Old School Rally Revives 90s Racing Games but Ultimately Lets You Down

Hello everybody and welcome back to another game review. This time we’re looking at Old School Rally, which first opened into early access on July 19 2024, was then launched at some point in July 2025 before being delisted due to copyright claims. On December 3 2025, the game was finally fully released once again. A physical release of the game launched in Europe the very next day, and a North American release is slated to occur at some point in 2026.

Everyone has their own opinion on the state of gaming in the modern era and that extends to racing games, which has seen its own trend of negative reception from online communities everywhere, culminating in Project Motor Racing experiencing layoffs after its disastrous launch, to Forza Motorsport 8 stopping development after months of not much going on. The Crew’s server shutdown in 2024 also called the Stop Killing Games into action, but sadly even they could not save the game. The sentiment of negativity surrounding either bad racing games, or mistreatment of good ones has been felt all around the community for quite some time.

It is perhaps for this reason that “retro”-style racing games have been seeing a renaissance over the years from the success of games like Victory Heat Rally and Parking Garage Rally Circuit (which I planned to write a review of, but then found it was difficult to find the substance to write one), as well as the first proper Tokyo Xtreme Racer game since 2006 and Screamer seeing a reboot 31 years after the original. Nightmare Kart is similarly a free kart racer on Steam modeled after Bloodborne PSX and has seen its own niche success.

Old School Rally is a game that falls along those lines. Just like Victory Heat Rally, it is very much a throwback to old racing games of decades past. This time, the game is meant to be reminiscent of the old Colin McRae Rally games on the PlayStation 1. In fact, the game contains a reference to the famous UFO easter egg from the original Colin McRae Rally. I had played the original game myself (and quite a few rally games in general) in my youth, and naturally this looked quite exciting to me, so I bought the game and now I’m here to bring you my review.

Retro Rally Racing!

Old School Rally is, well, an old-school rally game. As mentioned before, the main game in comparison to this one is Colin McRae Rally, which contrasts Victory Heat Rally (which was more like Sega Rally Championship if anything). This means we’re dealing with a more traditional rally game. I tend to split more traditional rally games into two categories: The realistic types which tend to use a numbered pace note system, and the more arcade-y types, which tend to use a simplified “easy”, “medium”, and “hard” pace note system. Old School Rally falls into the latter category.

Although notice that I said “more traditional” as opposed to just “traditional" by itself. This is because Old School Rally is still not your standard run of the mill rally experience because you don’t have any opponents. All you have to do to progress is beat the target time of any stage and you’re allowed to progress onwards. This might not seem that much different than a regular rally game in the grand scheme, but it also felt a little bit soulless knowing how empty the competition is.

Speaking of “empty”, this is unfortunately a problem that persists in a lot of the stage designs in the game. Both figuratively and literally. Because there’s no competition, every race in this game is effectively a glorified Gran Turismo license test. I love the license tests in Gran Turismo, which is a controversial opinion in and of itself, but I wouldn’t love the game if it consisted exclusively of them. The stages often feel very empty in terms of their design. Take a look at Arizona SS1 for example:

There’s a giant hole in the middle of the track where you can see the skybox. If this were a retail PlayStation 1 game from way back when, the developers would’ve likely tried to hide that with a lake or a dense forest (I realize neither of those fit the desert theme, but surely there’s something that would), but instead, the empty void is just visible for all of us to see.

This also segues into my next point, which would be the graphical qualities. This game has a lot of areas of the map that fade in and out, objects popping in and out of existence, and textures that warp around themselves when you get close to them. I realize that these were put there intentionally to mimic the feeling of the original PlayStation, but the execution here feels less graceful than their appearance out of necessity than the old rally games that this one is paying tribute to. Sometimes I also spotted what looked like almost deliberately glitchy textures in perfect square shapes along the edges of some of the roads. I could forgive the other graphical quirks in an attempt to capture the nostalgic feeling, but I sincerely do not understand why those glitchy squares needed to be there.

These weird squares are present all over the place in the game and I really don't know why they're there.

The progress bar that appears at the top of the screen also moves very inconsistently, jumping up and down in speed rapidly and even outright stopping for chunks of the stage. Sometimes it looked like I had completed 75% of the stage in less than half of the allotted time only for the progress bar to slow down to a crawl near the end, or the opposite situation.

Polygonal Performance

Despite the game’s disclaimer that appears every time you boot up the game, all of the cars in this game are modeled after real life cars. If you’re a fan of either motorsports or even just racing games in general, you will recognize a lot of them quite quickly. Given that it’s based on the original Colin McRae Rally, you’ve got classic rally cars of that era like the Subaru Impreza, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII, Toyota Corolla, and… er sorry, they’re actually called the Taurus RS, Jupiter Ram, and Zeta Gampi 300R in this game. This is an indie game after all and they can’t afford all of these licensing rights. It’s always really funny to me when game companies use real cars as the basis for unlicensed vehicles and then make absolutely no attempt to disguise what they’re based off of. Art of Rally, which is a really fun and artistic rally game, does the same thing.

There are also a myriad of older machines like the Audi Sport Quattro, Lanica Stratos, and Ford RS200 (or rather, the Mio Symphonic, Libra Grande, and Gemini T2000), and off the back of fame from Gran Turismo 2, you can even unlock the Suzuki Escudo Pikes Peak car (called the Adares Titan CXR in the game). There however is a little bit of anachronism in the car selection. The original Colin McRae Rally came out in 1998, but Old School Rally notably contains the Peugeot 307 WRC car, which didn't exist until 2004. Either way, the car selection in this game is really great. It contains all the cars you’d expect to find in a rally game of the era it’s trying to emulate, and it’s cool to find all these older rally cars in a modern game. When was the last time you saw a rally game contain the 1999 Skoda Octavia WRC car? Exactly.

The choice of cars in the game however segues into a point that I’ve seen a lot of people complain about in the game, and that is the driving physics. I’m just going to be very straight up with you here and save your skins. DO NOT USE THE DEFAULT DRIVING PHYSICS! They’re incredibly slippery and hard to predict. Thankfully, the game lets you adjust the steering and braking sensitivity, and you will need to experiment with those until you find a setting that’s actually playable. Oddly enough, I also found that your car always takes the exact same amount of damage from every collision regardless of the angle or speed of the impact.

Pace Yourself

One element of the game that often “pendulumed” (is that a word? If not, then I’m coining it now) between a bit confusing and genuinely problematic were the pace notes. If you’ve played any rally game before or are familiar with the actual motorsport, then you know what pace notes are and how important they are for the driver. They are there so the driver is able to anticipate the upcoming corners and prepare for them as soon as they reach them, so the timing of when the pace notes are called out is critical. Lots of rally games give you an option to adjust the timings of when they’re called if you find the default timing to be too early or too late, but Old School Rally does not.

Late pace notes are a huge problem with the game because sometimes you can’t see the whole turn as it’s coming up to you, and then the pace note is called when you’re already trying to navigate the turn and this can end up with you in a disastrous accident. You’re breaking the car, Samir!

Lots of turns for some reason don’t have any pace notes at all, which I found mostly happened on turns that could be taken “flat out” (or in other words, at full throttle without slowing down). It feels very inconsistent for these to be left out when there’s other turns that can be taken without slowing down that still have pace notes, and when most other rally games would give pace notes for insignificant turns anyway. Occasionally, there was also a pace note calling that was blatantly wrong (an “easy” for a turn that was definitely a medium or maybe even a hard), which does not combo well with how late they get called.

Old-School Conclusions

Overall, I appreciate what Old School Rally is attempting to do. It’s a hybrid between the original Colin McRae Rally and the original Sega Rally Championship (much more the former than the latter) that aims to capture the nostalgic feeling of those games. In terms of the presentation, it absolutely nails the art style and soundtrack, but there are a lot of weird gameplay quirks that prevent it from being as good as either of those games.

I hate to end 2025 with a downer review, and I really wanted to like this game, but it sadly didn’t live up to my expectations and left me quite disappointed. If you’re really into the nostalgic racing game craze, then feel free to buy it once it goes on a huge discount, but I really wouldn’t say it’s worth the full asking price. If you’re looking for a retro-style arcade racer, Victory Heat Rally does that better.

Pros

• Great car list
• Nails the nostalgic feeling through the art style and music style
• More accessible for a casual or inexperienced rally player than the typical rally game.

Cons

• The driving physics need to be altered with to get a comfortable setup
• The individual stages tend to feel empty due to not having much foreground
• The rallies themselves feel empty due to having no real competition and a tendency to repeat the same stages a lot
• Pace notes are often called too late or not called at all.

Old School Rally can currently be purchased digitally on Steam, the PlayStation store, or the Nintendo store. In Europe, you can buy a physical version on either PS5 or Nintendo Switch 2, but people living in North America can only buy it digitally as of the time of this review, with a physical release slated for 2026.

If you enjoyed this review, then be sure to check out our Steam Curator Page.