I was rather excited when I heard that there was (paid) DLC coming out for the brilliant retro arcade racer Parking Garage Rally Circuit. I first stumbled across this game in the Steam Winter Sale late in 2025 and had an absolute blast with it over the holiday period, sneaking in speedy sessions between family commitments whenever I got a chance.
The base game features eight tracks, each one set in a parking garage in an American city. The big idea for the DLC is a European tour. Eight brand new tracks in multi-storey car parks in European cities. Strap me in!
Most of the things I love from the base game are present and correct in the DLC. The Sega Saturn-era graphics, the remarkably tight and satisfying driving mechanics (the drift is a dream) and the cheesy rock soundtrack (featuring brand new songs). And the sheer thrill of shaving seconds off your best times as you race against your own ghost, or against other players from the online leaderboard, still gets the old heart pumping.
The DLC also features the same progression system. In order to reach the next track, you must get a ‘bronze medal time’ on the current one. There are also two faster, harder-to-control, and cooler classes of cars to unlock and master. It’s a generous and moderately priced package, which essentially doubles the content of the base game and delivers the same kind of video gaming joy and challenge I so enjoyed on the original American tracks. The gameplay is all about lightning reflexes, speedy inputs and chasing that sweet adrenaline rush.
However, I’m sad to report that the DLC falls rather short of the base game when it comes to the layout of the tracks, specifically how they are incorporated into the European cities. Moreover, it somewhat drifts away from the original core idea of driving very fast around ostensibly humdrum parking lots.
My enthusiasm for the new tracks immediately took a hit in the first new location, Paris. You get a brief glimpse of a sketchy Eiffel Tower now and again, but aside from that, you could be in a parking garage anywhere in the world. This is in stark contrast to the American tracks, which manage to simultaneously stay true to the core concept of racing cars around mundane, claustrophobic parking garages while also giving you a weirdly vivid sense of place, of the cities and environs in which they are located.
Each track in the base game has its own character. Catching sight of the giant faces on Mount Rushmore through the concrete pillars of the faceless parking garage – which provides visitors to that strange monument to ‘great men’ with reasonably priced parking – is both exhilarating and a bit uncanny. (By the way, there actually is a huge multi-storey car park at the monument, the National Park Service website helpfully informs me). Another good example is the snowy Minnesota Mall, which always gives me creepy Fargo vibes.
These tracks, aside from being brilliantly engineered to make the most of the driving mechanics, have atmosphere. It is harder, on the other hand, to get excited about the new tracks in Turin and Montpellier (with all due respect to those cities). It’s not so much that they are poorly designed as that they lack distinctiveness and fail to juxtapose themselves with their surroundings in the kinds of ways that the Mount Rushmore one does.
Of the new tracks, Hamburg Concert Hall has more personality than most, but even certain sections of this felt at odds with what I liked about the first game. Part of the Hamburg course goes through the actual lobby of the concert hall and then down an escalator. It all felt a bit too Mario Kart-y. Design decisions like this – the caves in Naples is another example – make the courses feel less unique, like the game has drifted too far away from what made the original tracks so quirkily distinctive. The courses in the base game, even when you popped outside on the final track to jump over the Statue of Liberty, maintained their sense of mundanity, specifically in relation to their surroundings; they felt like functional pieces of architecture on the periphery of iconic locales.
But the new tracks do have their moments. For instance, when the fog rolls in on the second lap at York Castle car park. I’m always happy to see the capricious British weather make an appearance in a video game. And some of the slalom-like sections in snowy Copenhagen are fun, if somewhat off-piste, once again, in relation to the gritty parking garage aesthetic I loved so much in the base game.
My relative lack of love for the settings and atmospheres of the new tracks means that I probably won’t be spending a lot of time chasing better times in the DLC (but I’ll still try for all the gold medals, of course). However, my love of the game endures. So, while I’d rate the DLC at ★★★☆☆, I heartily recommend the overall package and give it:
