Top 10 Racing Games For PC in 2016

What is the best PC racing game? So many elements contribute: they’re not just about graphical fidelity and hair-raising sound design - though both certainly help - they’re about pulling you into the action 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 perfect gear shift to kicking out the back-end for a sublime drift,  a quality racing game just feels right.

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Don’t go asking, “How could you forget about Grand Prix Legends! Where’s Geoff Crammond!” When versions of those games surface on Steam or GOG, we’ll be the 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

Dirt Rally
Dirt Rally screenshot

Codemasters’ Dirt Rally has surpassed its predecessor, Dirt 3, and is arguably the best game Codemasters have made in years. With a far more authentic handling model, Dirt Rally does away with many of the arcadey touches that continue to persist in the core series.

That also makes it a proper 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 dirt tracks with loads and loads of sideways slidey driving, but that you're actually taking part in the kind of endurance racing that rallying is all about. Screw up your car in Stage 1 and you'll have to see what you can repair before Stage 2, and what problems you'll just have to live with for the remainder of the event. It introduces an element of strategy and resource management that's all too rare in sim-racing.

Want more? Here's our Dirt Rally review.

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


Project CARS is not without its issues, and a plethora of minor but noticeable bugs have definitely dampened enthusiasm for what was one of the PC's most exciting racers. Still, it's one of the best racing packages on offer, with tons 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-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. Check our Project Cars review and nobody mention Project Cars 2.

The best PC arcade racers

TrackMania 2: Canyon
trackmania 2 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 bend, g-force-laden camber or high speed straight might suffice, for TrackMania 2: Canyon track design takes on a terrifying, Hot Wheels-inspired new meaning. Sweeping barrel-rolls, nigh-impossible jumps and floating platforms that give two fingers to physics are what set the TrackMania series apart from other arcade racers.

The real heart of TrackMania 2 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 jumps 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 easy the cars are to drive, and yet, once you hit the (often ludicrous) tracks, it’s anyone’s bet who’ll take first place.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted


Add the thrilling chases of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit to the sandbox elements of Burnout: Paradise and you get Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Putting players behind the wheel in the gorgeously detailed city of Fairhaven and offering them instant access - provided you can locate them - to a roster of 31 cars, as well as 10 additional cars, which can be unlocked by beating challenges.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted’s greatest strength is its variety of challenge types, races and freeroam objectives to complete. You can spend hours drifting, speeding or crashing through Fairhaven without having to do the same type of challenge twice. Moreover, the versatility of Most Wanted’s driving mechanics allow for newcomers to feel immediately at home, despite the surprising amount of depth and precision that can be found after a spending a considerable amount of time with the game.

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.

The best PC 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 from SimBin. 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.

Assetto Corsa
French mini-sedan racing

Assetto Corsa is less a great racing game than it is a great handling model with a game built-up around it. But damn if it doesn't feel 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 exaclty what it needs to be... right down to some terrific AI driving. These aren't slot-car drivers, but convincing opponents who will overcook it going into a turn, lose control as they try to get back onto the track, and even give you a love-tap as your race side-by-side through a turn. It's definitely a great 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 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.