Our Gaming Highlights Of 2025

It’s fair to say that 2025 has been a tough year for racing games, both for people who work in the industry and fans. There have been all too regular stories of redundancies, and totemic, long-established franchises including Forza Motorsport, Need for Speed and Dirt all have major question marks hanging over their futures.

Despite that, though, there’s been a lot to get excited about in the genre this year too. Join us for a look back at our driving game highlights of 2025.

Raceroom keeps the touring car nostalgia flowing

Now approaching its 13th birthday, KW Studios’ free-to-play RaceRoom Racing Experience has seen a bit of a resurgence in the last year or so. That kicked off last year when it gained two new DLC packs celebrating the best of ’90s touring car racing with the Super Tourer and Class 1 DTM categories.

The sim has kept that form rolling in 2025, expanding its Super Tourer roster with the Alfa Romeo 156 and Opel Vectra as well as adding the legendary 2002 DTM grid, hitting us with all the TOCA franchise nostalgia. A clever move to make all its content free to access for a month helped solidify this revival, and remind everyone quite what a good sim RaceRoom remains in 2025.

Forza Horizon 5 does the unthinkable

We’re talking, of course, about its launch on the PlayStation 5, over three years since it first arrived on Xbox and PC. Just a few years ago, any game from Microsoft’s flagship racing franchise making its way over to Sony’s console would have been unimaginable, but more and more have been making the jump of late.

Horizon 5’s PS release opened up the four-year-old but still brilliant open world racer to a whole new audience, and the good news is that it’s not a one-off – it’s already been confirmed that Horizon 6 will follow it, albeit not immediately at launch.

Forza Motorsport’s most iconic track returns

Just before news came that the Forza Motorsport franchise had seemingly been put on ice, the eighth and likely final title was celebrating the series’ 20th anniversary with one of its most major updates yet.

The undoubted highlight was the return of Fujimi Kaido, the 10-mile fan-favourite circuit that winds its way up and down Japanese mountain roads, but had been absent since Forza 4. Its return may have coincided with the apparent end of the franchise, but, reimagined in glorious current-gen detail, it served as quite the send-off.

Wreckfest 2 brings more fun-loving chaos

The original Wreckfest game was always a fantastic stress reliever, centred as it was around the gratuitous smashing and bashing of your rivals in a variety of contact-heavy racing disciplines.

We were very pleased, then, when its sequel launched in Early Access this year without deviating from the formula. New cars, new tracks, better graphics and customisation, sure, but developer THQ Nordic knows what its fans want, and what they want is the ability to make your virtual car look like it’s made out of papier mache. We eagerly await the final product.

The Crew Motorfest goes from strength to strength

Offering some fresh open-world racing action in the long gap between Forza Horizons 5 and 6 (okay, there’s TDU: Solar Crown too, but…), The Crew Motorfest is easily the strongest title in the franchise so far.

What’s more, it’s only been getting stronger throughout 2025, despite reaching its second anniversary. This year, the map gained an entire second island, not much smaller than the first, and it’s received a steady stream of other new content, including being the first video game to feature cars like the Ferrari F80 and BMW M2 CS.

Cute indie racers boom

‘Cute’ and ‘motorsport’ aren’t necessarily words that have traditionally gone hand in hand, but a new wave of indie titles are starting to change that. 

2025 brought us both Formula Legends, a scaled-down love letter to Formula 1 over the decades, and a demo of iRacing Arcade, a spinoff of the super hardcore sim racing service that sees a range of real-world racing disciplines and circuits recreated in utterly adorable form. Awwww!

Tokyo Xtreme Racer wins our hearts

We were already pretty smitten with the reborn Tokyo Xtreme Racer when it launched in Early Access in January, and now that the full game’s out, we’re even bigger fans. It’s a throwback to a simpler era of gaming, single-minded in its highway racing scope but drenched in nostalgia and featuring a solid list of highly customisable Japanese icons and oddities.

That list was bolstered by the absent-from-Early-Access Honda with the launch of the full version, and we’re excited to see what developer Genki has in store for the game next, especially as it’s making the jump to PS5 in February.

Gran Turismo 2: Beige Edition celebrates the mundane

Already one of the series’ standout titles, 1999’s PS1 classic Gran Turismo 2 has seen a bit of a revival of late thanks to a burgeoning modding scene. That began a couple of years ago with the A-Spec mod, but something arguably even better was announced this year.

GT2: Beige Edition comes from HWTsuchiyaNathan, one of the team behind A-Spec, and fills the game’s car list with a selection of utter late ’90s mundanity, recreated in beautiful low-poly detail. 120 new cars are there to begin with, with more on the way. You know that when a mod’s poster car is the Chrysler PT Cruiser, you’re in for a good time.

Gran Turismo 7 gets a new lease of life

We’d sort of reached the conclusion that, as the monthly updates for Gran Turismo 7 got smaller in scope, Polyphony Digital was gradually winding down support of the game to focus on whatever comes next. How wrong we were.

4 December brought not only the game’s biggest free update yet, Spec III, but also its first piece of paid DLC in the form of the motorsport-centric Power Pack. We don’t know what comes next for GT7, but we know one thing: we can now drive a Renault Espace F1 in it.

Forza Horizon 6 answers fans’ wishes

Ever since it became clear that Forza Horizon was going to be a fully-blown franchise rather than a one-off anomaly, fans have kept asking one question: ‘When’s it going to be set in Japan?’

Well, finally, we know: 2026. Aptly announced at the Tokyo Game Show this year, the Horizon Festival will finally head to Japan next year when the sixth game in the franchise launches. Details are still sparse for now, but expect drifting, kei cars, mountain passes, neon-drenched city streets and, if the teaser trailer is anything to go by, many maneki-neko.

EA does the sensible thing with F1

Basically the entire racing game community has long been in agreement that the annual F1 tie-in games have been getting a bit stale, and finally, EA Sports has listened. It announced in November that there’d be no full F1 26 game, with the new season – which, ironically, is set to bring some of the biggest changes to the real-world sport in years – instead due to arrive as an expansion pack for F1 25.

The next full game will instead arrive in 2027, when the franchise will be “reimagined into a more expansive experience with new ways to play for fans around the world.” Consider us intrigued.

Assetto Corsa Rally surprises us all

Our reactions when Assetto Corsa Rally was unveiled at the Sim Racing Expo in autumn were first surprise, then scepticism. Surprise because it came out of absolutely nowhere, and scepticism because its track-based sibling, Assetto Corsa Evo, hasn’t exactly had the smoothest ride since launching in Early Access back in January.

That scepticism, though, was misplaced, because AC Rally is a triumph. Even in its sparse Early Access form, it brings astonishingly detailed laser-scanned stages, a broad variety of cars and one of the most realistically punishing virtual interpretations of the real-world sport to ever grace gaming PCs.