Racing games for PC: ten of the best for 2017
What is the best PC racing game? So many elements contribute: the genre’s not only about graphical fidelity and hair-raising sound design – however both certainly help – it’s also about pulling you into the activity as if you’re there in the driver’s seat, eyes strained as the asphalt whips past at 240kph. From honing your timing for a ideal gear shift to kicking out the back-end for a sublime drift, a quality racing game just feels right.
Don’t go asking, “How could you leave behind about Grand Prix Legends! Where’s Geoff Crammond?!” When versions of those games surface on Steam or GOG, we’ll be the very first in line to play them again… and inevitably find they haven’t aged as well as we hoped. So for those of you who are just looking to hop in and fire up the engine of a superb racer, whether that’s an intricate sim or an arcade thriller, these are the best racing games to play right now:
The most realistic PC racing games
Filth Rally
Codemasters’ Mud Rally has surpassed its predecessor, Mess Trio, and is arguably the best game Codemasters have made in years. With a far more authentic treating model, Filth Rally does away with many of the arcadey touches that proceed to persist in the core series.
That also makes it a decent rally game in a way gamers haven’t seen in a long while. It’s not just that these races happen to be set on filth tracks with geysers and explosions of slidey sideways driving, but that you’re actually taking part in the kind of stamina racing that rallying is all about. You have to take care of your car through every race stage, which introduces an element of strategy and resource management that’s all too infrequent in sim-racing.
Now that it’s been out a while, Mess Rally has also accrued a dedicated and meticulous modding community that regularly put out tweaks and fixes that massively improve the core game, especially for rally aficionados. Everything from gorgeously rendered car skins to the most subtle of weather and lighting switches are available to elevate the core game just that little bit higher.
Shift Two
Shift two might be the best compromise inbetween realism and accessibility of any game on this list. It’s not just the ways the car treat – menacing, but capable – but the way it consistently thinks about what players need to perform at a high level. Rather than lock your view staring out over the fetish mask, or ask you to spring for TrackIR to let you turn your head, Shift two has a dynamic view that subtly switches based on context.
Coming up on a gentle right-hand corner, your view shifts a bit as your driver avatar looks right into the apex. For a sharper corner, your view swings a bit more so you have a sense of what you’re driving into, yet it doesn’t feel disorienting at all. It feels natural.
The thoughtfulness even extends to depth-of-field. This is a frantically overused visual effect but Shift two uses it to highlight where your attention should be. When someone is coming up swift on your tail, objects further away get a bit fuzzier while your mirrors sharpen to razor clarity. As you stir around in dense traffic, your cockpit gets indistinct while the cars around you come into concentrate. It sounds gimmicky, but it all feels as natural as driving a car in real life. Shift two is indeed dedicated to communicating the joy and accomplishment of spectacle driving, and it succeeds admirably.
Project CARS
Project CARS is not without its issues, and a plethora of minor but noticeable bugs have undoubtedly dampened enthusiasm for what was one of the PC’s most titillating racers. Still, it’s one of the best racing packages on suggest, with tonnes of rarely-seen racing series and UK circuits that set it apart from its competition.
Project CARS is not just beautiful, but its vehicles and tracks are lovingly recreated and wonderfully diverse. You can drive classic F1 deathtraps around modern race courses, or take a LeMans car around the dazzling and under-utilised Watkins Glen race track (which rivals Spa for hilly grandeur). Or you can say to hell with all that noise and hop into a kart. Just nobody mention Project Cars 2…
The best PC arcade racers
TrackMania Two: Canyon
Any genre veteran will tell you that good track design is an essential part of any quality racing title. While in most games a hairpin arch, g-force-laden camber, or high-speed straight might suffice, for TrackMania Two: Canyon track design takes on a appalling, Hot Wheels-inspired fresh meaning. Sweeping barrel-rolls, nigh-impossible leaps, and floating platforms that stick up two fingers to physics are what set the TrackMania series apart from other arcade racers.
The real heart of TrackMania two can be found online, where the ingenious, convoluted creations of others take centre stage. The competition is fierce and frantic. A race can quickly devolve into a hilarious highlight reel of missed leaps and unforeseen corners. The racing mechanics make for an ideal pick-up-and-play title that you can lose hours to without noticing. That’s largely because of how effortless the cars are to drive, and yet, once you hit the (often ludicrous) tracks, it’s anyone’s bet who’ll take very first place.
Forza Horizon Three
We had to make do without Forza on PC for all of eternity, but that switched with Horizon Three. An absolute party of a racing game, the Horizon series abandons the main Forza personality traits of ‘steely’ and ‘serious’ and substitutes them with the absurdity of a high-octane car festival.
Your job in Horizon Trio, aside from racing a healthy multiplicity of stunning motor vehicles, is to build your Horizon festival in the Australian outback. You’ll contest with attending guests in a diversity of petrolhead events, from plain first-to-the-finish races to stunt hops through cargo ships and multi-hour-long stamina tests.
Of all of Forza Horizon 3’s achievements, tho’, its open world is the one that will capture your heart. A stunning recreation of classic Aussie landscapes, you’ll find yourself pulling awe-inspiring drifts through dusty corners and hurtling past the flawless blue sways of the South Pacific. It’s a road excursion you won’t leave behind in a hurry.
Driver: San Francisco
Every arcade racer should be as cool as this game. If Steve McQueen were digitised and turned into a videogame, he would be Driver: San Francisco.
While Driver: SF features cars and influences from a multitude of eras, it approaches everything with a ’70s style. It loves American muscle, roaring engines, squealing tyres, and the impossibly steep hills and twisting roads of San Francisco. It may have the single greatest soundtrack of any racing game, and some of the best event multiplicity, too.
It also has one of the most novel conceits in the genre. Rather than be tied to one vehicle, you can loosely interchange your car for any other on the road at the thrust of a button. So, in many races, the car you finish in might not be the one you began with, and in car pursues, you’ll quickly learn to teleport through traffic to engineer a diversity of automotive catastrophes just to screw with opponents. It’s bizarre, original, and perpetually delightful.
The best PC racing simulations
F1 2016
F1 fans have had to wait a long time since two thousand thirteen for Codemasters to steer their licensed F1 IP back on track. There were moments of brilliance along the way, like F1 2015’s revised treating physics and a constant increase in overall fidelity, but it’s only with the release of F1 two thousand sixteen that we see the studio come good on their promise. It was a promise laid out back in 2010, actually: be the driver, live the life.
Simply put, it’s the most accomplish and compelling career mode to date. Shooting fish in a barrel compared to F1 2015, which lopped that mode out entirely, but nonetheless extraordinaire. You can now lose your drive entirely if you’re underperforming, and on the other end of the spectrum it’s possible to upgrade a wayward mobile chicane like the two thousand sixteen Sauber up to genuinely competitive levels via mid-session testing and its upgrade system.
It’s the little things that indeed make the difference, however: virtual and actual safety cars. Tremendous weather effects. A remarkably sturdy time trial mode. Customisable helmets. All these puny details accumulate to let you know that Codemasters indeed, truly care about this sport.
Race: Injection
You can’t put together a list of good simulation racing games without having something from SimBin. While the studio emerges to have lost its way a bit with the dubious free-to-play RaceRoom Racing Practice, SimBin were sim racing royalty during the mid-2000s. Race: Injection is their capstone game, the package that combines just about everything they accomplished with the GTR series and Race 07.
These are hard games, but the race-modified sedans of the World Touring Car Cup should ease your transition into serious racing. Even a racing Honda Accord is still a Honda Accord, and the slightly more manageable speed and difficulty of the WTCC is a excellent place to learn the tracks and SimBin’s superb physics.
But there are muscle cars, stamina cars, and open-wheel racers to choose from in this package, all of them brilliantly recreated and suggesting unique driving challenges. For the money, you very likely can’t do better than Race: Injection for sim racing.
Unluckily, the Race series was also long in the tooth even as Injection was released, and there’s no concealing the old tech it’s built on. Don’t let the vapid lighting and abate graphics throw you off, however. A few minutes with these cars, especially if you have a quality force feedback wheel, and you won’t even notice the aged appearance.
Assetto Corsa
Less a excellent racing game and more a excellent treating model with a game built-up around it, Assetto Corsa feels like driving a real car around a real track, to the point of being uncanny at times.
The presentation is kind of crude outside the races themselves, but on the track it’s exactly what it needs to be. right down to some terrific AI driving. These aren’t slot-car drivers, but persuading opponents who will overcook it going into a turn, lose control as they attempt to get back onto the track, and even give you a love-tap as you race side-by-side through a turn. It’s certainly a fine option for people who need something that combines modern, attractive graphics and good AI with high-fidelity simulation.
iRacing
Welp, here we go. The Grand Poobah of simulation racing.
iRacing blurs the line inbetween play and work. Its cars and tracks are recreated with a fanatical attention to detail, and its league racing rules are about as serious as you’ll find in any racing club or at any track event in the world. This is a racing game for people who want the real thing and are willing to spend hours training for it. It is perhaps the pinnacle of Papyrus legend David Kaemmer’s career. For those of us who cut our teeth on the IndyCar and Grand Prix Legends game, that name alone is recommendation enough.
iRacing is not cheap – tho’, at $50 a year, it’s better value than many an MMO. Nor is its emphasis on graphics. But its prizes are aimed at a specific and requesting group of players. When you’ve outgrown the Codemasters games, and even stuff like Race: Injection is wearing a little skinny, this is where you go.
That’s our kicking off grid, but what do you think? Let us know your picks below.
Racing games for PC: ten of the best for 2017, PCGamesN
Racing games for PC: ten of the best for 2017
What is the best PC racing game? So many elements contribute: the genre’s not only about graphical fidelity and hair-raising sound design – tho’ both certainly help – it’s also about pulling you into the act as if you’re there in the driver’s seat, eyes strained as the asphalt whips past at 240kph. From honing your timing for a ideal gear shift to kicking out the back-end for a sublime drift, a quality racing game just feels right.
Don’t go asking, “How could you leave behind about Grand Prix Legends! Where’s Geoff Crammond?!” When versions of those games surface on Steam or GOG, we’ll be the very first in line to play them again… and inevitably find they haven’t aged as well as we hoped. So for those of you who are just looking to hop in and fire up the engine of a superb racer, whether that’s an intricate sim or an arcade thriller, these are the best racing games to play right now:
The most realistic PC racing games
Filth Rally
Codemasters’ Mud Rally has surpassed its predecessor, Mess Three, and is arguably the best game Codemasters have made in years. With a far more authentic treating model, Mess Rally does away with many of the arcadey touches that proceed to persist in the core series.
That also makes it a decent rally game in a way gamers haven’t seen in a long while. It’s not just that these races happen to be set on filth tracks with explosions and fountains of slidey sideways driving, but that you’re actually taking part in the kind of stamina racing that rallying is all about. You have to take care of your car through every race stage, which introduces an element of strategy and resource management that’s all too uncommon in sim-racing.
Now that it’s been out a while, Mud Rally has also accrued a dedicated and meticulous modding community that regularly put out tweaks and fixes that massively improve the core game, especially for rally aficionados. Everything from gorgeously rendered car skins to the most subtle of weather and lighting switches are available to elevate the core game just that little bit higher.
Shift Two
Shift two might be the best compromise inbetween realism and accessibility of any game on this list. It’s not just the ways the car treat – menacing, but capable – but the way it consistently thinks about what players need to perform at a high level. Rather than lock your view staring out over the fetish mask, or ask you to spring for TrackIR to let you turn your head, Shift two has a dynamic view that subtly switches based on context.
Coming up on a gentle right-hand corner, your view shifts a bit as your driver avatar looks right into the apex. For a sharper corner, your view swings a bit more so you have a sense of what you’re driving into, yet it doesn’t feel disorienting at all. It feels natural.
The thoughtfulness even extends to depth-of-field. This is a frantically overused visual effect but Shift two uses it to highlight where your attention should be. When someone is coming up prompt on your tail, objects further away get a bit fuzzier while your mirrors sharpen to razor clarity. As you stir around in dense traffic, your cockpit gets indistinct while the cars around you come into concentrate. It sounds gimmicky, but it all feels as natural as driving a car in real life. Shift two is indeed dedicated to communicating the joy and accomplishment of spectacle driving, and it succeeds admirably.
Project CARS
Project CARS is not without its issues, and a plethora of minor but noticeable bugs have certainly dampened enthusiasm for what was one of the PC’s most titillating racers. Still, it’s one of the best racing packages on suggest, with tonnes of rarely-seen racing series and UK circuits that set it apart from its competition.
Project CARS is not just beautiful, but its vehicles and tracks are lovingly recreated and wonderfully diverse. You can drive classic F1 deathtraps around modern race courses, or take a LeMans car around the dazzling and under-utilised Watkins Glen race track (which rivals Spa for hilly grandeur). Or you can say to hell with all that noise and hop into a kart. Just nobody mention Project Cars 2…
The best PC arcade racers
TrackMania Two: Canyon
Any genre veteran will tell you that good track design is an essential part of any quality racing title. While in most games a hairpin arch, g-force-laden camber, or high-speed straight might suffice, for TrackMania Two: Canyon track design takes on a appalling, Hot Wheels-inspired fresh meaning. Sweeping barrel-rolls, nigh-impossible hops, and floating platforms that stick up two fingers to physics are what set the TrackMania series apart from other arcade racers.
The real heart of TrackMania two can be found online, where the ingenious, convoluted creations of others take centre stage. The competition is fierce and frantic. A race can quickly devolve into a hilarious highlight reel of missed hops and unforeseen corners. The racing mechanics make for an ideal pick-up-and-play title that you can lose hours to without noticing. That’s largely because of how effortless the cars are to drive, and yet, once you hit the (often ludicrous) tracks, it’s anyone’s bet who’ll take very first place.
Forza Horizon Trio
We had to make do without Forza on PC for all of eternity, but that switched with Horizon Three. An absolute party of a racing game, the Horizon series abandons the main Forza personality traits of ‘steely’ and ‘serious’ and substitutes them with the absurdity of a high-octane car festival.
Your job in Horizon Trio, aside from racing a healthy multitude of stunning motor vehicles, is to build your Horizon festival in the Australian outback. You’ll challenge with attending guests in a diversity of petrolhead events, from plain first-to-the-finish races to stunt leaps through cargo ships and multi-hour-long stamina tests.
Of all of Forza Horizon 3’s achievements, tho’, its open world is the one that will capture your heart. A stunning recreation of classic Aussie landscapes, you’ll find yourself pulling awe-inspiring drifts through dusty corners and hurtling past the flawless blue swings of the South Pacific. It’s a road journey you won’t leave behind in a hurry.
Driver: San Francisco
Every arcade racer should be as cool as this game. If Steve McQueen were digitised and turned into a videogame, he would be Driver: San Francisco.
While Driver: SF features cars and influences from a multiplicity of eras, it approaches everything with a ’70s style. It loves American muscle, roaring engines, squealing tyres, and the impossibly steep hills and twisting roads of San Francisco. It may have the single greatest soundtrack of any racing game, and some of the best event multitude, too.
It also has one of the most novel conceits in the genre. Rather than be strapped to one vehicle, you can loosely exchange your car for any other on the road at the thrust of a button. So, in many races, the car you finish in might not be the one you began with, and in car pursues, you’ll quickly learn to teleport through traffic to engineer a diversity of automotive catastrophes just to screw with opponents. It’s bizarre, original, and perpetually delightful.
The best PC racing simulations
F1 2016
F1 fans have had to wait a long time since two thousand thirteen for Codemasters to steer their licensed F1 IP back on track. There were moments of brilliance along the way, like F1 2015’s revised treating physics and a sustained increase in overall fidelity, but it’s only with the release of F1 two thousand sixteen that we see the studio come good on their promise. It was a promise laid out back in 2010, actually: be the driver, live the life.
Simply put, it’s the most accomplish and compelling career mode to date. Shooting fish in a barrel compared to F1 2015, which lopped that mode out entirely, but nonetheless astounding. You can now lose your drive entirely if you’re underperforming, and on the other end of the spectrum it’s possible to upgrade a wayward mobile chicane like the two thousand sixteen Sauber up to genuinely competitive levels via mid-session testing and its upgrade system.
It’s the little things that indeed make the difference, tho’: virtual and actual safety cars. Tremendous weather effects. A remarkably sturdy time trial mode. Customisable helmets. All these petite details accumulate to let you know that Codemasters truly, truly care about this sport.
Race: Injection
You can’t put together a list of fine simulation racing games without having something from SimBin. While the studio shows up to have lost its way a bit with the dubious free-to-play RaceRoom Racing Practice, SimBin were sim racing royalty during the mid-2000s. Race: Injection is their capstone game, the package that combines just about everything they accomplished with the GTR series and Race 07.
These are hard games, but the race-modified sedans of the World Touring Car Cup should ease your transition into serious racing. Even a racing Honda Accord is still a Honda Accord, and the slightly more manageable speed and difficulty of the WTCC is a superb place to learn the tracks and SimBin’s superb physics.
But there are muscle cars, stamina cars, and open-wheel racers to choose from in this package, all of them brilliantly recreated and suggesting unique driving challenges. For the money, you very likely can’t do better than Race: Injection for sim racing.
Unluckily, the Race series was also long in the tooth even as Injection was released, and there’s no concealing the old tech it’s built on. Don’t let the vapid lighting and abate graphics throw you off, tho’. A few minutes with these cars, especially if you have a quality force feedback wheel, and you won’t even notice the aged appearance.
Assetto Corsa
Less a fine racing game and more a good treating model with a game built-up around it, Assetto Corsa feels like driving a real car around a real track, to the point of being uncanny at times.
The presentation is kind of crude outside the races themselves, but on the track it’s exactly what it needs to be. right down to some terrific AI driving. These aren’t slot-car drivers, but coaxing opponents who will overcook it going into a turn, lose control as they attempt to get back onto the track, and even give you a love-tap as you race side-by-side through a turn. It’s certainly a fine option for people who need something that combines modern, attractive graphics and good AI with high-fidelity simulation.
iRacing
Welp, here we go. The Grand Poobah of simulation racing.
iRacing blurs the line inbetween play and work. Its cars and tracks are recreated with a fanatical attention to detail, and its league racing rules are about as serious as you’ll find in any racing club or at any track event in the world. This is a racing game for people who want the real thing and are willing to spend hours training for it. It is perhaps the pinnacle of Papyrus legend David Kaemmer’s career. For those of us who cut our teeth on the IndyCar and Grand Prix Legends game, that name alone is recommendation enough.
iRacing is not cheap – tho’, at $50 a year, it’s better value than many an MMO. Nor is its emphasis on graphics. But its prizes are aimed at a specific and requiring group of players. When you’ve outgrown the Codemasters games, and even stuff like Race: Injection is wearing a little skinny, this is where you go.
That’s our embarking grid, but what do you think? Let us know your picks below.