A PS2-influenced racer, Rally Arcade Classics does just enough to be interesting but not enough to keep us coming back for another lap
Within moments of playing this game, I knew exactly how to control it. I knew exactly what I was going to get out of it. It’s as “What You See Is What You Get” of a racing game as can be, and that’s neither a good nor a bad thing — it’s the premise that this game is fully built around.
Rally Arcade Classics initially came out in September, developed by a small group of friends who thought to themselves, “hey, we love classic PS2 racing games, so why not make one today?” And so they have. They’ve managed to capture the essence of that era of racing, the nostalgia of running a real-ish car around a track, whether it’s a dirt track or pavement, off road or on a highway, with some lite weather and night effects and racing sounds and road physics. If we’re on the road we go fast, and if we go off the road we slow down.
It’s basic, very basic, and it aims to be pure, at least from the controls and presentation, to what we expect. It plays like a racing game, every racing game. And it looks like a racing game, every racing game.
But that doesn’t meean that it’s all that great, to be fair. There isn’t anything to set this game apart from any other racing game out there. Sure there are online “events” that we can race in that compare our times and our rankings, but that’s not new. That’s not going to put me over from other games that do the same exact thing. There are a few different courses, a few different cars and a few different modes. I’t simple and clean, and that’s fine. It’s just not special.
That simplicty, though, makes the actual issues pretty glaring. For one, the requirement to go through the licensing system is tedious and feels shoehorned in. I just want to race, not work to race. The car physics, while they feel good, don’t actually react to obstacles. Hitting a thin post gives the same reaction as hitting a brick wall: a complete dead stop. There’s no damage, there’s no bounceback. It all reacts the same, forcing us to be extra weary of anything around the edges of the track. Even that is a little off, because just in the first few runs the track exploits start to become apparent, making it fairly easy to break the course times or blow past other cars.
Now, we don’t review games based on how many people make them. We review them on the finished product. This finished product doesn’t do anything special at all. But again, if you’re into early PS2-style racing games, as a lot of us are, then Rally Arcade Classics is a simple, pure little palate cleanser. Sometimes you just want a little bare bones product, and sometimes that’s all you get even if you were kinda expecting more.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. The video first appeared on the March 3rd, 2025 episode of The SideQuest.
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