Arcade racing built around old metal — collect the classics, tune them in your garage, then throw them at a corner.
Modern race cars are solved problems. They stick, they stop, they do what the telemetry says. A thirty-year-old coupé does none of that — it leans into a corner, it waits a beat before it answers the wheel, and it rewards you for being smooth instead of being fast on the straight.
That gap is the whole game. RACE & RETRO CARS is an arcade racer, not a simulator: you steer with a thumb, the braking is forgiving and a race fits in the time it takes a kettle to boil. But every car in the garage is drawn from the era when bodywork had shoulders and dashboards had dials, and each one drives like it looks. The boxy hatchback darts. The long-nosed grand tourer wants a wide line and a bit of patience. You learn them the way you learn a set of corners.
No two garages end up the same, because nobody unlocks cars in the same order or tunes them the same way. Yours ends up being a record of what you like driving.
Circuits, cars and the garage they live in.
Every car on the roster is a vintage or retro design, and each handles to its character — short wheelbase cars twitch, heavy tourers slide wide and settle.
Cars arrive as you win, not as a wall of locked icons. The garage fills up slowly enough that you remember how you earned each one.
Engine, gearing, brakes, tyres and suspension are all adjustable, and the changes show up in how the car turns in — not just in a number on a bar.
Period liveries, race numbers, two-tone paint and wheel sets. Build the car you had a poster of, or something nobody ever built.
Coastal circuits, mountain passes, city loops and short sprint tracks, each with braking points worth learning.
Arcade controls, quick restarts and short races — it works standing on a platform and it works on the sofa for an hour.
Pick the mood: a quick win, a clean lap, or a long climb through the collection.
Point-to-point blast against a grid of rivals, over before your coffee cools.
No traffic, no excuses — just you, the circuit and a lap time to beat.
Last car on the lap is out, every lap, until two are left arguing over one corner.
The long campaign: era by era, each rung unlocking the next set of cars and circuits.
Modes open up as your garage grows — you start with a sprint and one car.
The garage is the other half of the game, and for a lot of players it is the half they keep coming back to. A car arrives stock — soft springs, tired brakes, a gearbox set up for cruising — and what you do next decides whether it becomes a sprint weapon or something you take round the mountain pass for the pleasure of it.
Tuning is deliberately legible. Shorten the gearing and you feel the car get frantic off the line and run out of road on the straight. Stiffen the rear and the back end starts to rotate under braking, which is fun right up until it isn't. Nothing is hidden behind a single power rating, so a slower car set up properly will embarrass a quicker one driven badly.
Paint, two-tone splits, stripes, period race numbers, wheels and plates. Put a works livery on a humble saloon. Build the exact shade your family car was. The point is that when your car lines up on the grid among five other classics, you know instantly which one is yours — and so does everyone else.
I came for the old cars and stayed for the tuning screen. Dropped the gearing on the little hatchback and suddenly it was the fastest thing I own.
Races are short enough for a train journey but the handling has enough in it that I'm still shaving tenths off the same mountain lap.
Elimination mode is pure noise and I love it. Painted my grand tourer in my grandad's colours, which was unexpectedly the best part.
Playtesting, press, creator collaborations or a question about the game — send it here and a person on the team picks it up.
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