Car games best racing

The Road Rash Soundtrack. What other driving game would permit such lunacy? The Greatest Kart Racers Ever. Was this article informative? In This Article. Make your Horizon the ultimate celebration of cars, music, and freedom of the open road. How you get there is up to you. Release Date. Presented by truth. IGN Logo Recommends. Steam Deck George Yang God of War Jonathon Dornbush Pokemon Blue Matt Kim God of War Michael Thompson That's only half the story, though.

The sheer volume of user-created mods is enormous, and while the focus is on Formula One throughout the years those with an itch to be scratched in DTM, WTCC, GT racing and other open wheelers will be satiated too. Hot Pursuit is a driving game frozen in a particularly special time for arcade racers. The purest essence of Need for Speed before the series went all open-world, it delivers exactly what the title promises, in race after race, with no downtime.

Enjoy the simple life as you aim a European exotic down a stretch of hauntingly beautiful Pacific coast highway with a train of police cars following in your wake.

It's aged like an oak-smoked A-lister too. The roadside textures and car poly counts might not be able to compete directly with the latest releases, but the overall aesthetic in Hot Pursuit still looks luxurious. And above all, fast. At least half your time in My Summer Car is spent outside of a car. It all begins with a note from your parents telling you to rebuild the junked car in your garage.

From there you construct a driveable, moddable vehicle down to the most minute nuts and bolts, teaching you exactly what an exhaust manifold looks like and what happens when it rattles loose along a lakeside single lane road at 70mph.

Car ownership has never felt more satisfying and personal in driving games than in this slightly janky but beautifully esoteric builder-meets-racer. Venerated for decades and still playable in , Grand Prix 3 was a turning point in racing games.

Grand Prix 3 was a new level of fidelity. It modelled things like tyre wear, wet weather grip, and tiny setup tweaks - things that games had only been able to approximate in the broadest manner previously. Simply put, it felt like sitting inside a Formula One car. And to look back on today as a playable museum piece, it has the added incentive of capturing the sport at an especially exciting time, when legends like Schumacher and Hakkinen were battling for top spot and previous champions Damon Hill and Jacques Villeneuve struggled at the back of the pack.

This is the descendant of SimBin's once-mighty racing empire. Think of it as GTR Online: it's the ruthlessly-authentic car sim you remember, but retooled for online free-to-play. The GT racing is beautifully modelled and captured through a good force feedback wheel, the online competition fierce and well-structured, and the catalog of cars and tracks deep enough to really specialise in a certain series thanks to that free-to-play model.

Which is also its weakness. Once you get the cars on the track, it's all terrific and familiar. But off-track, RaceRoom is all about selling you bits and pieces of the game. Pick a series you want to race, and immerse yourself in it. There's more than enough to learn about vintage touring cars to occupy you for months, if not years, before you need to go dribbling over the in-game store menu again. Autosport is Codemasters' easiest, most entry-level track racing game.

The car handling is very forgiving, but with just enough fight in it to teach you the basics of corner-braking and throttle-control. Outside the car it does as deep as you're up for, though. It's got full-race weekends, typically strong opponent AI for Codemasters, and tons of variety in its racing formats. With the ability to "shift" between NPC cars at-will, Driver:SF is one of the only post-Paradise open-world racers to think of something fresh and new to do with the freedom of the open world.

In truth the brilliance of its central idea does outweigh the feel of its handling, which aims for Need For Speed but doesn't quite excite in the same way. It's still rough and ready enough to power a brilliantly odd story and bring San Francisco to life, though. Welcome to the Michael Bay Motorsports Hour, where fake sports cars will rocket through desolate, orange-filtered urban wastelands at blinding speed while drivers accumulate enough energy to trigger bomb-drops from overhead helicopters, vicious sweeps from out-of-control cranes, and even the odd explosion of an entire city block.

Racing games aren't often treated to remasters. The big franchises iterate so often that there rarely seems much point, but in the case of Burnout Paradise everybody was happy to see an exception to the rule. In 10 years, there's been nothing quite like it. And yet the original model still surpasses its imitators.

It's so much purer and more exciting than the games it inspired. It doesn't have any licensed cars, so instead it features car-archetypes that crumple into gut-wrenchingly violent wrecks. Compare those to the fender-benders that wipe you out in Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Criterion's attempt at topping themselves and where you get the sense that just depicting a shattered headlight would have entailed hundreds of meetings with Lamborghini's lawyers.

Paradise isn't an online "social" experience. It's not all about collectibles and unlocks. You get new cars, but they're not the point of the game. It's about driving around a city populated entirely by cars, listening to a drivetime DJ spin classic and pop rock tracks while you drive hell-for-leather through twisting city streets, mountain passes, and idyllic farmland.

It's violent, blindingly fast, and endlessly entertaining. It's created the modern arcade racing genre, but the joke is on us, because all we've done ever since is try to get back to Paradise. Hey folks, beloved mascot Coconut Monkey here representing the collective PC Gamer editorial team, who worked together to write this article! PC Gamer. See comments.