Formula Retro Racing - World Tour

My first thought when I loaded up Formula Retro Racing - World Tour was that someone had lovingly ripped the coin-op board out of a Virtua Racing cabinet and soldered a modern PC onto it. That is absolutely a compliment. The visual style - flat-shaded low-poly cars, garish solid colours, chunky trackside pine trees - runs at a locked 60fps and supports up to 4K resolution, so it looks intentional and sharp rather than lazy. If Daytona USA and Sega Rally had a baby that grew up on Horizon Chase, this is roughly what you would get. Content-wise, the package is genuinely decent for an indie. You get ten cars split across two distinct classes: five single-seater formula cars covering touring, rally and cigar body styles, and five muscle cars with throwback designs ranging from 1940s proportions up to the early 2000s. The two classes handle completely differently. The formula cars grip the apex like you would expect - precise, rear-driven, very Virtua Racing. The muscle cars throw their back end wide and demand a totally different line through corners; wider entries, covering track to block, more sliding than slicing. Eighteen tracks cover city circuits in London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York and more, plus dedicated drift layouts at Snowdonia, Miami and Santa Monica, and two oval configurations at Indiana and Alabama. Three difficulty levels and a points-based unlock system mean a complete newcomer can make steady progress without hitting a wall, which I genuinely appreciate. The four game modes keep things varied enough. Arcade is your main progression campaign. Grand Prix lets up to four people race locally in split-screen - and yes, it does work properly for couch sessions. Eliminator is the standout mode where the AI gets progressively faster rather than simply dropping one car per lap, which keeps the pressure on right to the finish. Free Practice rounds out the set. For PC players there is also an OpenXR VR mode that drops you into a virtual arcade cabinet view, which is a fun gimmick for about twenty minutes. The elephant in the room is that there is no online multiplayer at all, only global leaderboards for lap and race times. If your friends are not in the same room, the multiplayer value disappears completely. The criticisms that keep surfacing across reviews are consistent and fair: the AI is chippy and aggressive at higher difficulties in a way that feels less like a challenge and more like rubberbanding nonsense. The music loops are short enough to become genuinely irritating over a long session. The muscle car drift handling is sensitive enough that some reviewers found it more frustrating than fun, particularly through tight chicanes. Button remapping was reportedly absent at launch and the retro-arcade menu countdown timers - a cute idea in theory - can feel obstructive in practice. It launched into Early Access and Steam activity from the developers has reportedly gone quiet, so do not buy in expecting a major content roadmap to materialise. What is here is what you are getting. For a casual couch racing night, though, it genuinely delivers. Controls map cleanly to a gamepad - gas on one trigger, brake on the other, gear shift on a face button if you want the illusion of manual control. No wheel or pedal support that I could confirm, so sim-rig owners should look elsewhere. The accessibility curve is gentle enough that non-racing players can be competitive quickly, which matters enormously when you are trying to fill four controller slots at a party. It earns its place as a pick-up-and-play option for groups. Just go in with eyes open about the solo longevity ceiling and the absent online modes.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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