This game has no head and no ass. It's something, it exists and you shouldn't care, cause you can't do anything about it.

This game is overrated.

I'm half-joking, but much of the reason I picked this up was because of the sheer number of people posting about how much of an "underrated hidden gem" this game is. I can understand some nostalgia for playing this back in the day, but let's keep it real, this didn't review well and never released in Japan for a reason.

The biggest problem is this game never comes together under some unified vision of what it's trying to do. It's poorly straddling the line of Ridge Racer (high speed, drift focus) and FlatOut (destructible environments, vehicle combat), and the additional features (shortcuts, map editor, stunt/frag modes) just clutter the gameplay experience.
Worse yet, each of these elements are just clunky: Vehicles are neither weighty like FlatOut nor responsive like Ridge Racer, drifting is awkward and stilted, vehicle combat is very inconsistent, the destructible environments have no weight or feedback (where they would throw off your vehicle in FlatOut), the shortcuts are only sometimes useful depending on the prefab, etc. There's just this pervasive feeling of shallowness that never comes together to form an engaging gameplay loop.

The identity crisis also means the game never has a sense of "place." One can forgive the le 2012 grunge washed-out lens flare aesthetic as a product of its time, I actually like it, but I'm scraping worldbuilding from the loading screen tips for crying out loud. The stylish Ridge Racer menus, environments, and vibe is gone, yet the intimate competition between characteristic, named rivals like in FlatOut is also gone, so you're racing for the sake of racing under the vague notion of being "The Unbounded" that even the opening movie fails to elaborate on. The fact they reused RR music is the cherry on top, the dissonance is crazy.

These two combined is pretty much a deathblow. It doesn't satisfy in the gameplay department, and it's not aesthetically interesting. Sure it does a bunch of things right, it runs good, it looks great at modern resolutions, but like what's the point? The value this game provides is the novelty as a piece of BUGBEAR/Ridge Racer history, but as a game, there's nothing to see here, and if it wasn't for the notoriety it would have vanished from history.

It's Ridge Racer meets Burnout. I'm easy to please.