These are ten of the best racing games you can easily get right now. You always know a great driving game when you play one. They just feel right. They don’t just look and sound good; they somehow pull you into the action as if you there really were nothing between you and asphalt whipping past at 240 KPH but a few inches of carbon fiber and leather.
Don’t go asking, “How could you forget about Grand Prix Legends! Where’s Geoff Crammond!” When Windows 7 and 8 compatible versions of those games surface on Steam or GOG, I’ll be the first in line to play them again... and even I’ll probably find they haven’t aged as well as I hoped. But for those of you who are just looking to hop into a racing game right now, these are the games that won’t let you down, no matter what your interest might be.
The best arcade racers
Burnout: ParadiseThere might not be a better open-world arcade racer. Even Need for Speed: Most Wanted, which tries so hard to trump Burnout: Paradise, somehow misses out on Burnout’s purity of purpose and fun. In a city populated entirely by cars and a crazed radio jockey, with impossibly epic roads leading through town and country, you simply put the pedal to the floor and rocket past tons of dazzling scenery and into an incredible variety of races. A winning soundtrack is simply the icing on this adrenaline cake.
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
Sometimes you don’t want to drive around a fake city looking for stuff to do. Sometimes you want to cut to the chase... and that’s exactly what Hot Pursuit does. From the perspective of either cops or criminal street-racers, you can pilot a fleet of supercars and tuner exotics down some of the fastest and most spectacular roads in the Need for Speed series.
Seriously, you barely need to touch the brakes in this game. In fact, why not use the guardrail or even another car to help guide you around a corner? If someone gets in your way, feel free to bang them into oncoming traffic and watch the carnage. If you’re a cop, you can even expect a reward for sending these poor street racers to their doom! It’s all as silly as Fast and the Furious ever dreams of being, and about as much fun.
This recommendation does come with a caveat: Hot Pursuit has been gutted by EA’s decision to disconnect it from the Autolog service. But its single-player remains a treat, and there aren’t a lot of arcade racers that just skip to the action the way Hot Pursuit does. That wins it the nod over the more recent (and still fully functional) Most Wanted.
Driver: San Francisco
Every arcade racer should be as cool as this game. If Steve McQueen were digitized and turned into a videogame, he would be Driver: San Francisco.
While Driver: SF features cars and influences from a variety of eras, it approaches everything with a 70’s style. It loves American muscle, roaring engines, squealing tires, 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 variety.
It also has one of the most novel conceits in the genre. Rather than be bound to one vehicle, you can freely swap your car for any other on the road with a push of a button. So in many races, the car you finish in might not be the one you started with, and in car chases, you’ll quickly learn to teleport through traffic to engineer a variety of automotive catastrophes just to screw with opponents. It’s bizarre, original, and perpetually delightful.
Grid 2
This begins to edge closer to “sim-lite” territory, especially as you advance in the campaign and take on more sophisticated racing challenges. But still, Grid 2 is too in love with slippery physics and big drifts to be considered anything but arcade.
And that’s no problem. The racing is consistently demanding, but everything is tuned to make you feel like you have tamed the great beast of a racing car that you’re piloting around the track. The tracks and cars look tremendous, and Grid never stops throwing new challenges your way. It’s an arcade racer for people who actually love racing more than smashing expensive cars. Codemasters’ signature Flashback feature, which lets you go back and erase previous mistakes, is used to great effect here as well, allowing Grid to crank up the challenge without getting too frustrating.
See our Grid Autosport preview for an idea of where the series might be driving next.
The best realistic racing games
Dirt 3
Another caveat here: Dirt 3 still has Games for Windows Live and even though Codemasters are working on removing it, I definitely encountered some GFW problems during my time with the game.
However, it’s worth getting past those problems, because rally racing is ridiculous fun and Dirt 3 is a tremendous representation of the discipline. With gorgeous courses through miles of dirt-track forests and coastal gravel roads, and a delightful physics engine that lets you feel the wheels spinning and sliding beneath your car, Dirt 3 really gets at the heart of rallying.
There’s nothing else like Dirt 3 on this list, but then, there’s nothing else like rally. By design it’s a looser, more seat-of-the-pants style of auto racing. It’s slippery and wild, and consistently exhilarating.
Shift 2
Shift 2 might be the best compromise between realism and accessibility of any game on this list. It’s not just the ways the car handle — menacing, but capable — but the way it consistently thinks about what players need to perform at a high level. Rather than lock your view gazing out over the hood, or ask you to spring for TrackIR to let you turn your head, Shift 2 has a dynamic view that subtly changes 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 just feels natural.
The thoughtfulness even extends to depth-of-field. This is a wildly overused visual effect, but Shift 2 uses it to highlight where your attention should be. When someone is coming up fast on your tail, objects farther away get a bit fuzzier while your mirrors sharpen to razor clarity. As you move around in dense traffic, your cockpit gets indistinct while the cars around you come into focus. It sounds gimmicky, but it all feels as natural as driving a car in real life. Shift 2 is really dedicated to communicating the fun and accomplishment of performance driving, and it succeeds admirably.
Project CARS
There are other good early-access racers out there right now, but none has been such a consistent delight as Slightly Mad’s gorgeous and exciting Project CARS. It’s a crowd-funded answer to console flagships like Forza and Gran Turismo, but with a lot more automotive panache.
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-utilized 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.
Project CARS hasn’t been released yet, but it’s been a solid value for over a year now. It’s such a unique and lovely package that it gets a nod here, even as we reserve judgment on games like Assetto Corsa and the long-awaited rFactor 2.
The best racing simulations
F1 2013
Purists may raise their eyebrows at the inclusion of Codemasters' F1 series in the simulation group, but F1 2013 is definitely more demanding than the games listed above. Even a slightly tamed rendition of an F1 car still has more torque and oversteer than most of what you’ll find above, and it demands expert-knowledge to guide these around F1’s tracks at competitive speeds.
As a whole, the F1 series suffers from a lack of innovation and ambition, but as an individual value, F1 2013 is excellent. It synthesizes all the lessons of the previous games, then adds some great touches like more granular assist settings. Plus, its terrific support for TrackIR and force feedback steering wheels ensure that serious sim racers will have no trouble imagining themselves in the cockpit.
Race: Injection
You can’t put together a list of great simulation racing games without having something fromSimBin. While the studio appears to have lost its way a bit with the dubious free-to-play RaceRoom Racing Experience, 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 great place to learn the tracks and SimBin’s superb physics.
But there are muscle cars, endurance cars, and open-wheel racers to choose from in this package, all of them brilliantly recreated and offering unique driving challenges. For the money, you probably can’t do better than Race: Injection for sim racing.
Unfortunately, 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 flat lighting and dull graphics throw you off, though. A few minutes with these cars, especially if you have a quality force feedback wheel, and you won’t even notice the aged appearance.
iRacing
Welp, here we go. The Grand Poobah of simulation racing.
iRacing exists at the place where a game blurs the line between 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, though at $50 a year, it’s a better value than many an MMO. Nor is its emphasis on graphics. But its rewards are aimed a specific and demanding group of players. When you’ve outgrown the Codemasters games and even stuff like Race: Injection is wearing a little thin, this is where you go.
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