There have been no shortage of car racing games to enjoy over the years. Here are five of our favourites.
iRacing
With the Nascar season on hold temporarily, iRacing has filled the gap for enthusiasts. iRacing is so realistic that pro drivers (using their own home racing rigs) used iRacing to battle each other virtually on the track. It certainly made for great entertainment as it was streamed online and even on TV. The subscription series (it costs about $99 per year) has been around since 2008 and is widely considered as one of the most realistic racing simulators anywhere. And it’s not just Nascar, either; iRacing encompasses almost all types of racing, on dirt, asphalt, and otherwise, making it a go to for anyone who wants to put their rig to the test.
GT Sport 7
When GT Sport launched with a limited car list and only the bare bones of a single player mode back in late 2017, everyone questioned whether Gran Turismo series creator Kazunori Yamauchi had finally been overtaken by new players in the game (excuse the pun). It turns out, though, it was his way of gently forcing players towards an online racing ecosystem that took real motorsport as its biggest inspiration. By real, we mean REAL.
Keen racer and mechanic Terry, who owns Advanced Service Centre, a car service centre in Grays, Essex, said he “learnt things about the workings of a car from GT 7 that I didn’t know from 15 years of experience”. This level of interior and exterior detail made GT7 incredible, even if it did feel light on content at launch.
Once everyone was indoctrinated into the competitiveness of daily online races, GT went and added more cars and a career mode too, making it the fully fledged game that most people hoped it would be at launch.
As it stands, GT Sport is the pinnacle of console simulators and Gran Turismo 7 in all but name, with a handling model that’s intuitive and convincing that it feels as real as a racing game possibly could. The car list is also expanding, for free, on a month-by-month basis and new tracks also pop up from time to time too. If you ever fell out of love with Gran Turismo, GT 7 will almost certainly be your ticket back into the series. With a PS5 Grand Turismo on the horizon, it’s going to be interesting to see just how insane racing games can become.
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
While UK coppers are busy on the beat in BMW 3 Series, the fictional police force in Need For Speed Hot Pursuit’s Seacrest County spend their time deciding between the Carrera GT, the Zonda Cinque or the Reventón. A choice that I’m sure would see police force applications surge if applied over here.
Still, chasing people down as the cops was the most fun part of Hot Pursuit, with each incredibly expensive car loaded with with spike strips, EMPs and roadblocks. The racers, meanwhile, have additional boost and a defensive jammer, making for a perfectly balanced police chase and a game that you can go back to time and time again.
This all played out on the beautiful, American style roads of an open world and perfectly blended Need for Speed’s garage full of licensed supercars with a Burnout style takedown system.
Rocket League
What do you get if you cross RC cars with football? A question im sure you would have pondered many times… Well, the answer, until its release in 2015, probably wasn’t Rocket League. But, still going strong six years later, Rocket League has filled that gap you never knew you needed in a racing game. Watching 6 grown men and women chase a giant football around an arena until a timer ends whilst literal explosions make you feel like you’re in a micro Michael Bay movie when you score.
Rocket League is a driving game in only the very loosest sense of the word, in that you’ll spend a good amount of your time airborne and chasing a football, but it makes the list through the technicality of being in cars.
Forza Motorsport 7
2017 – Trump’s inauguration, the largest NFL comeback in Superbowl history and the Forza Motorsport 7 release. Three monumental moments that 2017 can claim. You simply can’t argue with the depth in FM7 – over 800 cars from 99 world famous manufacturers and 30 racetracks to test their capabilities. If your favourites aren’t in here, they won’t be anywhere and probably rightfully so.
As befitting of a game with a production budget that would match PSG’s transfer budget, Forza 7 is visually stunning even 4 years on. This semi-sim pushed previous gen Xbox hardware to its absolute limits with its silky 60 frames per second motion and crisp 4K visuals which are now the standard for next gen racing games to come, making it our favourite racing game of all time.
With PS5 and Xbox now able to push the current benchmark to a new level, we expect a racing game to soon knock Forza Motorsport 7 off the top spot, but whether that comes from Forza again, Gran Turismo on the PlayStation or a new competitor, remains to be seen.