Synopsis: Rally Arcade Classics leaves a few quality of life-improvements and features to be desired. The stuff that is there, however, feels good and engaging. It has a thorough selection of classic rally cars in 4 of the most quintessential rally locations. If a few improvements are made, this game could be a must-have for arcade racing players. More information in this Rally Arcade Classics review.
My recommendation is to buy the game if it is on sale. Because in the eurozone, the game is priced 19.99€, which seems steep to me for ‘just’ a leaderboard game. If online-play is added, the price tag is definitely warranted.
Rally Arcade Classics is a rally game by developer NETK2GAMES. First released on September 23rd, 2024, the game has since seen regular updates. But what is it about?
About Rally Arcade Classics
Rally Arcade classics is an arcade racing game featuring classic rally cars. The game has a selection of game modes, being:
- Tour – A selection of different events, allowing a player to gain stars to progress in the game
- Rally – Multi-stage rally events against computer-opponents
- Licenses – Acquire licenses to be allowed to buy more powerful cars
- Arcade – Special events in which upgraded cars can be unlocked
- Chrono – Local leaderboards for all combinations of stages and weather
- Events – Weekly and Monthly changing events with leaderboard
The cars included are fictional vehicles heavily based on classic rally cars from the 70s until the 00s. A Subaru Impreza becomes an “Imperial”, a Lancia Stratos becomes a “Startros” and a Peugeot 205 becomes a “Paigot 5”.
Stages are in 4 locations: Finland, Catalunya, Greece and Monte Carlo. These 4 grant a selection of diverse environments for drivers to partake in stages.
Sunny and rainy are the two kinds of available weather. Monte Carlo, additionally, has a couple of snowy tarmac sections. Also, the game has both tarmac and dirt surfaces with notable differences combined with weather.
The gameplay loop
Rally Arcade Classics has a rather basic gameplay loop reminiscent of a mobile game. You start with one car, the “Kopper” which is based on a classic Mini Cooper. You partake in a selection of different “Tour”-events including normal time attack, drift contests and racing against AI-opponents. In the example of time attack, beating pre-defined times grants a player either 1, 2 or 3 stars. You need to beat a threshold of stars to be allowed to get a license for faster cars. Once that license is unlocked, faster cars can be bought and new events can be participated in.
Of course, new cars need to be bought as well. Players get money, or credits, by finishing tour, rally or events.
How it feels to start Rally Arcade Classics for the first time
Starting the game up, I initially had to change language, because the game didn’t recognise I have my Steam client and Windows set to English, maybe going for location instead. After that, I had to touch no more settings at all and was ready to race immediately. My gamepad was immediately recognised and allowed me to play.
C-license
A bit of a guided tour helped me find my path to the “Licenses” sections to get my first license of the game. C-license allowed me to race the free fake stock Mini Cooper, a horrendously slow car which is effective in explaining the basic controls, gas and steering. Really, the stock Mini Cooper needs neither brakes nor handbrake. This license takes incredibly long, or at least it feels like it. It took me 1.5 hours to reach B-class. This doesn’t sound bad, but it felt like a drag.
Potentially, it felt like a drag because the stages are merely 20-30 stages long. So doing a large number of those feels like being stuck in traffic that just start stops the entire time. Personally, start-stop traffic is more infuriating for me than just standing still for the same amount of time.
It also didn’t help that the “challenges” felt a bit too easy.
Anyway, after 1.5 hours I started doing B-license.
B-license
While C-license slightly demotivated me, B-license reinvigorated me. Just making the Mini Cooper a bit faster made it feel much more exciting! And now I finally had to use the handbrake. And I enjoyed it.
Drifting the car around some of the corners because just gas and steering was slightly too quick now made the game so much more interesting. And that even though I was just sliding a front-wheel drive car around. Still, the challenges felt really easy. Only a handful of tour-stages required a do-over to get 3 stars.
So after about 1.5 more hours, I unlocked C-license!
A1-license
So next, getting in C-license, it seemed like the challenges were suddenly harder. I had to redo almost every stage of the 10-stage license test to get the 3-star rankings. But after finally finishing that, I got to buy my first car!
I chose the Toyota Celica-type car, the “Selicka”. It was challenging to get 3 stars. And in this license class, normal brakes are also needed sometimes! In order to be fast, you need to be much more precise here. But when I made it, it felt rewarding!
I haven’t continued to A2, B1 or B2 yet, but may do so in the future.
The gameplay
The physics
As long as you don’t go into this expecting a hardcore simulator or a classic arcade game, you are not going to be disappointed. I guess from my experience, the closest I can compare this game to is a budget Colin McRae: DiRT. This feels similar, but on a lower budget. It’s really fun with a gamepad and can provide a real challenge. It’s simple and when seeing conditions, you immediately know what to suspect. Rain may be a bit too slidey in some parts but it’s predictable and enjoyable.
The cars have two different stats: tempo and handling. And the difference in control of cars seems really only in these two factors. Unfortunately, there is no “balance of performance” or similar. Cars are decidedly better or worse than one or the other, which sort of defeats the purpose of buying your favourite car. Speaking from a competitive standpoint, you would only buy the best car you can. And since everything has online leaderboards, there is therefore no incentive to buy any other cars than the best.
The AI
AI, at lower levels, seems way too easy to beat. After trying out timed events, the AI there seems more proficient, which may be because the car class is much faster than a bog-standard Mini Cooper. In any case, the AI opponents, which you just need to overtake before the finish line while they start a while ahead, are very slow in C-class. Going up the classes made me not want to do the AI challenges anymore.
The sounds
The music stings are fine. They are action packed alternative rock shorts which fit well. Unfortunately, there are a few too few of those and after a few tours, it gets repetitive.
The car engine sounds are inoffensive. For a game of this pedigree, they are good. Obviously they are not like sim-racing engine sounds which are recorded for each car on-site. But they are okay in the background of the alternative rock sounds.
Other than that, menu sounds are okay. Only the music sting when something big is unlocked feels pretty loud and keeps playing at the same time as the menu music, which weirdly overlaps.
The game’s issues and potential
This is just a spot for an unranked list of improvement possibilities I have found for the developer to consider.
- C-license cars feels a bit too long before B-license can be acquired.
- C-license feels a bit boring, especially considering the time it needs to advance. It feels a bit repetitive.
- It’s hard to tell which roadside objects are destructible and some indestructible objects make little sense as to why they are indestructible. Examples here are the flimsy feather flags which any car would just unroot or bend. Instead, the whole car just stops. Also the tape fences.
- There are steel fences which act as physics objects and are therefore movable in some Catalunya stages. While they are movable, the physics here can be a bit buggy.
- Collision with unmovable objects like walls or rocks stops the car too much at some point. Especially when sliding into walls the car just completely comes to a stop in a weird way.
- The spotter voice feels like some cheap generated voice. It can get annoying.
- Even though I have set my Steam and Windows to English language, the game started with German language set. Steam has language settings for a reason.
- When selecting cars, you can circle through liveries. Unfortunately, you have to select your favourite livery every time you select the car. It would be nice to have a function allowing either a player to set their favourite livery which is then auto-selected every time or save the last-selected livery for a car and use that as standard for next time.
- Cars are only decidedly better or worse than others. There is no incentive to buy anything else other than the best car in the in-game economy. More levelled cars would allow for players to buy what car they want inside a class instead of just buying the best car.
- No online play as of the time of writing, even though ‘race of champions’-style stages are available.
In conclusion
The game is good and enjoyable if you like leaderboard challenges, because that is currently what it is. My recommendation is to buy the game if it is on sale. Because in the eurozone, the game is priced 19.99€, which seems steep to me for ‘just’ a leaderboard game. If online-play is added, the price tag is definitely warranted.
Rally Arcade Classics is available for PC via Steam and as Demo for PlayStation 5 via the PS Store. The game is planned to fully release for PlayStation 5, Xbox and Nintendo Switch consoles in June 2025.
This game was received for free for the purpose of this review.