The world may care less about cars and racing these days. But here at Gamer Malaya and Gamer Matters, we are not living in the dystopian future yet. And so we shall commemorate the racing games which, contrary to popular belief, are still being made in large quantities these days.
The only normal genre-based game award here and it is as it says
- Dangerous Driving
- The Grand Tour Game
- GRID (2019)
- Need For Speed Heat
- WRC 8
Deliberations Summary
There were more than 5 games in the shortlist, and the games getting cut may seem like an unpopular move. Crash Team Racing, despite being a great remake, did not make the list as no other crew member here have that strong of an opinion of it as a racing game. And eschewing what the public majority think what’s the best racing game is why we have this category in the first place.
Thanks to that, The Grand Tour Game is now the best kart game in this list. The novelty of an FMV racing game is highly regarded among us.
Codemasters, despite being on a roll with three new racing games this year, has only one game to make the list. GRID is a solid racer but unfortunately fails to dethrone the original Grid in several aspects. But punting Fernando Alonso is still a great feature to have in a racing game.
Dangerous Driving is what a modern Burnout would be in an alternate universe where the team never got bought by EA. It captures the spirit of Burnout 2 and 3, but the way they work around their shortcomings is applaudable. Don’t have the budget for license music? Well, make a Spotify integration for you to play your own tunes.
WRC 8 is the best rally game this year. With its more involved Career mode and more nuanced physics, it’s a formidable competitor. It also helps that we are biased a bit as the game has a Proton Iriz in it.
But this year definitely has a clear winner. Not something we expected to be a strong contender. But Need For Speed Heat has brought honour back to the long-running series.
Oh, we are well-aware that the game may not be exciting as previous entries because, in a lot of ways, it’s more of the same. But it’s the under-the-hood changes that fundamentally make the game fun again. The improved physics for both grip and drift handling is a godsend. The roads in the open-world flow so much better than just squiggly lines of the previous titles of this generation. And the little details, like seeing and hearing different engine notes and tweaking that exhaust tone to your liking, makes our silly remark of “cars go vroom vroom good” a valid point of argument.
Need For Speed is finally back.
Congratulations to Need For Speed Heat for winning the GM GOTY Award for Best Racing Game!
Previously, we crowned the winner for Best Game We Didn’t Play. For the full list of awards, have a look at that here.
Check back tomorrow for the winner of the Best a e s t h e t i c Award!