The business end of 2017 (and early 2018) is looking like the most exciting time to be a racing gamer in years. I certainly can’t remember a busier time to be a racing fan.
Considering we’ve got established, licensed series hitting their stride, a trio of big-brand racing sims arriving within weeks of each other, and a smattering of other unique racers warming up in the paddock, the time is ripe to be a revhead.
We’ve rounded up all of the biggest racing games set to be released over the next few months and beyond, plus a few lesser-known ones you may not be across.
F1 2017, which was released recently, is a confident and comprehensive racer that succeeds by embracing all of modern F1’s idiosyncratic rules and regulations and baking them into a sports sim that rewards consistency, patience, and strategy.
The career mode is denser than ever.
There are a few ways the package itself feels a bit like F1 2016.5, but it’d be unfair to pretend there haven’t been improvements. The career mode is denser than ever, the force feedback is the best I’ve ever felt in a Codemasters game, and the enhanced lighting makes for noticeably more vibrant and lifelike tracks. There are also a bunch of all-time classic F1 cars available to thrash about in on this season’s tracks.
Highly-customisable – whether you’re after a more casual experience or a hardcore one – F1 2017 can cater for variety of Formula 1 fans. It really comes into its own when you play longer Grands Prix though, when surprising opponent errors, safety cars, pit strategies, and dynamic weather changes all come into play.
Rich with details and faithful to just about everything that makes contemporary F1 tick, F1 2017 is about as good a simulation of a single, modern motorsport as you can get. It definitely makes me wonder just what Codemasters could accomplish if it were ever able to apply the kind of philosophy that now drives its F1 series to the other licensed championships it used to build into its racers, like the BTCC or Supercars. HHNNNNNGGG
Check out IGN’s F1 2017 review for more.
Project CARS 2 lands in just a couple of weeks and it is looking like the real deal. I’ve been playing with a preview build of Project CARS 2 for several weeks now and it’s already huge fun, and there are still vast piles of the game I haven’t even touched yet.
The racing variety available here [is] colossal.
180+ cars, nine motorsport disciplines, and 60 venues with 130+ layouts is a hearty offering for any modern racer, but once you combine this content with the game’s living tracks, shifting seasons, and wild weather the racing variety available here becomes colossal.
Wrap in an authentic career mode inspired by real-world motorsports, demanding race weekends, animated pit crews, mechanical failures, strategic racing – plus both modern and retro vehicles and tracks – and you’ve got something like nothing else in the category.
Perhaps the most crucial point at this stage is that the handling in Project CARS 2 is not just improved, it’s been honed by a long list of professional drivers, including Nicolas Hamilton, Tommy Milner, Vaughn Gittin, Jr., Oli Webb, René Rast, Patrick Long, Chris Goodwin, and former Stig Ben Collins. Hiring race drivers to chat about how great your game feels may be the oldest trick in the book but it’s worth noting Ben Collins famously hated racing sims before he began consulting on the handling for Project CARS 2. If you bounced off the original Project CARS over problems with the handling, know that The Stig himself also had complaints about the handling in the original, and they’ve been addressed.
While crosstown first-party rival GT Sport is dialling back on its “car-PG” origins and shifting the spotlight from the usual scale of its virtual garage, Forza Motorsport 7 is doubling down on it. As such, Forza Motorsport 7 will ship with over 700 cars and a renewed focus on collecting them, experimenting with them, and learning about what makes them interesting.
Some of that 700-strong list is bolstered by a few same car-different livery instances (plus some pre-tuned Turn 10 variants of existing cars) but for the most part it’s set to be a broad smorgasbord of cars from all kinds of countries and categories.
They’ll be let loose upon the biggest track selection in a Forza game to date – 32 locations with over 200 routes. Mugello, Suzuka, and fan-favourite original track Maple Valley return. Time-of-day and dynamic weather has been brought to Forza Motorsport 7 also, though not for every track.
Turn 10 has even tossed in the ability to personalise your driver’s appearance with hundreds of items of race gear “spanning decades of race history and pop culture.”
Forza Motorsport 7 will begin arriving for players who’ve pre-ordered the Ultimate Edition later this month, ahead of its official release on October 3.
It’s easy to forget when there are such vast gaps between instalments but the Gran Turismo series remains Sony’s biggest-selling first-party franchise, ever. But even though Gran Turismo Sport will be the first GT game on PS4 – and the brand still carries plenty of cultural cache amongst car fans – the pressure is definitely on. Sales of Gran Turismo 6 dipped more than 50% from Gran Turismo 5, and the PS3 generation itself was a self-described “nightmare” for developer Polyphony Digital. To make things even more difficult, the competition has never been fiercer.
Polyphony Digital has re-invented Gran Turismo.
In the face of this challenge Polyphony Digital has re-invented Gran Turismo. It’s not a 1000+ vehicle, car-PG collect ’em up anymore; the focus is now esports. There’s still a solo mode, but the purpose of the 150-or-so drills in ‘Campaign Mode’ is really just to prepare players for the iRacing-inspired ‘Sport Mode’, which is the scheduled, online multiplayer side of the game.
Running at 4K at 60 frames per second GT Sport is looking incredibly handsome, and after many years of promises the sound has improved significantly. There’s a surprisingly robust new livery editor to give your cars an authentic and unique race-ready look for when you take them out against other players, and an expanded photo mode that’s damn near indistinguishable from reality. GT Sport’s obsessively-honed presentation is A1. As a fan since 1998, however, the fact that GT Sport is shipping with no solid offline career mode, no dynamic weather, and fewer tracks and cars than an independent cross-platform competitor like Project CARS 2 does give me pause. GT Sport will launch with 150 cars and 17 racing locations (with 28 different layouts), although it appears just six of them are real-life tracks.
Whether or not traditional Gran Turismo players will warm to GT Sport’s new evolution we’ll know following the game’s release on October 17.
Developer Kylotonn turned a corner with WRC 6 last year, producing a strong rally game with a respectable career mode, well-designed stages, and a responsive handling model. It was definitely the most fun I’d had with a licensed WRC game since the PS2 era and it made for a credible companion game to the technically stunning Dirt Rally.
WRC 7 will now arrive in the wake of Codemasters’ very good Dirt 4 – which launched earlier this year – and seems set to make a similarly strong case for itself.
Like this year’s F1 season, the real-life 2017 World Rally Championship has seen a number of changes to car regulations. The result is rally cars that are lighter, more powerful, and fitted with wider and more aggressive aerodynamics. Kylotonn has brought all the new cars to WRC 7 and they definitely feel faster, especially on the typically narrow and perilous stages. Kylotonn’s stage design has really improved since its first attempt; they’re bumpy, claustrophobic, and varied. They can’t be endlessly altered like the stages in Dirt 4 but they do span more than twice the countries.
Kylotonn’s stage design has really improved since its first attempt; they’re bumpy, claustrophobic, and varied.
WRC will feature split screen multiplayer and 55 official teams, including a “large selection of WRC 2 and WRC Junior drivers.” It’ll also feature modern rally beasts from Hyundai, Citroën, Ford, and, yes, Toyota (a brand that has developed a sudden aversion to some, but apparently not all, racing games). It’ll even include a Porsche 911 GT3 RS R-GT, which is a first for the series (the R-GT Cup is a fledgling championship for rear-wheel drive GT cars held across five tarmac rally rounds in Europe). It’s been stressed that the 911 will only be available for those who pre-order but hopefully it’ll become available to all players later down the line (getting it alongside its only other rival in the category, the Abarth 124 R-GT, would be nice).
The big bullet point this year is WRC 7’s new ‘Epic Stages’, which are mammoth events that will generally take players around 15 minutes to complete. I worked up a real sweat manhandling a car through WRC 7’s Mexican Epic Stage during a recent hands-on; it was very well-designed and the backdrop changed quite often as I tore up mile after mile.
WRC 7 is slated to arrive this week on Steam, but the remaining release dates vary considerably across territories and other platforms.
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