Parking Garage Rally Circuit Review

Over the years, I have played a lot of racing games, some excellent and others that just don’t feel that great because of bad controls and uninspired gameplay. Parking Garage Rally Circuit seemed very different from other racing titles that I had tried, especially since you aren’t racing on the traditional race track, but instead through parking garages located in different cities around the United States. There isn’t a story to be found in Parking Garage Rally Circuit. Instead, your focus is on racing yourself and beating your previous best time. You will challenge a ghost car of your previous best time and try to improve it to beat the times listed to earn the bronze, silver, or gold trophy to advance to the next location.

There are four different visual settings that you get to choose from before you start your races. They range from retro styles like the Original Hardware option with a 4:3 display, 30 FPS, and Pixel Perfect with CRT Scanlines on. This looks like how it would be if it were released on a CRT TV. Then there are more crisp options, like the Modern Emulator which is 16:9 and runs with 60 FPS. This selection still has CRT scanlines, but Pixel Perfect graphics. Next is the Modern Handheld, 60 FPS and 16:10 Fill Space (Fractional) with CRT Scanlines; and finally the PC Port, 16:9 Unlimited FPS Fill Space and the only option that has CRT Scanlines off. 

When it is set to look like a retro title that would have appeared on original hardware, the visuals are slightly unclear, like on an older TV, and not as crisp as newer hardware. If you select the PC Port option, this is a newer game that emulates what a classic game looks like but has improvements like taking out the scanlines and making the picture clearer than the other options. To make things really feel like a classic game, there is a spot where you can turn on and enter cheat codes for cool unlockables. If you do some research online, you can find one of these cyphers that will allow you to race a totally different car!

When you start the game, you will see that there are two different modes to play: Single-player, where your main rival is yourself, so you are trying to get the best time that you can, or Online Multiplayer, where you can play with up to eight other opponents by creating or joining an existing lobby. There is an options menu where you can make changes like switching the units between metric (km/h) or imperial (mph). Here you can select your ghost car type, like if you are racing against your own best time or if you want to race against the trophy rival that is the closest to your time — in the beginning with this option, I was always racing against the car that had the time for the bronze trophy. As you improve your time, you have the option to race against all three of the trophy rivals. Personally, I liked racing against the ghost car of my best time, I just wanted to keep improving my performance and didn’t want to get frustrated when I couldn’t keep up with one of the trophy cars.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit allows you to customise your vehicle before you hit the parkade race track. The first vehicle you get to drive is a light vehicle, which is quite small, but if quick off the start and because of its size, it can drift around tight corners more easily. To move up to one of the bigger vehicles, Heavy or Ultra, you will need to complete all the tracks available in the previous weight class. Once you have your vehicle, you get to select what kind of livery will be on your car, ranging from spots, one large racing stripe, or several small ones. There are seven two-tone paint colour combinations like red and grey, white and blue, or something more vibrant like light and dark pink. Once you select the number that will be posted on the sides of your car, you are finally ready to race.

Well, I kind of lied there. Before you get to do an actual race, you will need to watch a training video that will teach you how to drive your race car and what to do to successfully drift around the course. You will take everything that you have learnt from this video and test it out for yourself in the Learning Garage. The garage lets you try out endurance and race modes. Endurance has you racing multiple laps trying to get your best time onto the online leaderboard. Race mode is where you will unlock additional tracks to race on by surpassing the three current trophy times. 

The controls in Parking Garage Rally Circuit are quite easy to learn and very responsive, which was great! I opted for a controller, as that is the option I am most familiar with. To accelerate, hold down the right trigger; if you want to brake/reverse, the left trigger is used; steer with the left thumbstick; and to start your drift, hit or hold the left face button. To perform a wider drift, you will need to steer in the opposite direction. If you make a clean drift, you will get a boost of speed which helps improve your lap time. The drifting in Parking Garage Rally Circuit was really good and actually reminds me of drifting in the Mario Kart games. If you are familiar with drifting in those games, you will have no issues making it work here! When your run is finished and you beat the required time, you can proceed to the next track. If you were unsuccessful, you can retry the race or view a replay of your run to see where it went wrong so you can figure out what you need to do for your next attempt.

Your racing journey has you starting at Mt. Rushmore; once complete, you head to San Francisco, then the Seattle Airport, followed by New Orleans Stadium, Chicago Marina, Minnesota Mega Mall, and Liberty Mall, respectively. You can’t just jump forward to try out one of the later tracks, you will need to unlock the next track after the current one you are playing by ranking third or better. Unless your time is in the top three, you must repeat the course ad-nauseam until you improve your time and beat the requirement. Some of these parking garages are incredibly tricky to get a good time in, so it can definitely get frustrating at times. I did find that the more I played each track, but muscle memory would kick in so I knew how to react to the turns coming up so I could improve my times.

In the beginning, the tracks have a pretty simple layout, making it easy to find out where you need to go next. This doesn’t last for long because, as you progress, the difficulty jumps up. The Seattle Airport was the first course that I had to challenge multiple times. It has a huge amount of turns, and a lot of them are incredibly sharp, requiring you to go in the totally opposite direction and making it easy to flip your car. All the turns made it hard to keep track of exactly where you came from and where to go next, so it was easy to get lost and turned around. Adding to the challenge, any vehicle or barrier that you hit will move and make it an obstacle for your next lap. A lot of the later tracks will take multiple playthroughs to learn the layout so you can figure out which route you need to take to successfully improve your time. 

There are a few other things that make this game challenging. There is one track where the power goes out on the second lap, making it so that the only light you have is your headlights. Unfortunately, these aren't the high beams you see on real-life cars; you can only see a small section directly in front of your car. This makes the yellowish-green barriers, with the arrows pointing in the direction to go, difficult to see. Once you get turned around, chances are you will waste a lot of time trying to find the next checkpoint. At that point, it's probably better to just restart the race or hit the top-face button, resetting your car back where you should be. Since these courses are quite short, getting off the correct path usually means that you are screwed and will be rechallenging this track again.

The look of Parking Garage Rally Circuit makes me feel like I’m playing a better-looking version of titles I would have played on the computer or console years ago. With a vibrant colour palette and polygonal yet realistic at the same time, parking garage courses to challenge were a lot of fun. I can’t think of another racing game where I had to speed and drift through a parking garage. I don’t even want to drive in a parkade at the best of times in real life! The upbeat soundtrack that accompanies the game is a perfect fit for the high speed and crazy drifting in this racing game. It makes you want to go as fast as possible!

Parking Garage Rally Circuit is an incredibly addictive game that keeps you coming back over and over again to beat your best times. I was really surprised to find a racing game with smooth controls where drifting your car around tight corners was so rewarding. Besides completing all the different tracks, I was trying to get my best time up on the leaderboard to see how my best lap time compares to all the other racers out there and my friends. It was fun to play a title where my biggest rival was myself; it really motivates you to keep improving and to get better. Even if you shave a second off your previous best time, you are still making progress, though it can be a long and frustrating process. Parking Garage Rally Circuit is a challenging and rewarding racing game that fans of the genre will enjoy. It’s surprisingly fun to race against your own ghost car! Plus, you don’t need to worry about rival racers smashing into you or knocking you off the course, which is a nice change.