Parking Garage Rally Circuit Review (NoPantsMan)
Time Trial Racing at its Finest
It's a rare game where you feel you and the developer have near identical desires for what a game should be but for myself and Parking Garage Rally Circuit this was most happily the case. Drawing clear inspiration visibly from the bygone era of checkbox transparencies, truncated draw distances and 30FPS home ports (with options to alter all of these if you aren't a sicko). PGRC isn't actually the arcade checkpoint racing game it appears to be but cuts its own very specific route to success.
Predominately a Time Trial racer with no cars to overtake or hurl randomized power ups at. For the most part you'll be racing to set the lowest lap time against the ghosts of other players in a way that evokes something closer to a low res Trackmania than you might otherwise expect from the 5th generation aesthetic. Cars dash around the tightest corners imaginable with a binary button based drift system not dissimilar from Mario Kart, drift longer to get blue sparks and in a bout of mad genius if you drift successfully in short order you'll lock in a new top speed for your car while you keep the drift chain up. Maintain the drift and you'll get faster and faster until you're practically travelling at the speed of sound. To stop you from rocketing off the course pressing the drift button locks your car onto the ground (usually) resulting in a furious game of juggling turns, drift and speed lest you witness the effects of high speeds off a short ramp. There's an incredible rush from nailing a tight sequence knowing that it was all player skill and tracks mastery. Those aforementioned ghosts also stop the track from getting lonely as you watch other players previous flailing attempts at racing.
And yes, the Parking Garage thing seems strange until it isn't. Smartly thought out to offer unusual layouts - even the most basic car parks in the game are fantastical offering interesting routes of up and down overlapping pathing. Rapidly the tracks (of which there's something like 10) begin to spill out onto rooftops or bits of offroading to ensure things don't get too monotonous. PGRC knows when to add a bit of flavor and it nails it better than I was expecting. One of the larger criticism you could throw at the game here however is that your first run or three through a track will be pretty bumpy as the layouts can be elaborate and it's not always 100% clear where you need to go even with a track map in the corner - there's arrows and fences trying to point you in the right direction but when you're hurtling through a course a single subdued barricade is almost beneath notice.
The music is categorically excellent in a way it didn't need to be. Avoiding chiptunes that tend to show up in retro themed games even when it's not period relevant - PGRC leans on a sort of Jazz/Ska fusion soundtrack with a sprinkle of honest to god vocal tracks waxing poetically about driving and going fast in a charmingly infectious manner that perhaps more than anything swings for the crown long held by racing game vocal king Takenobu Mitsuyoshi - perhaps it doesn't quite hit the level of Daytona but each track has its own theme and that rules.
At the time of writing this review the developer is still making some planned additions to the game in the form of local simultaneous multiplayer so that's something to look forward to but it sounds more like a gimmick and PGRC is absolutely a full complete title without the need for more ongoing additions so I'm considering it complete regardless. Get this one and learn the joy, the thrill of racing... in Parking Garages.