Rocket League is a fiendishly addictive online arcade game in which chunky, rocket-powered buggies compete to punt a huge football into the opposing team's goal. Simple in theory but there's a whole world of deft flicks, well-timed volleys and flagrant goal hanging to master.
A goal's a goal. As long as Microsoft keeps pumping out Forza Horizon games, you can stick all your holiday savings into that s Italian sportscar slush fund instead. Forza Horizon 3, set this time in Australia, is basically your dream road trip vacation: tooling around in expensive cars to a thumping festival soundtrack. Then there are the Showcase events, allowing you to assert the automobile's dominance against fighter jets, helicopters and freight trains in wholly sensible and necessary competition.
This has to be the Australian tourist board's idea of a nightmare — why would you spend the better part of a day folded up like a deck chair in an airline economy seat just to get to the Antipodes when you've got all the best bits contained inside your Xbox?
The one great exception is the Colin McRae series, which transplanted the gravel-spraying joy of rallying into your living room.
It was here that a generation of 90s kids awakened their latent love of excessive oversteer. The eight international courses set a good difficulty curve, the cars started shiny and became caked in Welsh mud, and, thanks to the technical advice of the late Scot, the handling was spot-on, meaning that when you launched your Subaru Impreza off a dirty hill at mph it felt every bit as good as it should. That is very, very good. Imagine a GT racing championship getting the same all encompassing treatment as F1 gets in its own games.
That's what happened for two glorious, fleeting years in the mid s with the GTR games. GTR 2 in particular was a revelation, fettling a handling model that showed enormous potential in the first game into the most authentic and demanding racing experience around.
There's a reason why there's still a rabid fan base holed up playing this game today. The Spa 24, incidentally, is where all the game's numerous systems come together in concert, multi-class racing plus dynamic time-of-day and weather make the enduro a real occasion, even if you compress the whole thing into just 24 minutes.
Technically uncompromising PC sim racing at its very best. Race with your opponents and eliminate them to claim your glory then unlock better cars by merging your existing cars! Two Punk Racing 2. Beat rival cars as you race on a sky high ramp at insane speed to claim the victory!
Hydro Storm 2. Ride your dangerous jet ski across the apocalyptic city and claim your glory in this death racing game! Real Drive. Drive stunning cars in a well lit city and complete side missions to earn money!
Monster Truck Racing Arena 2. Race and smash on cars as you claim victory by beating all your opponents! Read More Loading Micro Racer 2 Remember those old-school stand-up arcade games with a steering wheel, two pedals, and a top-down camera angle? Today, you can find bike racing games, drag racing games, track racing games, and even stunt racing games.
Research has shown that playing racing games can actually improve your driving skills because of the long-term improvement in reaction time required to place successfully. The most recent study came courtesy of researches at the University of Rochester. Racing games can even help improve physical and mental traits like hand-eye coordination, spatial attention, and processing speed. Several racing drivers across numerous disciplines acted as consultants during development, and it really does show.
A strong eSports scene is now solidified around Project CARS 2, and such is the depth of simulation that for young aspiring drivers, this might well be a fitting substitute for time on track. With its regular online racing leagues and meticulous car and track modelling, iRacing is as close to real racing as you can get on the PC.
That also means iRacing is something you need to work up to. It has no meaningful single-player component and, with its subscription fees and live tournament scheduling, it requires significant investment. Oh, and a force feedback wheel is quite literally required here - that's not us saying the gamepad support is poor. The game just won't let you race unless you have a wheel. But for a certain class of sim racing fan, there is nothing that compares. The very best iRacing players often compete in real motorsport too, and make a career out of eSports sim racing.
And having first released now over a decade ago in , it's consistently stayed astride with the latest simulators each year. Quite an achievement. This is a brilliant, great-looking F1 sim and just keeps getting deeper the more you look into it. It could also use a little more flair and personality in its presentation. As for polish, forget about it. What this license gives its successor is an inviting championship structure with different vehicle categories and highly scalable endurance racing across treasured circuits like Paul Ricard, Spa Francorchamps and Circuit de Catalunya.
Almost a decade after the release of Trackmania 2, Ubisoft Nadeo debuted its semi-reboot of series with Trackmania The new game features some significant graphical upgrades, but the real treat is the addition of daily featured tracks, new track pieces like ice, and improved checkpointing. Most importantly, it's a fresh start for Trackmania detached from Nadeo's strange Maniaplanet platform. But don't worry, Trackmania is still incredibly weird.
I've already played tons of nonsensical tracks that require pinpoint timing, endless repetition, and a little bit of luck. Nadeo is also taking a more hands-on approach to post-release content by releasing new tracks made by the studio on a seasonal basis.
If you're a lapsed fan or new to the series, this is where you want to be. Motorcycle racing is inherently exciting - the lean angles, suicidal overtakes and acceleration rates just make for a great spectator sport. And Italian superbike specialists Milestone really nail that feeling of terror and bravery of being on a factory MotoGP bike. The Codemasters F1 games are obviously a big inspiration, to put it politely, but the upshot for anyone playing it is a layer of career simulation on top of the racing.
Work your way up through slower categories, build a reputation, and hold out for that big team ride. It's not a cheap habit, but it will please serious racers. 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.
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