If you have ever played a Ridge Racer game before, then you probably know what to expect from Ridge Racer 6. You can still feel the spirit of the arcade racer, that this game once was, beating in every pixel. Ridge Racer will probably always be a fast paced arcade style racer, with an emphasis on drifting over braking. But there is enough skill built into the track design to keep even the most skilled racer interested, at least for a while.

For those who don’t know what to expect, you have a drift happy arcade style racer with intelligent track design. The tracks are laid out so that you do not have to rely on your brakes to navigate the turns. In fact, hitting your brakes while cornering will only slow you down. The best bet is to drift through the curve, and let the game take over. It will guide you through the curves and all you really need to do is keep your car straight so you don’t lose too much speed.

Adding a little more strategy to the game is the nitro system. You build up your nitro gauge by drifting through the curves. The longer and faster you drift, the quicker you gauge builds. You have three separate sections within your gauge. Once each section of your gauge has built up, you can use a nitro boost which will allow you to have a nice little burst of speed. The trick is to time your nitro bursts at the best time so that it ends just in time for you to start a new drift so that you can build the gauge back up.

The track design is well done, but unfortunately you get too see most of the tracks pretty early on. What you are left with is just about every version of the track you could imagine. You end up racing backwards and on different routes for the remainder of the tracks. You still get some interesting tracks from nighttime to an airport runway.

With Ridge Racer 6 you also get several gameplay options. You can go head to head with a friend on the same Xbox 360. You can also play time trial. But the meat of the game is the World Xplorer mode, which is Ridge Racer 6's version of career mode. In Xplorer mode you race your way through the courses in the game from one class to the next unlocking new cars along the way. The further you progress through Xplorer mode the more difficult the tracks get. Later on, you even get some multi-path tracks to add even a little more flavor to the mix.

You also have several Xbox Live options. First of all you can upload your time trial times to the worldwide rankings. You can also download other players’ ghosts and race against them in your own time trial races. This gives you a rare opportunity to race against the best players in the world and see when they drift and boost on certain courses.