Top 10 racing games in the world

See our full Wipeout Omega Collection review and buy it now from Amazon. We usually favour recent releases over retro classics in our best-of lists, but a handful of oldies play as fresh now as they ever did, and that goes for this blast of summer breeze from Sega's stone-cold classic of free-wheeling road racing is available on Switch in this lovely version by the remaster artists at M2 - although, if you still have a 3DS, it's even better on that machine, with the stereoscopic visuals.

It's just you against the clock, the traffic and a branching route, drifting forever in a topless Testarossa. It's a crying shame, though, that OutRun 2 and its superb mids console versions are no longer available. Find out why OutRun is still the pinnacle of driving games.

In fact, it's probably the best there has ever been. While it may not be a perfectly rounded package, its handling model is second-to-none and the driving experience is as purely gripping as anything else in any of these categories. It's hard, and best experienced with a good wheel, but for communicating the sheer thrill and challenge of a car and a course, there's nothing better.

See our full Dirt Rally 2. While many don't consider it to be a "full" Gran Turismo game, the series' sole PS4 entry which also features in our best PS4 games list has expanded substantially over time and now boasts many of the solo campaign events and license tests fans love, as well as an impressive car and track list. But it remains Polyphony Digital's most focused piece of work, and that's not at all a bad thing.

The handling is a sublime balance of accessibility and sim-like bite, and the extremely well designed online multiplayer brings the clear rulesets and competitive edge of serious PC titles like iRacing to a more casual and welcoming setting.

In short, it's still a GT game, as well as being the best and fairest online multiplayer experience on console - by a long chalk. See our full Gran Turismo Sport review and buy it now from Amazon. Even if you're new to sims, you'll probably know a little about iRacing: that it's expensive, time consuming, tough. It is also, if you allow it, an all-encompassing take on some of the very best aspects of motorsport. Work your way through the ranks and earn a slot in a team endurance event and you'll be witness to all the camaraderie, excitement - and, yes, crushing disappointment - of the real thing.

There's no doubt that some aspects of iRacing are getting a little long in the tooth - and there are certainly better-looking sims out there - but with all those years of experience since the service rolled out well over ten years ago comes a competence that you can't find elsewhere.

Find out what makes iRacing the ultimate driving sim. Kunos Simulazioni offers up two very different experiences - though they're both so good we've cheated and included both.

The original Assetto Corsa might be getting a little long in the tooth, but with a handful of the right mods it can still be the best pure driving game on PC, while Competizione - after a handful of welcome updates - now offers a purebred racing experience that's the measure of iRacing.

When it comes to GT racing - perhaps the healthiest and most diverse form of motorsport right now - it's pretty much peerless. See our full Assetto Corsa Competizione review and buy it now from Amazon. There's still the sense that rFactor 2 has yet to reach its potential, and that it might be some time until it properly does so - Motorsport Games' acquisition of developer Studio combined with mouthwatering licences such as BTCC and WEC suggests there's plenty to get excited about in the future.

For now, though, and for all its little faults, there's no denying the authenticity of rFactor 2's handling, serving up a simulation model like no other. If you've any interest in pretend race cars, you at least need to take this one out for a spin. Some old problems persist, and a handful of new ones crop up in what's still an occasionally lumpy package, but none of that can hold back this year's F1 game as being the best yet. An all-new story mode, riffing heavily off the overstated drama of Netflix's Drive to Survive, works surprisingly well, and it's matched by decent next-gen versions and a few welcome nips and tucks to the existing racing.

The AI puts up a decent fight, there's a whole season's worth of racing and it all looks impressively authentic - and given we're enjoying a season for the ages in F1 right now, it's fitting that the official game is up there with Geoff Crammond's 90s efforts in being some of the best takes on the sport to date.

See our full F1 review and buy it now from Jacamo. Codemasters will take over the licence for the world's preeminent rallying series from , which should be interesting - but don't think for a minute that it's because the current KT Racing games are substandard.

They have the goods where it counts: a beautiful, detailed, hard-edged handling model that is not mucking around and ensures this demanding sport makes for a challenging game, as it should do. Some other games have attempted to replicate the madness and majesty of the Isle of Man's KT Racing smoothed out some of the bumps for this sequel, while importantly staying true to the bumps and bends of the course itself, making for a racing experience that stands alone and manages to do justice to the great event.

It doesn't get a lot of attention or serve up the same sense of drama as Ride on the Edge, but Milestone's long-running licence based on the premier motorcycle racing series is a well-sorted motorsport sim all the same. The Italian developer has more experience with bike racing than any other developer, and it shows in the fine-tuned handling. The sport itself remains a perfect inspiration for video games, with a sense of precariousness and danger that modern car racing has largely lost.

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Forza Horizon 3. Driver: San Francisco. Gran Turismo 3. The history of racing games dates back decades, all the way to the earliest origins of video games. Always quick to squeeze every ounce of performance from any given platform, racing games are regularly at the tip of the spear when it comes to technological leaps.

From top down to takedowns and Byron Bay to Colin McRae, there have been hundreds of top quality racing games released over the years featuring just about every type of machine you can strap an engine to and point towards a finish line. The Greatest Racing Games Ever.

Have you played Forza Horizon 3? 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.