iRacing Arcade has some of the cutest visuals seen in recent times, with giant crash helmets on small people, driving squished cars around recognisable, but tiny, circuits.
This is the kitten litter of racing games. Only without the fur. Or the scratching. Or like a kitten in any way, really.
It’s adorable, that’s the point.
But, in order to appeal to an ever-cynical and weary gaming audience, its talents need to be more than pretty visuals and miniaturised tracks.
It’s best to see this as a spiritual successor to 2021’s Circuit Superstars and 2023’s early access Karting Superstars, rather than a watered-down version of its earnest simulation namesake.
Both those indie games were created by the compact Original Fire Games team, and so too is this, using a similar codebase and visual style – but amped up, and noticeably refined.
When looked through this lens, it starts to make a lot more sense.
That means this is an accessible racing game, with innocuous vehicle handling, a chase camera perspective and hints of authenticity from tyre wear, damage, fuel usage and strategy. Don’t expect wheel support, or virtual reality, or triple screens or ranked special multiplayer events. That’s deliberately, overtly, not the point.
This is meant to be a slice of motorsport – that adrenaline rush, competitive nature and sense of satisfaction – in a bite-sized chunk for a wider audience.
The clue is the giant Arcade in the title…
Having said that, there’s a lack of startline boosts for timing your throttle, checkpoints, exaggerated powerslides or weapons like Mario Kart World or Sonic Racing: Crossworlds.
This sits at the crossroads somewhere in the middle.
And that is a difficult balance, with a lack of elementary assists such as a visible racing line for newcomers and the need to nail all apices if you’d like to win on the most challenging levels.
The main draw is the single-player career mode, and it is surprisingly lengthy, in-depth and creative – albeit after an inauspicious start.
Merging elements of strategy and planning games with motorsport sounds… a bit weird. Like if there was a soccer or football game with a city management element. But, for the most part, it works.
In simple terms, you compete in races, starting in the slow Fiat 500, rising to LMDh and Formula 1-style screamers, spending cash on cars, crash helmets and paint schemes on the way.
Basic, nothing to see here.
But layered over the top is an area of bucolic countryside, which you then flatten with your embryonic race team. Your cash is also used to purchase ever-extravagant buildings, each representing parts of a race team, such as an engine shop. Experience points are also earned, unlocking team levels which, in turn, open up the ability to buy upgraded departments.
Apart from fantasising about your own motorsport-based village, there is a reason to become a real estate agent in between races – the buildings pay out in perks called ‘Boosts’.
These can range from every driver on the grid having large heads – which is more of a joke and largely pointless for closed cockpit vehicles – to enhancing power during certain circumstances, or juicing up the slipstream strength.
In a roundabout way, this is iRacing Arcade’s way of delivering powerups, just without driving through visible squares on the track, which perhaps wouldn’t fit with the dash of authenticity buried beneath the charming visuals and podium dance movements.
They add an extra frisson to races, and can help you especially in the more difficult races – but the Penalty Shield is significantly overpowered in our testing. You can cut corners without a reprimand, avoiding a large 10-second penalty for skipping the first turn at Bahrain, for example.
Once you’re in the rhythm of winning races and upgrading your facilities, you then start to unlock multiple race series at once.
In your calendar, you can check upcoming events, all part of a multi-race championship, apart from occasional standalone endurance races – think 12 laps instead of 12 hours.
The structure means you may do a short Formula Junior race, then onto a longer Porsche 911 GT3 Cup race, then to Fiat 500s. Once you complete that week, go back to base, oversee its progress, then into another week of races.
After several championships are complete, you finish a season, each subsequent one adding more races, quicker cars and longer lengths with seven seasons in total.
This is such a simple trick, adding much-needed variety to the path. It makes you wonder why more racing games haven’t tried something similar.
So, the career mode is a pleasant surprise, with a satisfying sense of advancement. But what about the racing itself?
Your on-track AI-controlled rivals are, in a word, batshit.
Capable of stark raving lunacy, bashing into each other, receiving track cut penalties and barging you out of the way, they aren’t scatty due to ineptitude. You get the sense that an element of fallibility has been consciously programmed in.
On higher difficulty levels, it creates a freneticism seen in lower-level stock car races, where everyone is bashing off each other in the opening laps. You send a dive down the inside, likely from too far back, knock a rival out of the way, only for your competitors to do the same to you in retaliation.
Sometimes frustrating, with the occasional strange contact where you can ‘stick’ to a fellow driver, the net effect is fraught, elbows out, racing.
This applies to the quicker vehicles too, not just the touring car, for example.
In total, there are eight vehicles, each distinct in visuals and sounds – some sound more raucous than others, the Porsche 911 a particular standout.
Then there are the 14 venues, all pint-sized in their recreations. 12 are diminutive versions of real-world locations, such as Knockhill, Paul Ricard, Kyalami and Tsukuba, and two are fictional – actually recreations of Circuit Superstars tracks in a subtle nod.
You can tell the development team really cares about motorsport, too, with a trackside tribute to Ayrton Senna at Imola and a woman on Barber’s bridge, reminiscent of the real-world “Georgina” mannequin.
However, we couldn’t help but feel there is a lack of both cars and circuits. By the third season, you’ll have likely experienced most of the roster, something that even fictional items could bolster the lineup. It has been confirmed that more content is on the way for the console release, expected this summer, alongside local split-screen multiplayer and DLC.
Speaking of irks, we found that perhaps there is too big a skill gap between the Master and the Superstar difficulty options. We could win at a canter on the former, sometimes struggling for a top five in the latter.
A spot of balancing here wouldn’t go amiss, nor would more malleable handling in some vehicles – a little more lateral movement could be more enjoyable. Most of the time, it’s just turn and stick, which, around hairpins, is a little too benign for our tastes.
Likewise, in the lauded career mode, you can hire drivers to enter some championships for you for cash, but we didn’t think this is clearly signposted. As it stands, it doesn’t run well on Steam Deck. It just chugs fairly badly on the default preset.
Turn everything off, however, and it runs silky smooth, but comes with the cost of looking noticeably poorer.
The largest challenge right now, in our pre-release testing, is sadly the online multiplayer. This is using a code system, where one friend creates a room, and others join by inputting the number. It will be cross-platform once the aforementioned console versions are released.
Thanks to the forgiving contact systems, this title is perfectly suited to some lively racing online, and we can envision several leagues and communities sprouting upon release. It’s just that, across the Traxion team, the ping was poor, with laggy performance, phantom collisions and generally jerky performance.
It could be down to playing pre-release US servers and it is seemingly not using a peer-to-peer system presently. This could be truly wonderful, but it isn’t at the time of reviewing.
iRacing Arcade delivers something that the racing video game genre has been missing for several years now – a refreshing and engrossing single-player progression arc. For many, the career will be worth the sub-25-dollar price alone.
As you play through, we think there’s a lack of content, the multiplayer has rough edges and some of the AI levels and boost potency require further balancing.
The rough and tumble racing, stylish visuals and daft AI combine to put a smile upon your face, and for video games, that’s all we ask for.
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