They took the one thing that was good about Ridge Racer - its audio-visual presentation - and ditched it in favor of some generic sterile corporate aesthetic. It's empty, hollow and reeks of bullshit like any good example of modern marketing. And you select a corporation you race for? I mean, sure, in R4 you technically had to pick a sponsor, but that was a racing company. Now you have like cloud computing companies or something. Frankly, it's hard to tell what they are, since their very descriptions are filled with that intentionally obscure corporate jargon.

And then you're greeted by one of the most confusing menu systems I've ever seen in a game. I couldn't tell whether this game has no career mode or I just couldn't find it. In fact, I'm not sure about anything with this game. Does it have only 3 tracks? I don't know, but that's sure how it seemed, I think...

And though the tracks are beautiful, why is there blur on the horizon? Whose genius idea was it to blur the backgrounds? Half of the reason I even play racing games is to enjoy driving around nice-looking places listening to good music. Speaking of music, whoever thought House or Trance, or whatever this genre is (let's call it night club dance music), was better than jungle and garage has no taste in music and should never be put in charge of commissioning a soundtrack for a game ever.

Also I see that they still couldn't fix the steering, so instead they just implemented OutRun's drifting to mediate its effects. Well done, this makes the game almost fun. Except I don't understand why anybody would ever wanna play this instead of OutRun.

Now, with the exception of Ridge Racer V, which I still hope to play some day because it looks most appealing to me, I am done with this series. Out of the five games I've played so far, every one of them was a disappointment. And post RRV they really all look very bland and boring.

Sad to see the series' last hurrah (at least in the classic sense of Ridge Racer) be such a hollow retool of what already existed in 6, 7, and 3D. The music is great as always but there's no real campaign. You're asked to race with the only progression being that you get more car parts and higher speeds after some (???) races. Visuals are nice but not as impressive as Ridge Racer PSP for the time, and performance leaves a lot to be desired. If only the Vita was just a year or two later with nicer hardware...