the wheel and pedal to play with, but I do still enjoy a racing when the controls and feel of the game are fast and tight (I generally like the more unrealistic racers).  I started up the game and it didn't require me to do a bunch of registrations, signing in and all that.  It just asked me to optionally give my e-mail to get a bonus in-game item.  Then it explains a lot of mechanics of the game with pop-up text blocks and arrows showing every little aspect of the game.  I guess I appreciate the help with finding my way around the game, but it did feel like it dragged on.

I finally picked my car and got through all the text and started up the game.  I drove straight forward and tried to turn but bumped into a wall and *BAM* "GAME OVER" you have to use some repair kits to fix your cars.  This was a bit of a concern for me that if you ever ran out of repair kits, you couldn't play anymore (or at least for the rest of the day).  But then I found out it was really easy earning more.  So after a few tries of crashing into walls, I got comfortable with the controls playing on keyboard and was able to get through without blowing up into a ball of fire.  As the name would suggest, there is a lot of drifting.  Drifting is one of my favorite things to do in racing games, and they generally feel too slippery or uncontrollable to be any fun in most racing games.  But it felt really good the very first time I drifted in-game and it looked really nice too.  The only mode beside Time attack is spirit race which is kind of like a single-player/multiplayer mode experience where you race against the ghosts of other players rather than live time.  This eliminates the problem when a player plays at a low player count time in the day and doesn't have anyone to play with/against.  On the other hand, the ghosts can't really react to the players actions and respond to them.

The graphics are beautiful and the music is amazing, but the mechanics of how the game works worries me.  The actual game during a race feels fine and I actually like how it feels despite not liking blowing up after one bump into the wall and starting over.  The real problem is everything in-between racing: having to use repair kits to repair cars you total, not being able to play the next level until you level up, you have to replay the same two levels several times over before you unlock the next level and you have to replay that a few more times before unlocking the one after, you can only own a certain number of cars unless you pay real money to unlock more slots, you must log-in/start-up the game every 24 hours to receive bonuses, etc.  The entire game just felt very "facebook", time orientated with a lot of repetition.  So in the end, I wasn't having that much fun and it felt like I was playing under a very limited restriction.  I did like that actual "in-game" play and that's when I looked up more about Ridge Racer Driftopia and realized that the levels, graphics, music, gameplay and such are all assets from Ridge Racer Unbounded.  Despite being disappointed with Ridge Racer Driftopia, my new found interest in Ridge Racer Unbounded made trying the game out worthwhile.  Keep in mind that Ridge Racer Driftopia is still in beta/early access and will continue to grow, so it might get better in the future.  For me, I want a full game with no restrictions due to micro-transactions or heavy time investment and I think Ridge Racer Unbounded might be the thing for me.