I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure.

Game number 16 was Ridge Racer 6. This is an arcade racing game that focuses more on a fast-paced arcade experience and extreme drifting/speed boosts than realistic racing. The main campaign of this game is called the World Xplorer and features a network of sequential races that get more difficult as you go on.

Honestly, the racing experience that Ridge Racer 6 gives is pretty decent. Most races consist of 3 laps and you start out in position 14 and need to climb up to first place. The basic driving controls felt good and I honestly don’t have too much to say about them. The main focus of the gameplay is mastering drifting and utilizing the turbo. Its really simple, but I think that’s the fun of Ridge Racer.

While the simplicity of the game is nice at first, the world xplorer consists of almost 250 races and it really could have been cut down to about 60-70 unique races instead of what it ended up being. You will xperience the same courses over and over again and the difficulty only got slightly more difficult each time. It would have been nice to have more tracks.

To exacerbate this, the 30ish tracks that actually do exist are less than they seem. The way the maps work here is that there are ~4 different large maps and any given race will just be specific paths through these maps. This has the effect of you experiencing large amounts of the same race, in the same biome… but with a couple different extras. The maps in this game got old very, very quickly.

Another issue with things feeling the same are the cars. While I like each car having a different speed UI, they didn’t feel that different from each other. Most of the “unlocked” cars are just color palette swaps of cars you already have. I think this is good for the pick-up-and-play aspect of an arcade racer, but some variety would have been nice on an xbox 360 racer.

I actually did not complete every single world xplorer race. I considered “beating the game” seeing the credits and you get that after beating the basic circuit. What I actually beat was all 111 races in the basic route, most of the advanced route, 4 “duels” (3 races where you just 1v1 another car), a little less than half of the expert route, and the pac man race.

Overall, I think it may be worth giving Ridge Racer 6 a try if you really like arcade racers or if you are a fan of the series, but not if you are just a casual racing fan and looking for something from this era of gaming. I’d go look at Forza 3, 4, or horizon before this. Ridge Racer 6 is really fun for about an hour, but diving too deep into it reveals how shallow the game actually is. (5/10)

I spent 11 hrs, 40 min, and 57 sec playing Ridge Racer 6

I have spent 197 hrs and 47 min on the Road to 360 challenge so far.

Next game: Alan Wake