Ridge Racer Review

Annoyingly, the early stages are much too easy, and anybody with any experience of Ridge Racer is going to clobber them in a few hours without surrendering the top tier of the podium even once. But you'll probably realise even then that it's special - from the first corner, in fact. Keep going and the onslaught of duel races, longer tours, faster cars and more fiendish track designs will make up for the slightly dull opening.

It's just so smooth...

The track design, definitely, needs to be celebrated. There's a lot of recognisable track design from earlier Ridge Racers, but the actual circuits merely borrow the best elements, and it's a tactic that works well; played forward and backwards at different points, there are very few weak tracks. Some of the better ones can be ludicrously punishing; we still shudder when we hit the hilly S-bends, or have to cross the river twice in quick succession, which we've never quite done without a pang of anxiety. Likewise having to send our car into a fearsome power-slide a split-second after landing a jump in front of a right-angle turn. Fouling that up is as bad as it sounds. More or less all the tracks send you up and down hills at breakneck pace (there we go snapping people's heads off again), and they're rarely wide enough to be easy. Even when they are easy, they have the decency to be entertaining, like the hairpin split over two levels that you negotiate sideways in midair.

The addition of the "nitro" meter, meanwhile, is well judged. Nitro's been around in racing games for yonks of course, but its inclusion here is much more than a knee-jerk reaction. You fill nitro slots by drifting, and there's something deliciously entertaining about emerging from a spectacular drift on somebody else's tail, tugging on that right shoulder button and watching them vanish into the rear-view like a stranded spectator. And you can double the entertainment value when you're playing wirelessly against a friend.

That, by the way, is another thing you're going to want to do. You'll probably want to practice first - learning these tracks will be a joy anyway - and once you're ready you can get up to seven other people involved. Each of you will need a copy of the game, but of all the titles in the launch line-up, this is one we can definitely imagine your friends buying too. The graphic-whoring casual gamer with an eye for shiny new toys - and, if we're honest, plenty of our friends are - will have spotted Ridge Racer a mile away, and playing wirelessly against them is a mostly lag-free experience.

The little circle highlighting your lead uses retro graphics. Namco loves us.

There are some things worth bitching about. The computer-controlled opposition is very good on the upper-upper levels, and has an uncanny ability to block your path before you can react to it, or boost past you on the home straight. But you'll probably be sufficiently pleased with the way it feels to play that you'll treat them not as pointless obstacles on the road to fun, but evil lines of code fit for munching nitrous' equivalent of dust once you find your A-game later on. Or at least once you've unlocked some of the delightful special-class cars. We're particularly fond of the one that looks like it has a giant desk-fan strapped to the back of it.