When I first booted up Rally Arcade Classics, I was expecting to be transported back in time. Within minutes of playing, I felt the same rush I used to get sitting cross‑legged in front of my dad’s PlayStation 1, clutching a clunky grey controller, grinding through pixelated dirt tracks in old rally games. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve sworn Rally Arcade Classics was a remaster or remake of one of those forgotten PS1 rally titles. And I am all for it.

If someone told me it was a remake, I would believe them.

The game leans heavily into retro design. From the blocky menus to the bold fonts, from the slightly jagged car models to the exaggerated dust clouds, everything screams late ’90s. But it’s not trying to parody or make fun of that era, it embraces it. There’s a sincerity to how Rally Arcade Classics presents itself, almost like the developers dug up a half‑finished PS1 game, polished it slightly, and shipped it.

For players who grew up on Colin McRae Rally, V‑Rally, or even arcade racers like Sega Rally Championship, this game scratches an itch you probably forgot you had. The cars feel light yet grippy, the tracks have that mix of realism and arcade sensibility, and the soundtrack keeps your foot tapping even when you’re skidding into a snowbank.

On paper, Rally Arcade Classics is generous. It offers 44 cars spanning decades of rally history and 48 tracks across varied environments. You start small, racing in a little “Kopper” that’s clearly a cheeky nod to the Mini Cooper, and gradually unlock bigger, faster machines. There’s a license system that gates progression, making you prove your skills before you get access to the heavy hitters. It’s a nice throwback to when games made you earn the right to play in the big leagues.

Repetitive? Yes. Addictive? Very.

The modes are also plentiful: Tour, Rally, Arcade, Chrono, and Licenses, plus rotating weekly and monthly events. On the surface, it’s everything you could ask for. But once you’ve played a handful of events, you start to realize there isn’t much variety in how they’re structured. Most of the modes boil down to re‑running similar stages under slightly different rules. It’s the kind of grind that was common in older games, and while it feeds into the nostalgic vibe, it can also test your patience if you’re used to modern rally titles with richer career modes.

Driving feels responsive, leaning more toward the arcade end of the spectrum than full simulation. Cars are easy to pick up and drive, but hard enough to master that you’ll want to chase better times. Surfaces matter, you’ll notice the difference between dirt, tarmac, and snow. However the handling never bogs you down with punishing realism. It hits a sweet spot: challenging without being frustrating.

The gameplay aside from the licenses really reminded me of Trackmania. Although you won’t be racing across insane ramps in the sky you will find yourself competing with players in the leader-boards. While I was progressing through on of the events I noticed I was close to top 100 and knew exactly which corner slowed me down. After a few restarts it felt so good to get into the top 80’s. All the game modes will give you something in return such as unlocking new cars in arcade mode or earning big bucks in Rallies to buy them. But the main gameplay loop for me was the addictiveness of shaving off a few seconds of my time.

The Conclusion

Rally Arcade Classics is a love letter to a bygone era of rally games. It’s not going to compete with the likes of DiRT Rally 2.0 or WRC Generations in terms of depth, realism, or production values. But it doesn’t need to. What it offers is a trip back in time, to a period when racing games were about unlocking cars, memorizing tracks, and shaving seconds off your time rather than managing tire compounds or fine‑tuning suspension settings.

If you grew up in the PS1 era, this game will feel like coming home. The grind, the repetition, the slightly janky presentation, they’re all part of the package, for better or worse. And while those elements may frustrate newcomers, for me it only amplified the nostalgia. It really does feel like a lost classic dusted off and somehow still works.

At its asking price, you’ll want to consider how much patience you have for repetition and how much value you place on nostalgia. But for players like me, who remember sneaking in rally sessions on my dad’s PlayStation, Rally Arcade Classics is more an addicting warm feeling.

The roguelike genre has been present in video games for many years, and since 2011, its presence has become more, and in recent years, its presence has been more than ever, and wonderful games like Hades have been released in this genre and have managed to achieve success and become popular with many fans.

While this genre is more popular with more professional players, the developers have always tried to make it playable for other players while maintaining the difficulty of the genre.

Combining the anime style with roguelike is definitely interesting and exciting for many, so when they see a game like Scar-lead salvation in the store, they will definitely be curious to research it and play it.

Scar-lead salvation was developed by Compile Heart and Neilo and published by Idea Factory International, and you can call it an AA game.

STORY

The story begins when the main character wakes up in a military facility and an AI talks to her. As you move forward, you find out that you have amnesia and that this is a military facility.

The main character of the game starts asking questions to this AI, and almost all of her questions go unanswered.

Most of the dialogues in this game end with the Protagonist telling the AI ​​that it is useless. The dialogues are very dry and bad.

After moving forward and talking, you learn about the events in the outside world, and the story progresses with the half-hearted and incomplete explanations of the AI ​​that acts as your guide, and there is almost no other storytelling other than this.

The story is completely predictable and has no excitement or interesting twists.
It takes about 7 to 8 hours to finish the main story.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay is as simple as possible and there is nothing interesting or creative about it, you can pick up two weapons, upgrade them or swap them for other weapons, apart from the weapons there are also exo skills that you keep after dying.

At first you only have one exo skill and then the number of them increases they are your passive skills like increased defence increased time to dodge and many more skills that you can upgrade by picking the same skill up again.

when you dodge successfully, open boxes or kill enemies a bar will fill up and then you can activate onslaught mode which makes you invincible for a limited time.

The gameplay of the game can easily become repetitive after half an hour and makes you just skip rooms to get to the boss fights, the low variety of enemies, the unattractive loot you get from the boxes, the repetitive level design and the simplicity of the fights makes you skip non-boss fight sections.

Boss fights are the most interesting part of the game, they are challenging, well designed, and really exciting.

VISUALS

Visually, this game is a disaster. Empty rooms with no art design, poor quality textures, very similar areas, not good at all, the only difference between the rooms is the different floors, which are the same as the previous floors, only with thin layers of ice or fire on them.

There is no reload animation in a shooter game! The character just puts his hand on the gun and you wait a few seconds and the gun reloads!

Even indie games with very, very low budgets offer you visuals that are many times better than this game.

CONCLUSION

This game, priced at $60, is not even close to an indie game in terms of visuals, story, gameplay, or even story length. The only positive thing about the game is its boss fights, but it still costs $60, while maybe $10 would be a better price. I do not recommend this game at all, especially at its current price.

Running a store for your niche hobby can be hard, but Supercar Collection Simulator captures what it would be like to run such a store. You run a small start-up business where you sell toy cars and toy car-related accessories. Much of the gameplay is managing your business by making orders on products, setting prices, and satisfying customers. Along with that, there’s also a collecting aspect to the game where you build up your car collection and use them for racing.

The Gameplay Loop

Starting out, you own a small store with nothing inside but a register and some shelves. The main tool you’ll be using for just about everything in the game is a tablet. There, you can make orders for products, check reviews, hire workers, and expand your store. The many proponents of all of those things I mentioned are, of course, money. Balancing your spending is crucial to advancing your store as well as keeping up to date on bill payments. There are many factors to take into account with spending and earning money. For one, certain products may be in more demand than others. You can find this out based on what customers are saying in your store and the market price tracker for individual items. Along with knowing the market price, it’s important to know when to when and what items should have their prices marked up or down. If items are too expensive, less people will show up or not purchase that particular item. If it’s too low, you’d be earning money at a very slow rate or even selling those items at a net loss. These factors are important to helping your store grow and keeping up on payments.

Collect n’ Battle

If you feel that the responsibilities of managing a brick and mortar store are too repetitive, this game lets you collect, sell, and race the cars that you pull. Obtaining cars is as easy as opening up a pack from your store’s inventory or going to the singles market across from your shop. Cars will be permanently marked in your collection, but if you receive a duplicate, you can either use those cars to race NPCs or players or you can sell them. As a bonus to pulling cars, there are card packs you can also open. These cards are used for racing battles as they have unique effects that can change the outcome of a race. While fun, it’s not always ideal to invest a lot of time in collecting. You still have a store to run, even when you have workers helping out.

Blandness of Visuals

Upon looking at the game’s visuals, it’s not hard to tell that it is quite rough looking. I understand that there are many games out there made by indie developers that look similar to this game. But, it’s worth pointing out those visual details as games such as this one can look like a total asset flip. It could be a stylistic choice, but a lot of the hair on the NPCs look like they mash several different hairstyles onto their models.

Just to get this out of the way, but this game uses AI-generated images for most of its 2D assets. This is also true for the cover art on the Steam page as well as for other games the devs have developed. Whether that affects how you feel about purchasing a game, but I can understand how some would turn their nose away from games that use generative AI art. I wouldn’t say this puts down the overall quality of the game, but this adds to this game’s visual blandness.

Conclusion

Playing through this game, I am reminded of a similar game that came out last year. That being TCG Card Shop Simulator. The concept of a store management game isn’t new, but both games share that similarity and that you sell items of a specific hobby. While the gameplay loop was enjoyable, it sort of wears at a certain point. Sure, I’m making a lot of progress in improving my store, but it feels like a lot of the same for each in-game day. There doesn’t seem to be any unique events or changes throughout the days. Because of this, the game loses steam and ends up being very repetitive. As of writing this, the game is still receiving updates, so there may end up being improvements to the game.

Man I love the classic Castlevania games. Sure, they’ve a bit before my time (I’m a 1999 baby), but as someone who spent a good amount of my formative years consuming retro video game reviews on YouTube and dabbling into dodgy emulators, those pixelated relics may just be as nostalgic to me as to any 80s kid. And I don’t need to tell you about the influence that Symphony of the Night had on the industry; it only had a subgenre named in its honour. Chronicles of the Wolf aims to emulate the look and feel of these classics, not only with a PSX inspired look and sound, but also they’re design and mechanics. It’s not a new concept in the indie scene, the initially crowdfunded series Bloodstained released to rave reviews from critics and Metroidvania fans alike. In this regard, Chronicles isn’t anything new or groundbreaking, but it will act as a cosy game for longtime fans of the genre.

Mateo Lombardo, an apprentice of the Knights of the Rose Cross Order, sets out with his fellowship to Southern France to slay the Beast of Gevaudan, a real life mythical creature which was apparently responsible for several grisly slaughters in the 1760s. On arrival, his fellow knights are slain, leaving Mateo stranded alone in this foreign land, the last apprentice of his order. His only objective now? Slay the Beast’s many apostles and avenge his comrades with the blood of the Wolf. It’s as simple as that, and that’s all you really need. Objective Good vs Demonic Evil; it’s delightfully tropey and faithfully echoes the Belmont’s never ending war against Count Dracula. It’s 90s dark fantasy, deadly serious and yet terribly camp.

Its aesthetics and sound design are certainly on point, not just in the stellar pixel art we come to expect in projects like this, but even down to the early CD-quality compression crunch of its audio. When you land a hit on an enemy, you really feel it. Voice acting is wonderfully wooden, the opening narration sounds as if it was delivered by a guy who really wants to be anywhere else and the shopkeepers around the world utter the same slightly clipped voice line every time you visit. This is all by design of course, emulating that awkward transitional stage when games were really trying hard to be cinematic, despite the limitations. And music, man, the music; it’s awesome and exactly what you’d expect. My personal highlight; the sweet melody that plays in villages that really reminds me of the opening to Stairway to Heaven.

Y’know its strange, I have no actual memories for this era of gaming (I wasn’t even born yet), and yet playing titles such as Symphony of the Night and Final Fantasy VII, both of which I only played for the first time in recent years, I am met with an intense melancholy, a twinge of longing nostalgia for a period I never even inhabited. Chronicles also evokes this in me; but there’s an even stranger degree of separation when you think about it. I am getting nostalgia for nostalgia for something I never personally experienced. 

Anyway, our Belmont stand-in, Mateo, is a very obvious tribute/knock off of Richter from Dracula X, bandana and sleeveless tunic included. Personality wise, the hunk doesn’t have much going on behind the eyes; he has no spoken dialogue, no inner monologue and certainly no conflict about what he’s doing. Is he sad over the death of his fallen comrades? There’s no time, he has a foul beast to slay. If you ask any retro gamer, chances are this is the kinda protagonist they like, a macho meathead who wouldn’t look out of place in an 80s action flick. Mateo’s story is a case where gameplay speaks louder than words, his growth not broadcast through retrospection but rather his new ability to double jump and air dash.

On the topic of gameplay, it’s exactly what you’d expect, I actually don’t have a lot to say. Anyone familiar with old school ‘Vania will feel right at home from the opening level, no need to adjust to the game feel. If I had to compare it to any game, I’d say playing as Richter in Symphony of the Night. Mateo’s not as dynamic or responsive as Simon in Super Castlevania IV or quite as acrobatic as Alucard in Symphony. Mateo’s jumps are stiff, but no one near as rigid as the NES titles, with some wiggle room midair. Of course, the more you progress the more upgrades you get to your moveset, sliding, double jumping airdashing; the usual. My biggest gripe is that despite the stunning sprite work, the animation quality lags behind even the older 32 bit titles; Mateo isn’t quite as visually fluid as Alucard, emphasising the stiffness. 

And with these retro throwbacks comes the annoyances of old game design ; archaic oddities like aerial enemies with wiggly movement patterns, convoluted button combinations for alternate attacks. Are they here? Of course they are. Despite every modem controller having four shoulder buttons, we’re still left dealing with combing Up and the attack button for a special attack. C’mon now. Adding to this, we also have various magic and companion attacks that require pressing Up and a different face button, that button also doing something completely different when pressed in isolation. Combined with the fact that none of the modern controllers have good D-Pads, and you’ll likely end up activating your companion ability when you’re trying to swap through. My last gripe is petty; Mateo has a sword and not a whip. That’s fine, I get it. But the whip is just way cooler, and has a much greater use case because of its range. You have some leeway with the weight of different weapons affecting the swing and range, but when you’re trying to simultaneously fight bats and jump across ropes in a narrow sewer, you get some classic old school frustration.

Uniquely, Chronicles takes inspiration from the infamous Simon’s Quest and sets a large portion of the game in the villages and countryside of the land. Don’t fret, there’s no abominably translated dialogue or inanely cryptic gameplay progression, and it provides a nice change of pace from the usual Castle Dracula/ equivalent (though if you do miss them, the latter part of the game largely has you plunging familiar labyrinths and dungeons). You can talk to literally any villager NPC as well, granted not all of them have much to say, but you can accept a few side quests; though they usually boil down to go here, kill this dude and collect a trinket. 

Being an old school metroidvania, expect to do a lot of backtracking, and expect to not always know where you’re exactly supposed to be going. The map system is functional, but lacks the waypoint system you’d expect in modern titles in the genre, so maybe don’t be ashamed to look up a guide to find some of the necessary upgrades that are stored in some back corner of the map you forgot existed. You probably love these quirks, and you might even be looking for them. Rest easy, they’re all here.

Chronicles of the Wolf is a damn good time and it’s exactly what you’d expect. I’ve repeated that phrase a few times now, but only because it’s so objectively true. Like tribute bands and movie tropes, we need a touch of the old school to remind us how far we’ve come and how much fun we’ve had along the way. If you know what you’re doing, you can breeze through in 5 hours, but it’s just difficult enough to provide a decent length on a first play through, owing to some pretty tricky boss fights that just about avoid being annoying.

There’s a few different endings (one of which is played for laughs and you can reach about 25% in) that depend on your completion status and certain choices, but it’s altogether a pretty simple and unpretentious experience. For veteran monster slayers this is good comfort food, a pork chop hidden inside a wall if you will. While it’s sitting on the store next to modern critically acclaimed ‘Vanias like the recently released Silksong, at just £16 it’s an easy recommend, and is sure to take you back to the past, but not to play the sh***y games that suck ass.