I have always enjoyed racing games – whether it’s circuit, street, or rally racing – I am there! Classic Racers Elite is a time-trial-centric racing game, and that's pretty much it! featuring 12 championships and various takes on iconic cars from the 1960s, it could have been a keeper, however, it doesn't quite get there.
Jumping straight into the first championship race, you can choose from four available cars, and from there you can choose from a selection of decals and colours - and then you're ready to race.
It was at this point that I realised that the game hadn't revealed the control scheme to me, luckily - from my knowledge of similar games, I discovered that Classic Racers Elite had the basic setup of ‘right trigger to accelerate, and the left trigger to brake/reverse’, with L3 used to steer your vehicle.
The settings are available to view – and can be tweaked from a settings menu, but there really should be something here explaining this before the race began. There is also the functionality to change the camera angle for those who like to view the race from the front bumper, or driver’s seat.
Let's talk about cars for a moment. The cars in Classic Racers Elite are unlicensed, but anyone with a bit of knowledge of cars can see that the Astun Macro is a classic Mini, or the Fred GT 50 - this name did make me giggle - is the amazing Ford GT. All I wanted now was for each of them to have their own individual engine sounds whilst going flat out, and the screeching of tires when you take corners too fast - and that's what I got.
As you progress through the championships, you get to try out different vehicles in different class categories, this is due to the courses needing faster and more agile cars - but the thing is, each car from the four that you can select from just don’t feel that different from each other in terms of performance. I just felt there was not much need for me to change from a car I liked the look of more to a vehicle with greater acceleration or for the better handling that it might supposedly have.
Classic Racers Elite does have kind of a multiplayer feature, whereby you can see other people’s fastest laps, which is a nice touch as you can always have a time that you might want to try to beat, but the game, unfortunately, does not have any form of local split-screen mode.
Visually it is decent but doesn’t stand out from other games in the same genre, and the tracks included varied from hill climbs to racing through cities - and they do vary in degrees of difficulty. For instance, in the later races, it was more very much about steering skills than flat-out speed.
I did find that I had an issue with regard to the environment appearing in view, it caused a bit of a distraction, and it did make me think that a corner was a lot further away than it actually was. The physics was probably the biggest downfall in terms of the actual on-track action, it just felt like it had very little to no physics at all. For instance – you could be driving at full pelt, forget to put the brakes on, crash straight into a brick wall… and then just drive off with only a second or two wasted. The only thing that might come from such a severe crash is smoke from the tyres, but even that seemed a bit out of place.
There are some options available to tweak your driving experience, you can change the speed metrics, or have a go at trying manual gear changes and even
can alter the response of your steering, or how much the steering will be affected by the
speed.
SUMMARY
Having played Classic Racer Elite and completed all championships in four hours, it's a very simple racing game to drop in and play, but now that I've completed it, it doesn't feel like I want to it pick up again and work through the championships a second time or continue to beat existing race times.
Classic Racers Elite is enjoyable while it lasts, but there wasn’t enough replayability there to keep me coming back for more.
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