Classic Racers

Review

Welcome drivers, we have fallen into a time-warp and landed back in the time of classic racing. You will be starting with slower cars and building up to the formula racers as you level up. The title is a time attack racer, you do not have any competition on the track; it is you and the open air, with only time to beat if you are to progress past the tracks. With tracks of various designs and difficulty, you’re sure to spend many hours mastering them all! With straightways and hairpin curves, the tracks will challenge you to make it in time to beat the clock - miss it by even a fraction of a second and it’s redo the track!

Released & self-published on Mar 26, 2019, by the developer Vision Reelle, this is a single player, casual time-trial racing simulator. It features full controller support, with digital and analog controller use (the digital is high precision, the analog for arcade style). With 2 game modes; Championship (8 tracks), and Free Run (21 tracks), you’ll need to unlock the tracks through championship first in order to play them in free run. With 4 car tiers and a total of 12 cars, you start with 3 lower levels cars and unlock the rest as you level up. 11 tracks with reversed and slalom variants, along with 6 championships. There are also international leader boards, so you can compete with players around the world for high scores.

For settings:
Video has Resolution, shadow quality, texture quality, effects (ambient occlusion, bloom, anti-aliasing).
Show controller mapping, these are not able to re-bind them.
Speed in MPH or KMH.
Traction control on/off.
Automatic shifting on/off.
Background music slider.
There are also sliders to control steering velocity, steer angle vs speed, and direct steering on/off.

I did have one issue . . . GPU temps spike by a large margin in menus. I was playing the day before yesterday, took a break to grab a sandwich, and when I returned, I saw my monitoring app red-lining my GPU temp at nearly 180 F! I decided to clean my video card (it needed it, but I annoyingly screwed up my fan while doing it), and then went and purchased a brand-new video card. On further investigation, my new card is reaching temps of 160 F. My GPU idle temp is about 109 F. My normal operating range for my system with other titles is 120-135 F. What is really odd is that while you are playing, temps are normal (sitting at between 125-135 F), but when you go to the main menu, the temps start rising instantly. In the time that I wrote the last 2 sentences, it has risen to 150 F in the menu in an idle state and climbing. This needs to be addressed!

A cute title; the tracks are not overly long and are well-designed, along with pretty decent sound effects. I am still trying to decide what control scheme works best for me. I have tried the keyboard and both controller styles, and I am torn as to which I prefer (probably the high precision). The tracks are set really close with the time values, so if you screw up too many turns, you will fail to beat the clock. I had many runs in which I would be just under a fraction of a second over, and would have to re-run the track! Practice makes perfect they say, and yeah it does. Once you learn how to handle the different cars along the way you will beat the clock a lot more easily.

Features I would like to see:
Being that there are no other cars on the track, it would be a neat feature to have at least a ghost car so you could watch your best runs as you redo the tracks. I would have liked the emergency brake to function a bit better for drifting; it currently feels more like regular braking than an E-brake.