Best PC Racing Games

Motorcade

"Racing" is less a genre than it is a feeling. The ultra-realism of a game like iRacing and the cartoonish chaos of Burnout: Paradise have nothing in common except this: when you're racing to the final corner, wheel-to-wheel with your last rival, you are utterly lost in that moment. That moment is why we play racing games. It's the high that racing fans are always chasing. The great racing games take you there again and again.

F1 2016

Developer: Codemasters

Released: August 2016

In our review of F1 2016, Sam White called it "the most well-featured, authentic recreation of Formula One ever created, and it’s a genuinely good PC port."

There's a massive checklist of new features that make F1 2016 the most immersive it's ever been. With manual starts, every race begins as a tense technical exercise. And a new R&D system doles out points that let you develop a specific car over the course of a season.

But most importantly, small refinements to the racing round out the sim, including "the slide of the car as you over-accelerate out of a turn; the gentle squeeze of the brakes so you don’t slide into a smoke-billowing, tire-ruining lock-up; the aquaplaning as you stray away from the safety of the racing line in a monsoon downpour—every lap is a joyous exercise in taming a ludicrously overpowered beast. "

NFS Rivals

Developer: Ghost Games
Released: November 2013

Rivals is probably the best of EA's open-world racing games right now. With parallel career tracks for playing as both the cops and street racers, and tons of online features that put you neck-and-neck with human opponents, Rivals makes a strong case for combining Burnout: Paradise-style open-world racing with online connectivity.

Developer: Black Rock Studio
Released: May 2010

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.

It's the perfect chaser to a lot of open-world arcade racers: Split / Second is laser-focused on absurd automotive chaos and increasingly improbable tableaus of bloodless mechanical carnage.