Dom Robinson reviews

Price: £39.99

Players: 1-2

Get your motor running, get out on the highway, looking for adventure, or whatever comes your way, or so sang Steppenwolf in the seventies. You'd be hard-pushed to find some adventure though in the fifth game of this bafflingly-successful series. For those who haven't played before, you are the lucky ones for reasons that will become clear during this review.

Ridge City is the place to be as you bomb around the track in your sexy, souped-up sports cars against the clock and other drivers who will have you eating their dust given half the chance. Upon starting the game, for which the initial selections available are a practice run or a Grand Prix, there are more sub-game options than you can shake a stick at including difficulty selection, team and driver name entries, team colour, music radio station, a choice of car, its colour, engine and transmission (automatic or manual gearbox). At any time off the race track you can visit the garage to check out your trophy and medal collection, but from powering up your PS2, it feels like forever before you actually get behind the wheel and a chance to make pole position.

The first class in which you will enter is the Frontal GP. Zoom round the track - making at least fourth position over four tracks - and you'll qualify for the next round where the competition is more fierce, but rewards come in terms of extra performance for your vehicle of choice, such as the ability to go "Drafting" - i.e. move behind an opponent's car and you'll get a power boost by avoiding turbulence. Perhaps Damon Hill could explain that one to me...

Where Ridge Racer 5 fails and the tedium begins to set in is that once you've done the first four tracks - which just provide variations along the same highway - and you're set to move onto the next classes (Heroic, Blast, Knight and Throne), you need new roads to race on and that's something you simply don't get. It's just the same old thing again and again and again and that's what put me off any other Ridge Racer game I've played in the series, hence if you've never played one before then there will be an air of originality for at least a short spell of time. A two-player option is available, but the split-screen leaves two flat, horizontal screens with player one on top and player two below, with the restrictive height doing nothing to aid the game play.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2001.