Motorama: Classic Racing

Motorama: Classic Racing is a solo PC arcade racer set in a 1950s California street-racing scene. You play as a leather-jacketed greaser working your way up through the Sierra Lake racing circuit, buying and upgrading cars, and taking on rival drivers across five themed areas. Race types include standard circuit races, sprints, and knockout formats. On paper, that is a reasonable foundation for a casual Saturday-night arcade racer. In practice, the wheels fall off pretty quickly. Let's start with the good, because there is some. The car roster leans into unlicensed replicas of genuine 1950s American iron - think Cadillac Eldorado shapes wearing fictional badge names like "Belvedere." The aesthetic nod to the era is genuinely appealing, and if you are the kind of person who goes weak at the knees for chrome bumpers and whitewall tires, that love clearly went into the model work. There is also a light upgrade and cosmetic customisation system covering performance parts and visual tweaks, which is fun to poke at in the garage even if the upgrade economy is poorly balanced - win cash from races, find that the payouts do not keep pace with the cost of actually progressing, repeat. Beyond the garage screen though, almost everything breaks down. The AI opponents crash into walls and clip through each other and through traffic while you are held to normal physics rules. Controls feel loose and unresponsive whether you are on a gamepad or keyboard, and keyboard users face an extra headache because the game only ever shows controller button prompts regardless of your input device - there is no button layout reference anywhere in the menus. The audio situation is arguably worse: a single looping rock-and-roll track plays through every menu, every garage visit, every race, and the volume setting resets itself after each event so you cannot even mute it once and forget about it. Multiplayer of any kind - split-screen, online, anything - is completely absent, which is a significant gap for a game that could theoretically work as a casual couch experience. Steam reception sits at Mostly Negative, and the community feedback is consistent: fun concept, rough execution, no meaningful post-launch patching to speak of. A single early patch in late 2014 left known bugs (including a broken level-cap reward system) unfixed, and development appears to have gone quiet after that. If you are a serious racing fan with a wheel and pedals on the desk, there is nothing here for you. If you are looking for something to share with friends on a Saturday night, the lack of any multiplayer mode kills that idea immediately. The only honest audience for this one is the very specific niche of players who absolutely need a virtual 1950s American car to exist on their hard drive and have exhausted better alternatives like Mafia II.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

Be the first to comment on Motorama: Classic Racing.