Classic Sport Driving Preview

Classic Sport Driving brings a unique take to the retro driving game style, as seen in titles such as OutRun, Chase HQ, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge and many other 90s racers.

Touting procedurally generated tracks as part of its arsenal, the game challenges you to read the road ahead as you race from checkpoint to checkpoint. In the demo that I played, three locations were available and could be altered by entering a custom word, which generated a seed for my upcoming track. Altering the location, time of day and weather conditions just by inputting a different word into the generator gives this the potential to throw near infinite possibilities at you.

I was limited to this “Exploration” game mode in the demo, but that still offered enough content to satisfy my curiosity and sate my 90s racer thirst. The full game offers a 24 race campaign, multiplayer modes and challenges to overcome, in private or public flavours. What I also found interesting is that the difficulty didn’t necessarily mean the AI cars on track became more adept, but increased the severity of the track itself.

“Easy” gently introduces you with mild curves and bends as you drive to your destination, increase the difficulty one stage and you start to face more pronounced corners, and “Hard” essentially slingshots you into hairpin city. This threw me off guard but it felt refreshing that this change adjusted the procedurally generated tracks rather than opponent vehicles.

One drawback with my time in the game is that only one single car model was seemingly used, for both the one I drove as well as the AI cars. This could get a little dry for prolonged sessions in Classic Sport Driving; while it may have been fine back in the 90s, today I’d expect a bit of variety in vehicles when I look at a driving game.

Classic Sport Driving doesn’t have a definitive release date at this point, only tentatively estimating December 2021, but it is a title to keep an eye on if you’re a fan of the old school 90s racing games.