Ridge Racer Driftopia is the 9,000th entry in the series.
Drift in ridge racer unbounded free#
While this may sound as if you can get into a position where you can't play any more without paying, Namco and Bugbear have implemented a failsafe for this eventuality: run out of cars and you'll be provided with a free "backup car" to use until you acquire some more cards, though you can count on this vehicle's performance being the equivalent of bringing a go-kart along to a Formula One race meet. Cars are discarded if you wreck them and choose not to repair them - or don't have enough repair kits to repair them, more to the point - and boosters are discarded immediately after the race in which you use them. The reason why cars and boosters are represented as cards is because they can be "discarded," and indeed over the course of your Driftopia career you'll likely be discarding as many things as you acquire. Booster packs are similar - the more you spend at once, the more likely you are to get rarer cards that are more effective in improving your performance. The more you spend in one go, the more likely you are to get uncommon, rare or "mythic" cards that feature better vehicles. The free-to-play structure is placed front and center with the way this is implemented - both cars and boosters are represented as collectible cards with varying degrees of rarity, and you're awarded a free pack every 24 hours, or you can purchase more for real money at any time. Upon starting Driftopia for the first time, you're presented with a "starter pack" that contains three cars, 50 repair kits and two booster items. But there's some interesting ideas at play, at least. The results, judging by my early impressions, are somewhat mixed. Could Namco and developer Bugbear maintain Unbounded's destructive, chaotic magic while implementing the divisive business model?
Drift in ridge racer unbounded Pc#
Thus it was with some trepidation that I fired up the current beta version of Ridge Racer Driftopia, a free-to-play adaptation of Unbounded presently in closed beta for PC and coming soon to PS3. Ridge Racer Unbounded passed a lot of people by - perhaps because it was more like Burnout than Ridge Racer - but I enjoyed it rather a lot.