As we speed towards the close of the year, we’re going to take a handbrake turn into our award for best racing game, so pop your seatbelt on (and let’s be honest, you really should be wearing one if you’re pulling a handbrake turn), ease off the throttle, and enjoy a drive-by of our top picks. It’s been a decent year for racing games, particularly in the arcade and kart racing genres, with the lighter end of the racing spectrum proving to be a big hit with our team, and the community at large.
What can we say? The Nintendo Switch 2 needed a killer launch title, and Nintendo delivered it with Mario Kart World. That ‘World’ in the title is doing a good chunk of tone-setting, because it’s the first open-world Mario Kart game, and you can tootle off, driving across a huge island, and find the answers to all sorts of unknowable questions, like, where do Toads like to go for breakfast? And how long can I follow this Shy Guy for? It’s easy-going, and genuinely likeable, and you can explore the tracks and the larger world to your heart’s content, with Nintendo having filled the place with interesting little visual treats and gatherings that you can ruin by barrelling through them.
Thankfully, the racing action itself is as tight as ever, and Grand Prix now see you racing between the different track locations, adding a new feel to each event. It is familiar, but when Mario Kart 8 gave us a decade of incredible racing, we probably shouldn’t feel too hard done by when Nintendo has chosen to do a bit of inventing too. The biggest and freshest highlight has to be the addition of Knockout Tour, bringing a Battle Royale flavour to Mario Kart’s already-brutal karting combat by whittling a larger-than-ever field of racers down through a series of areas, before ending in a four-racer battle to first place. It’s thrilling, frustrating, and unmissable, and you’ll keep coming back time and time again.
Fast Fusion – Runner Up
The Nintendo Switch 2 didn’t just get one arcade racer at launch, it got two, and Fast Fusion found its way into nearly as many hearts as Mario Kart World did at launch. How did it manage that? Well, it was priced incredibly competitively, an indie game that proved to be the cheapest game at the new console’s launch – no, we’re not including Welcome Tour here – and on top of that, its sci-fi racing was utterly brilliant, winning plaudits from critics and gamers alike.
Framed within the same sub-genre as Wipeout or F-Zero, Fast Fusion is actually the latest entry in the Fast series from Shin’en Multimedia, who’ve continually rung both incredible performance and visuals out of Nintendo’s humble systems. Its colour-changing mechanic for boosting means you can never switch off through races, and the Fusion aspect that lets you combine vehicles means that you can create something that truly feels like your own craft. Fast Fusion looks and feels so good, you could almost mistake it for a AAA title. In our minds, it is one.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer – Runner Up
Here’s where the resurgence of arcade racers became clear in 2025. Alongside JDM, Tokyo Xtreme Racer returned us to the kind of racing game that epitomised the Dreamcast and PS2 era. In Tokyo Xtreme Racer’s case, that was the last time we had an entry in the series, with the most recent entry arriving all the way back in 2007.
The brand new Tokyo Xtreme Racer put us on Tokyo’s highways and byways let us loose, allowing you to challenge anyone you like to a race, beating scrubs, upgrading your car, and working your way through every possible rival. The racing is fundamentally unique too, built on a ‘stamina/tug-of-war’ system where the race is won by finding and maintaining a lead on your rival for a certain amount of time, and not just reaching a clear finish line. It’s got heaps of content, feels completely different from eveything else this year, and reminds us of a time when everything was simpler. In 2025, that’s as good as it gets.
Honourable Mentions (in alphabetical order)
Alright, that’s it for this award, and you’ll excuse us for not stopping before we race off to the next one. For some reason, we’re not allowed to drop below 50MPH, which would be rather scary if Keanu Reeves wasn’t on the bus with us.
