Parking Garage Rally Circuit review

Parking Garage Rally Circuit will provide an instant dopamine shot of warm, snuggly nostalgia for anyone who ever played a SEGA arcade racer in the mid 90s, owned a Saturn, or loved the slept-on Excite Truck for Nintendo Wii. Booting it up, it feels like if an 8-bit computer combined with Sega’s 32 bit console, with old-school presentation and menu screens giving way to a deliberately rag-tag low-polygon-looking racer which sees chunky motors boosting around multi-storey car parks to a ska soundtrack. Gran Turismo it ain’t, but it is brilliantly addictive.

This is a gloriously simple arcade racer that has been put together by the very clever Tim FitzRandolph, better known as JellyCar-developing one-man-show studio Walaber. It grasps what made the racers of that bygone era work. There are eight cars and eight tracks. Each one is a car park set in a different thematic location. One minute you will be in San Francisco, the next whizzing past Mount Rushmore. Each track has tons of crazy hairpin turns and like a Mario Kart game, every locale having its own special considerations, specific obstacles, and predicaments. When careering around the mountainous Mt.Rushmore track, huge boulders and slabs of rock fall from above and have to be avoided or driven around. One of the other tracks has a thrilling power cut mid-race, which adds a brilliant layer of peril.

The main hook of the racing is the use of drifting. The controls involve pulling on the right trigger to accelerate, the left to brake, but there is a specific face button which executes the drift, which is signified by a crackling lightning effect on your motor, as you lean into corners. Like a well-loved mode on the classic Outrun 2, risking a particularly lengthy drift can mean big rewards as the subsequent boost pulls you into the lead like a slingshot. But drifting too much or at the wrong time can see you in trouble, and this isn’t afraid to throw your car all over the place like a ragdoll. It is such a fun time.

Progression through Parking Garage Rally Circuit unlocks new, more diverse cars, and a certain time has to be achieved on each track to unlock the next. There are three different classes, labelled Light, Heavy and Ultra, each more tough than the last but with Heavy featuring cars with more grunt.

One thing about Parking Garage Rally Circuit is that you don’t actually race against other physical cars. You challenge ghosts of racers past, which provides a good guide as to the kind of driving you need to be doing to crack the best times. Some may find this jarring, but I think that this decision is a logical one because of the intimate nature of the circuits and how busy it would be with lots of other vehicles in play. That said, the multiplayer will pull in better ghosts based on players on the leaderboards, so there’s something to aim for.

Shaving seconds off your times in solo rally mode becomes a chronic addiction if you love this kind of game. It just feels so fun to play that it is almost impossible to dislike. My sole criticism is that at just eight cars and tracks, it can be beaten pretty quickly. But this was never intended to be a huge, big budget release, and I get the distinct impression that there could very well be downloadable content for this one somewhere down the line. The nature of the racing and its physics lends itself well to more fantastical and outlandish car parks to race in, so I look forward to seeing what Walaber does with it. Parking Garage Rally Circuit an ode to the classics that deserves to be a big success.