Parking Garage Rally Circuit is a love letter to the classic Sega Saturn and original PlayStation arcade rally racing games of yore. The aesthetics and visuals are a near-perfect approximation of what you remember Sega Rally looking like, and it even offers graphical modes for a locked 30 or 60fps, along with options for CRT-screen filters and more, all while maintaining that low-poly 3D look of the era. The look of Parking Garage Rally Circuit is one of my two favourite aspects of the game. Your mileage may vary when it comes to the Sega Saturn-style graphics. Still, visually, Parking Garage Rally Circuit reminds me of a time when racing games felt warm, bright, colourful, playful, and inviting for players of all kinds. I like the way the game looks, and I, for one, welcome our recent wave of PS1-era-inspired indie games.
In Parking Garage Rally Circuit, you race laps, competing with online ghosts for the best time. In single-player, you see the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-place ghosts’ performance as you race, giving you the sense of multi-car competition, just without the risk of collision. In multiplayer, the ghosts are replaced with up to eight real-time players, but they still behave as ghosts, preventing any collisions from occurring.
Now, at its core, Parking Garage Rally Circuit is an arcade racing game with a strong emphasis on pick-up and-play driving mechanics, with the most complicated mechanic being drifting/boosting. Instead of applying the regular break for turns, the game requires you to drift in and around turns to not only maintain your current speed but also earn a boost. The boost automatically applies upon leaving the drift, and the burst of speed is tied to how long your drift has been going. If the boost mechanic sounds a little uninspired, it’s because it is, but an uninteresting boost mechanic is the least of the gameplay’s problems.
The idea of rally racing in parking lots is a brilliant idea, but Parking Garage Rally Circuit’s driving and level design kneecap the game’s potential every step of the way. Parking Garage Rally Circuit just isn’t that fun to play. The physics and driving feel sloppy and unpredictable and can easily result in a frustrating experience. The unpredictable nature of the driving is most noticeable when colliding with walls. Wall collisions result in the car easily turning sideways and riding up the surface. I’ve played a decent amount of rally games in my day, and I don’t remember any of them featuring cars so eager to Spider-Man their way onto the sides of walls so easily. Due to the tight, near-claustrophobic nature of the levels, it’s very easy to connect with a wall, even when drifting. The drift mechanic also has an unnatural desire to magnetize the car to the road, which offers a pretty unnatural feeling when drifting over steep inclines. If you accelerate straight over the incline, you will jump the car, but if you drift, you will stick to the surface no matter what speed, which can be incredibly frustrating when jumps and inclines in levels lead directly into 90-degree turns.
Too often, the level design feels like it’s punishing the player for performing too well. It’s very easy to fly off the track due to the boost or miss a jump due to a lack of straightaway to use your boost on. Chaining your boost with another drift feels too much like trial and error when the levels simply don’t accommodate you driving as fast as the game lets you. If the verticality of the levels wasn’t bad enough, it’s also all too easy to crash and collide with objects and obstacles in the environment, including gates, parked cars, and even corners. To make another Sega reference, collisions in this game often feel like getting hit when playing Sonic. Assuming you never get hit, you can quickly enter a seamless drifting and boosting flow state. But when you crash, it is a near-debilitating whiplash that immediately ruins the fun you had been having up until that point. It’s just a shame the level design often accentuates the poor driving controls.
Besides the graphics and presentation, my second favourite aspect of this game is the soundtrack. Ska band The Holophonics deliver a catchy, horn-filled set of 15 tracks that were honestly so fun I started listening to them on Apple Music outside of the game itself. My favourite tracks ended up being the Main Theme and Learning Lot. I’m not saying throw on your favourite checkerboard pants and start skanking, but even if you aren’t a big ska fan, it’s hard to deny just how well the soundtracks fit the vibe of the game. It also helps that if you like Ska, this is pretty good Ska, all things considered.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit features eight tracks and three different cars. Each car is represented by weight, with the light vehicle being available first and the other two available as unlocks after completing the campaign with the previous car class. The end result was a pretty short experience as I was able to unlock all three car types in less than two hours, but it did require me to race on the same short tracks multiple times. The game also features online multiplayer, where players can join or create lobbies with up to eight drivers total using peer-to-peer connections. My time with the multiplayer didn’t feel much different than the single-player except for the occasional wait for the host of the lobby to start the next race. I would further criticize the games’ somewhat limited content, but I would argue the repetitive nature of a game that feels like a chore to play is far more damning than what content it brings to the table.
