Parking Garage Rally Circuit

A very fun retro arcade racing game with a nostalgic 90s art style and a great soundtrack. The driving and drifting can be challenging at first, but once you get the hang of them, maintaining a rhythm of drifts and boosts becomes incredibly satisfying. The tracks are well designed, the handling feels tight, and the game is easy to pick up and enjoy. While the online multiplayer is practically dead and a significant portion of the content is locked behind DLC, the core USA map and single-player experience still offer plenty of fun. Despite those drawbacks, it's easy to recommend to anyone who enjoys arcade racers.

A casually little time attack racer with drifting as its core mechanic. You know the drifting of some of the Mario Kart games? Well this takes the concept and turns it up a notch. Overall I really enjoyed my time, but I felt it didn't do enough. Don't get me wrong - the 8 tracks and 3 cars are enough in my opinion. But I feel like something along the lines of platinum times (like how Neon White did their Ace medals - getting a bigger challenge after completing the game) would have been really cool. Also telling people that theres a boosted start would be cool - I didn't know until I look into the Steam discussions... Also i think it's kind of weird that the game gets easier with each car. The first car is somewhat of a challenge, but the second and third car are really easy to handle and can get a good amount of speed fast. Only the very last level was a challenge in my eyes. 100% required around 1.5 to 3 hours depending on how good you are. (DLC is not required for 100% - time after this review will probably be on the DLC)

I sat down to start playing this, and pretty much didn’t (and/or couldn’t) stop until I had managed a gold on all tracks with all 3 classes. Much as I hate to drop a spoiler in the second sentence: I am in fact a big fan of this game. There is such a sense of fun, and a clear love of arcade racing classics, absolutely imbued into every inch of this. The vibe is perfect, the controls feel tight with a satisfying fluidity which I find quite unique, and the polished attention to detail is great – considering this is from a solo dev, it is all honestly pretty mind blowing. That said, even a great game can have minor issues, and I had 4 quibbles with it – though the first 2 are arguably personal preference, and have fairly minimal impact on player experience. The first point, and certainly more of a personal gripe than an actual problem, is the soundtrack. The game does a great job in so many ways of feeling authentically like a Saturn-era game, but the backing music includes a mixture of different styles that don’t always ring true to that goal, and to my mind often don’t feel cohesive. Thankfully, none of them are annoying (and in fact, I like all of them) but going from one track to another they don’t really mesh together, and often feel like they belong in different games. Not enough of a problem to spoil the game in the slightest, though, and I should mention here that all the sound effects are spot-on perfect. My second little bugbear is that when you are airborne (which some tracks require of you) you have absolutely zero control over the car’s angle, and you often start to rotate along one or multiple axes with no ability to course-correct. Especially with the lighter classes, this can easily go so far as to flip you over completely, which might completely decimate a run and feels just a little unfair. It would be very in keeping with the style to allow you some *minor* adjustments while in the air, and I would greatly prefer it. The third issue is related, but more wide-reaching: the physics as a whole have some janky edges at times. They are solidly geared towards not getting in the way of the fun, and so you can almost always slam against parked cars or even plough straight through concrete pillars, for example, without batting an eyelid. Yet at other times, the tiniest - *tiniest* - graze of the wrong object will see you suddenly flipping wildly, like a toddler has flung their hot wheels in frustration. More annoyingly, there are occasions (though infrequent, at least) where you have an epic boost-chain going, and suddenly the car will decide that you hit some invisible imperfection in the track, and you will find all that built-up speed rapidly draining. And that brings me to my final problem, which is potentially the most serious: the quirks of the boost system are unintuitive, and go completely unexplained. I blasted through the first 7 levels with the (mis)understanding that the boost had a pretty simplistic functionality: successfully complete a drift, and get a boost – with a more powerful, longer-lasting boost for bigger drifts. Successfully complete another drift before your boost runs out, and compound it with an additional boost, building and building to potentially reach ludicrous speeds. And then on the 8th track, perhaps because of the increased complexity, I recognised that it didn’t always seem to work that way. It felt so odd that I even began to suspect that my controller was malfunctioning. Sometimes, I would seem to complete a drift successfully, but then inexplicably my car would be going *slower* than before. Surely, that couldn’t possibly be intended behaviour. Right? Bafflingly, that is indeed how it works. I don’t think I would have come close to figuring out why, if it wasn’t for [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3481631291]the magnificently in-depth guide[/url] by Frappe, who appears to literally be the top-ranked player in the world, so it is gracious of them to share their expertise! The only point at which I got frustrated with the game was when the boost stopped making sense, and if it wasn’t for this guide I’m not entirely sure I would have pushed through my confusion. Which would have been a great shame, because – to be clear – this game is absolutely superb, just *heaps* of fun. I recommend it whole-heartedly, only be sure to check out that guide when you’re moving into the more challenging levels, or you might find yourself going from giddy top-speed delirium to smacking straight into a brick wall of annoyance.