iRacing Arcade Review: A Fun, Simple Racer that Needs a Bit More Depth

1 week ago 8

Published Mar 3, 2026, 12:00 PM EST

Ethan Krieger (He/Him) is an editor at DualShockers that got started in the writing industry by covering professional basketball for a sports network. Despite being a diehard sports fan (mainly formula one, basketball, American football, and golf), video games have always been his #1 interest.

On a personal level, my racing preferences are all over the place. I play Gran Tursimo 7 in VR as realistically as possible, am a self-proclaimed Mario Kart master, love the chaos of a good Forza Horizon or Burnout, and everything in between. For a review of iRacing Arcade, I think this is a valuable angle to begin with since this is a title that comes from a renowned sim racing developer that's now dipping their toes into the world of the arcade racer.

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For those deep in the weeds of the genre, iRacing Arcade is also a title that very much resembles 2025's Formula Legends, a hidden gem of an F1 love letter that also took the adorable real-world-meets-toy-car approach and melded it with some sim racer DNA while remaining endlessly approachable. In my opinion, this worked wonderfully in Formula Legends. In iRacing Arcade, it turned out... okay.

Don't get me wrong at all, I've had a really nice time with the game overall, but I also have to admit that there were some decisions made with it that left me a little confused. iRacing Arcade feels like a title stuck between Arcade and Sim in some weird ways, never truly leaning into either direction enough to make it feel like a racing game that will ultimately end up resonating with either audience.

Fun, Aesthetically-Pleasing Presentation

On the major plus side of things, iRacing Arcade really does look wonderful, and it runs extremely well too. I have a fairly modest PC rig (the only console iRacing Arcade is launching on), and I still was able to run everything on high settings with excellent results.

The game is vibrant, the bloom of the sun creates some surprisingly stunning lighting, textures are great, and everything sings with a cartoonish charm that goes a long way towards making iRacing Arcade a very pretty game for what it is. Of course, it's not even remotely close to the visual fidelity of the biggest budget racing titles, but it's also obviously not going for the same tone at all.

The UI, hub, and menus are clean, there's a fun enough (if not a little repetitive) soundtrack, and a team of little pit crew members and driver avatars give the game additional levels of a cute, almost Chibi vibe that you obviously don't see in lots of other racing games.

The cars themselves look extremely fun, and are smashed-down, miniature versions of their real-world counterparts that are still clearly recognizable as the actual vehicles they intend to portray. The cars, once acquired or purchased with race winnings in Career Mode, are also customizable with several wrap options and colors.

This level of customization applies to your driver avatar, their jumpsuit, helmet, and visor as well. In most of these images, you'll notice that I opted to theme my racing team around the orange, blue, and black era of McLaren, because I'm unfortunately still a fan of their F1 team despite how wildly cringey their last couple of Constructor's Championships have been. Still, it was fun to design my personal "McLarens," Zak Brown be damned.

To pair alongside the genuinely stellar presentation of iRacing Arcade, the game employs an actual gameplay system that is nearly aggressively approachable. In fact, besides steering with the joystick, there are only two other button inputs found within the game: gas and brakes.

On the one hand, I actually love this decision. There are no extra frills to worry about when jumping into iRacing Arcade, and it really is one of the most "pickup and play" capable racing games I've ever experienced in the modern era. This is great for getting players of all skill types into the swing of things immediately, especially when adding in the five different difficulty levels to choose from as well.

iRacing Arcade feels like a title stuck between Arcade and Sim in some weird ways, never truly leaning into either direction enough to make it feel like a racing game that will ultimately end up resonating with either audience.

On the other hand, this extreme simplicity means that despite every style of car handling and performing appropriately differently in the game, the experience of playing it does feel a little same-y after a while. This is combated a bit with a surprisingly cutthroat-feeling roster of AI drivers you'll compete against, who won't think twice about smashing you off the racing line and cause you to pick up some time penalties for track limits violations.

I did find the aggressive nature of the other drivers a little over the top at first, as being forced into penalties (which immediately slow your car down to a crawl for a couple of seconds) felt bad when you're genuinely just trying to drive a clean race. To counter this, however, you can give the AI a taste of their own medicine and force them into their own penalties that they'll serve immediately as well, allowing you to instantly zip by them.

There is a vehicle health meter to consider when racing like this, but it almost never comes into play. Gas and tire gauges will force you to pit eventually if a race is long enough, and you will actually notice grip and car performance dipping hard as your tires fall off. Pit stops, however, are as simple as just stopping in your lane and watching your team go to work, with no required inputs or decision-making on your end whatsoever.

This is... fine, but it's also a bit boring. The aforementioned Formula Legends, for example, employed a fun QTE to swap your tires, as well as allowed you to pick between soft, medium, hard, or wet compounds in order to work just a little bit of strategy into things. In iRacing Arcade, you have no options, nor any sort of dynamic weather to make for any fun moments where you debate when you need to come in for a set of wets.

Of course, I clearly understand an arcade game is, inherently, going to be simple. But even Mario Kart has drifting, boosting, modular car stats, and items to switch things up and make the racing feel like it has some more depth to really master if you want to. iRacing Arcade sadly feels like it lacks much sense of depth at all, instead just tasking you with hammering the straights, staying on the racing line, and surviving the bumper car-like nature of your opponents.

You can draft cars in front of you, as well as employ some various performance boosts in Career Mode as you unlock them, but that's about it. No DRS, BRS, precise drifting, ways to tweak your car's performance/stats, or anything of the sort. I imagine many will appreciate the simplicity at first, but also find that this level of approachability does get a bit unfortunately thin after a while.

A Decent Amount of Content with Some Real-World Inclusions

Something working in iRacing Arcade's benefit is that they were able to get some real-life licensing on board in order to be able to include a handful of fun, familiar tracks and vehicles. As a mega Formula One fan, it was a blast to take to the streets of tracks like Miami, Imola, and Bahrain. The tracks are faithfully represented, though scaled down to a smaller size just like your vehicles.

The Gran Turismo fan in me also loved getting back on the tarmac at Tsukuba Circuit in Japan, complete with Dunlop Tire archway (though cheekily rebranded to "Funlop" here). There are a handful of other real world tracks to choose from, as well as several that are original designs for iRacing Arcade, with a total number of 14. I liked the majority of the tracks, though I did feel like sometimes the scaling down of some made them a bit weird to race on. Bahrain, for example, feels a bit too cramped in multiple corners when brought to mini-size.

I imagine many will appreciate the simplicity at first, but also find that this level of approachability does get a bit unfortunately thin after a while.

A few recognizable cars show up as well, such as a Fiat 500, Porsche 911, three different formula cars, touring cars, LMP2s, and GTPs, rounding out the roster with a total of eight drivable vehicles. This is a decent number of options, and all do feel categorically different while looking and sounding great. I must admit, however, that I was hoping for a more diverse number of vehicles from real brands to choose from in the end.

14 tracks and 8 cars, combined with the simplicity of the actual gameplay, did unfortunately cause the selection to feel a little stale to me after a short while. I do feel a bit spoiled asking for more, but I do hope iRacing Arcade continues to build out the options here over time.

There are three modes in iRacing Arcade; Career, Free Play, and Online Multiplayer (no local couch co-op, though). While I didn't get to test out online multiplayer pre-release, its inclusion is very wise, and I could see it being a fun time. Similar games like Formula Legends lacked this functionality at launch, which was a big miss and something that's clearly working in iRacing Arcade's favor. There are also time attack leaderboards to attempt online, complete with the ghosts of other real players to chase.

What is disappointing about online is that your only options for live competition are starting a private room and sharing the code with friends, or joining a room you've been given a code for. There seems to be no matchmaking or public lobbies, which is a bit odd and underwhelming overall.

Free Play is just what you'd expect; a custom race (or series of races) where you can choose whatever cars, tracks, and settings you'd like. The highlight here is just how deep the settings let you get, allowing you to really fine-tune AI difficulty, other modifiers, and the ability to add a qualifying session before the real race in order to set the grid.

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Career Mode revolves around predetermined seasons/racing series to compete in, which earns you in-game currency and progress towards a Team Level bar, which has a ton of ways to earn XP, with rewards for race performance, overall career progress, and how much you've expanded/improved your Career Mode Campus.

The Campus is a sort of "Baby's First SimCity" layout where you can unlock and build structures like garages, engine shops, R&D facilities, and a nice level of campus decorations. New and upgraded structures give you perks for the races to leverage, though I also must admit that the money grind in the iRacing Arcade is pretty steep, causing the feeling of progression to become too infrequent.

A Few Head-Scratching Mode Differences and General Omissions

There are sadly also some very confusing differences between modes in the game. For example, I mentioned that Free Play has the option to participate in qualifying before a race. Career Mode does not have qualifying whatsoever, which is a massive disappointment and a very strange decision. Instead, you'll just start every Career race in dead last and have to work up the field. Other games, like Gran Turismo, employ this same starting position model, but why have qualifying in one mode and not the other here?

Free Play allows you to fine-tune the game's AI on a scale of 0-100, while Career Mode simply offers five different difficulty settings that cannot be customized further. This was an annoyance, as I often found my skill level to fall right between two of the five difficulties, so it was either "Win every race easily," or "Good luck getting on the podium." Why do I have more freedom to fine-tune in Free Play, the mode I will inherently care much less about and spend way less time with?

In addition to these strange differences/omissions between modes, there are also just a few hiccups and missing features in general that I was disappointed to see. One is your opponents' names always being displayed above their cars, which gets incredibly messy and distracting to look at in the heat of a race. There's no option to toggle these off, which is a pain point. What's worse, is sometimes these nametags would show up, and sometimes they wouldn't, with no rhyme or reason.

The position/timing tower on the side of the screen doesn't show time gaps between drivers, which makes it very difficult to manage your lead, plan pit stops, and keep an eye on the rest of the field. There are also no time sector splits so you can keep tabs on your performance properly during a race and see where you can improve.

These might sound like some specific, picky gripes, but with how iRacing Arcade ultimately does portray itself, they feel like very glaring omissions in practice. These are things that could be easily patched/added in at a later date, so I really do hope the team invests in some quality of life features like these as the game is supported after launch.

All of these things just make iRacing Arcade feel a bit... confusing. I've had a fun time with it, but I also can't quite figure out who it really is for. It wants to be an approachable arcade racer, but doesn't give enough to keep the gameplay feeling fresh. It wants to appeal to some of the simulation nerds to an extent, but doesn't implement basic things like time gaps. This is a fun game, but one that never quite hits the apex in a few unfortunate areas.

I expected a little more from iRacing Arcade. What's here is a very simple and easy to understand racer with a very approachable learning curve, which makes it a decent entry point for genre newcomers. It is pretty consistently fun, but it also makes some confusing decisions between available game modes, totally omits some base level racing game features you'd expect, and has a lack of gameplay depth even compared to other arcade-style titles. It's still a good time and worth checking out (especially at the price point), but I don't think it'll become a staple of my racing game lineup.