Time for another guest review from my friend, Dave Corn. This time, Dave is taking us back to an era of racing where driving gloves and men with moustaches were mandatory. It’s Classic Racers Elite.

There was a time when pilots were TRUE pilots. It was the 60’s. The time of Rock’n’Roll, movie stars and iconic cars. Drive furiously fast on gorgeous landscapes and fight against your monstrous car. A pure Time Attack game where you’re driving cars from the “Gentlemen Drivers” era.

Classic Racers Elite from Vision Reelle is classed as a hill climb rally game, you start at the bottom of the hill and you race your way to the top. Well, that sounds good and all. I’m looking at the Nintendo Switch version a console that I don’t think necessarily lends itself to racing games very well. When you have graphical beasts on the market like the Xbox Series X and PS5, racing games need more of a hook, such as Mario Kart or a new F-Zero (I can only dream). Classic Racers Elite is like neither of those awesome titles. I’ve played a few racers ported to switch with the likes of Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered or the chaotic Burnout Paradise. Both top-end titles and neither are exactly great on the console. However, they’re utterly fantastic compared to Classic Elite Racer. In short, this is just not very good.

Sometimes a game can draw you in when it’s ‘not very good’. It is somewhat inexplainable but you find an element, whether it be a levelling up grind, a hunt for treasure or in this game’s case, unlocking content. More cars and more tracks to discover as you play. Unfortunately, the unlocking cars and tracks is all that Classic Elite Racer really has to offer. From the offset, this feels like a mobile phone game and not a game made for a console. The cheap low-quality graphics would look very budget on the original Xbox at best. Then, it features some pretty terrible handling that just can’t compete with a modern racing game.

There are multiple cars to unlock and multiple stages, but don’t let that gameplay mechanic that fool you. No matter which you try, every car handles in exactly the same way, no amount of adjusting sensitivity will help as far as I’ve found. The car is either stuck to the road or hovering above it, with no in-between. It’s the same with breaking and drift too, the controls are just not there and the slightest touch of either will spin you out of control, or just bring you to a complete stop. It’s almost like they couldn’t commit to how they wanted this game to play, is it arcade, sim or rally? Because it ends up achieving none of them and even Asphalt (the Android racing game) looks better and plays 100 times better too.

All races are against the clock, a time trial and this limited game mode gets very old very quickly. You are just repeating yourself over and over by trying to trim seconds off a time in a game you are not really enjoying but can’t stop playing (I’m almost certain by this point I have developed a problem).

A unique flaw to this game, one I haven’t found in a modern racing game and one that has driven me nuts is the return to track feature. Racing game fans are all aware of it, you dramatically veer off the track, you press a button and it places you back on the track for a speedy recovery. However, this game puts you back on the track in the direction you went off it at. Meaning, if you went off at an angle on a straight, you have to do multiple-point turn just to get you facing back in the right direction and this costs so much time and ends up making it effectively pointless to finish the run. Sometimes funny, mostly utterly infuriating.

I can honestly say I will never play this game again and I’d advise you to only try it if it’s free. There are so many more better racers (on the Switch) I’d stick with Mario Kart if I were you.