The engines are revving hot on the starting grid. Both Project Gotham Racing 3 and Need For Speed: Most Wanted went into turbo and sped into the lead, receiving great reviews and selling impressively. But hot on their heels is newcomer Ridge Racer 6 - can Namco's entry catch up with its rivals, or will it be left eating their dust?

The Ridge Racer series is both renowned and loved by gamers throughout the world, and Ridge Racer 6 captures the spirit of previous incarnations perfectly, while presenting it with all the next generation polish you could hope for as a launch title. Single player gaming mainly take place in the huge World Xplorer, where you work your way through a myriad of routes across well over 100 races, unlocking new cars and working your way up four increasingly fast classes of car as you progress. Single Race presents you with thirty race tracks (fifteen unique tracks and their reversed counterparts) and the seriously hefty challenge of completing each course in all four car classes without using nitro and without having any crashes, something that will take a tremendous amount of patience and a lot of hours for completists to accomplish. As well as all this, global rankings come into play on the Time Attack mode, where you will be pitting yourself against the best times in the world on any given track, across all four classes.

Diving straight into the World Xplorer mode, you will be immediately struck by the outstanding quality of the graphics. While RR6 can't quite rival the sheer scope and scale of all the buildings present in PGR3's unbelievably detailed cities (and neither can you pan the view around the car), it does deliver a gorgeous looking host of highly varied tracks. Half of these take place in cities, some at nighttime with fireworks exploding in the sky, garish neon lit buildings and tunnels, and even a glowing fairground wheel, with others stretching through European looking towns and villages. One particularly great looking level leads you around an airport, under the wings of many parked aeroplanes with more taking off and landing in the background.

The countryside levels are the most interesting and pleasant to drive through, with plenty of life in the scenery - birds glide and flock overhead, sheep and cows graze in the pastures, trams glide along on their wires, traffic can be seen driving along nearby hillside roads, windmills turn and waterfalls pour down rocky cliffs in very realistic fashion. The range of things going on in the courses really give a sense of life to the proceedings and adds the final level of polish onto stunning looking graphics - every building is detailed in both texture and design, trees look almost photo realistic, especially those on distant hills, while the game presents some of the nicest sky effects I've ever seen, as the sun gleams through a few wispy clouds in the twilight, or dimly lights the landscape from behind light, grey cloud cover. The way the light gleams when it reflects off the road at certain points also looks wonderful and the cars themselves look glorious - the polygon count is through the rood for shiny, super detailed, smooth looking cars that scale beautifully at all times, with a variety of imaginative paint jobs including plenty of text scribbled across the body work. The reflection effects are equally superb and as there's no damage modelling, they look great all the time.

Unfortunately, things aren't half so impressive on the sound front, which really could have been so much better. Ambient sounds of planes flying overhead are fine, but the engines are droning and repetitive - not as droning and repetitive as the perpetually cheerful and condescending voiceover guy however, who congratulates you as you overtake rivals and tells you immensely obvious things, such as "It's the final lap!" and "You're in first!" He's so annoying that within an hour I had him switched off, the sound effects low and the music cranked up to max. But even in this respect RR6 fails quite badly - of the measly fifteen music tracks provided (compared to Amped 3's incredible 300+ this really is pitiful) at least half of them are terminally irritating and even the best ones don't rise above being just plain good. The tunes are retro-style arcade ditties that do make you feel quite nostalgic, but gaming has moved on and we need something more. If ever a game demanded that you rip some of your favourite CDs onto your hard drive, this is it!

Still, it's not about the sound and graphics, and at least Ridge Racer 6 looks the business. But how is the all-important gameplay? Well, it's pretty shallow, but in a good way. Racing consists of holding down the accelerator almost all the time and every time you release it, your vehicle begins to drift (no need for a handbrake button here!) Once you're drifting, you can hold down the accelerator again to keep your speed up as you glide around even the sharpest corner with the grace of a champion figure skater and power out of the turn. It takes a few minutes to get the hang of the technique, but it really is very intuitive and within half an hour you'll be drifting like a pro. Drifting gives you the added bonus that you charge up your three level nitrous meter, which you can activate once the first level is charged.

Nitrous doesn't actually give you a massive Burnout-style boost, so it's best to save it for the straights and wait until your car is near top speed before activating, and if you can time it so the boost ends at the exact moment you hit a corner, you can use the extra speed to recharge your boost meter more quickly - the faster your car is going when you drift, the faster the meter fills. The wiser and more patient gamers will soon realise that letting your boost fill through all three levels is the best approach, as using all three at ones gives you a faster and longer boost than levels one or two.

And that's all there is to it! You race, you drift, you boost, and once you're into the swing of things you'll almost always win the World Xplorer races first time, speeding past the pack of thirteen other drivers pretty much by the end of the first lap, perhaps taking the second of the three laps to catch up to the leaders and slip into first. The AI drivers just don't seem to be as fast as you and even their usage of nitrous can't keep you from overtaking them for long, so the challenge level is pretty low. This makes the game ideal for younger gamers and casual race fans, but the PGR fanatics out there will probably find the single player game far too easy - at least for the Basic Route.

However, once you complete this and unlock the several extra routes, each consisting of many more races, things start to get tough - insanely tough! Just when you thought you had the game licked, things step up several notches and you struggle to even get into first place, let alone stay there. Be warned, these advanced routes are no pushover and will take every ounce of your racing skills if you're to have even a hope of completing them! The mammoth challenge of completing all thirty courses without crashing is also insanely tough - that really does take skill and a lot of patience, because one wrong move and you've failed (you can complete the race for a time score or the no-nitrous goal but you won't get the no-crash). Speaking of crashes, the game is pretty kind - bumping into the sides of the road slow you down a bit but rarely spin you out, while hitting drivers ahead simply gives them a bit of extra speed and slows you down. A sneaky technique is to veer in front of a rival approaching fast from behind and let him give you a boost instead!

Pulling all this together, it has to be said that the actual racing experience is so super smooth that it almost defies belief. Those incredible graphics scale perfectly, with hardly a jagged edge in sight, the immensely detailed scenery scaling nearer and nearer with perfect realism, while the whole thing moves blisteringly fast once you reach the Class 4 machines, and of course when you're boosting. It really is a sight to behold and a testament to very high quality, polished programming on the part of the developers. The sense of speed is reasonable in Class 1, but each time you step up a class you're clearly moving faster, until the top class is so fast as to be pretty frightening; suddenly whirling around those corners and staying in control of the drift is a little more challenging!

So, with an enjoyable and challenging single player experience, we move onto the online portion of RR6 - and it certainly doesn't disappoint! There're only two modes - Ranked and Player games. Ranked is self-explanatory, although it does feature the annoying quirk of booting all the players out at the end of each race. This means that if you find a room you like, you have to do a Custom search and enter it again each time, or you can hit Quick Match and dive into another room. Player matches aren't ranked and you can stay in the lobby after each race, so the choice is yours. Either way, the competition is fierce - I was reminded that I'm not that great at racing games as I repeatedly got my ass well and truly kicked, finishing a good twenty to forty seconds behind the winner!

It just goes to show that there is a lot more to the subtleties of the driving than you first realise and you soon learn that saving boost like in the single player mode isn't the answer - instead it's better to use red boost and time it just right - run out of boost just as you hit a sweeping corner, take it well, and you almost fill back up to the first level again (red being level one, green for level two and blue for level three) so you can do it again on the next long bend. This is what the pros do and so must you, if you intend to ever win a race! There's a strong following online and they're generally quite a friendly bunch - good, healthy competition and perfect for an enjoyable online experience. They're certainly a big step up from the steady AI of single player, so prepare yourself for a serious challenge. Cars can occasionally be a little bit jumpy and laggy on the track, and passing real people is a lot trickier, as they're often all over the place, but that's just part of the fun! The game really comes alive online and the appeal of coming back for more is definitely enough to warrant a purchase.

Ridge Racer 6 is quite possibly the most pure arcade racer I've ever played - nothing hearkens back to the simplistic racing fun of arcade machines like this does. It's not trying to compete with PGR3's deep and varied gameplay, nor is it offering the open city and high-speed police chases of Most Wanted. With gorgeous graphics and intuitive racing action, it's suited to casual gamers and hardcore race fans alike, and both groups will find themselves pushed to the limits in the races at the high end of the massive World Xplorer map. There're plenty of skilled competitors to find online too, plus the global time attack rankings, and it's such a relaxing, feel good game too, which is quite unusual in the racing genre, so it's definitely worth consideration. If you're planning to take Ridge Racer 6 out for a spin, my advice is to sit back, relax and enjoy the ride!

Reviewed by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).