Developer: Walaber Entertainment LLC
Publisher: Walaber Entertainment LLC
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Parking Garage Rally Circuit – Review
While there are still a lot of good realistic racing games out there, it seems the heyday of the arcade racer is over. Several generations of consoles ago, arcade racing games would be a dime a dozen, and most of them actually offered engaging and thrilling gameplay. Now, we see occasional entries, such as the recently released Super Woden GP II, which was entertaining. Even though the top-down visuals were different from many old-school titles, such as Sega Rally Championship, it still felt like a true ’90s classic racing game. Now, however, straight from our backlog, we are looking at Parking Garage Rally Circuit, which not only emulates that old-school arcade racing feeling, it also looks like a proper blast from the past.
Story
If you’re picking up Parking Garage Rally Circuit hoping it has a story to play through, you’ll be sorely disappointed. The game is all about racing, and that’s perfectly fine. As we’ll delve into below, Parking Garage Rally Circuit has more than enough interesting and highly polished components that it doesn’t need a story or proper career mode to play through.
Graphics
Parking Garage Rally Circuit looks amazing. Of course, this is because we’re judging the game’s intent of emulating retro visuals from the Sega Saturn and PlayStation 1 era. The jagged cars look delightful, even though there are only a few car models available in the game. The different decal and color options properly recreate the old-school rally car feeling. As the name of the game implies, you’ll be racing in parking garages, but even then, there is quite a bit of visual variety thanks to the track layouts, the different obstacles, and the different cars that are parked throughout. All in all, everything looks simplistic, but in a good way.
Although the standard settings already look great, you have quite a few options to tinker with the visuals. You can opt to turn on the CRT filter and even warp the image to properly emulate the feeling of playing on an old-school TV, but you can also change the aspect ratios, drawing distances, and so on. There are a lot of customization options here, and it was fun to mess around with them. We preferred to have a clearer view, as you’ll have to pay attention to ensure that you hit every corner perfectly.
Sound
Even though parking garages aren’t really the most cozy of places to hang around in, the soundtrack of Parking Garage Rally Circuit is delightfully catchy. The OST emulates that ’80s or ’90s summer hit chart feeling and even reminds us of some of the upbeat songs we heard in Sonic Adventure for the Sega Dreamcast. The sound effects also sound decent, but they’re nothing we haven’t heard before in other similar titles.
Gameplay
Parking Garage Rally Circuit is an arcade racing game that feels as if it comes straight out of the ’90s. In the game, you’ll basically have the option to go through more traditional races or endurance races. One pits you against other cars while the other is a solo-oriented mode. The game also supports local multiplayer and online multiplayer. Sadly, the latter never really had any players online to play against.
As you’ll be racing in parking garages, you’ll have limited space to race and you’ll constantly have to drift around corners to reach the next checkpoint. Luckily, the game has extremely tight controls and very satisfying drift mechanics. Drifting is the key to picking up speed, as pulling off a successful longer drift will provide you with a short speed boost, very much the same as in Mario Kart, for example. The game is quite punishing when you miss a turn, as your digital opponents do not really make any big mistakes. This makes the game a bit harder for more casual players, but it makes finishing first after a few tries all the more satisfying.
If we had to fault the game for one thing, it would be the limited content. Everything that is currently present in the game is a blast to play through, but you’ll be done with what Parking Garage Rally Circuit has to offer in a few hours if you take into account a few track retries here and there. While the content may be limited, the RRP of €8.99 does still feel very fair for what’s being offered here.
Conclusion
Parking Garage Rally Circuit is a blast to play, and while it only offers limited content, we enjoyed every minute of it. It’s a shame that the online servers were not really populated, as we would have loved to get a few online matches in during our review period as well. Even so, if you consider picking this one up, you’ll be treated to a great arcade racing experience. Parking Garage Rally Circuit might be a bit difficult for casual racing fans at first, but after a bit of practice, it becomes a fun and challenging grind to unlock all the stages and ultimately come out on top for every level. If you’re looking for a delightful blast from the past, look no further.
No Comments