- Introduction
- It is Arcade, but is it iRacing?
- I wish things were different
- The technicalities
- Benchmarks
- Steam Deck
- To buy or to skip?
Introduction
A few years ago, iRacing was a name reserved for a hardcore, subscription-based sim. Since then, they’ve expanded into publishing different racing games – first ExoCross and World of Outlaws, then NASCAR 25, and now iRacing Arcade. This cartoony simcade spin-off, developed by Original Fire Games, previously known for Circuit Superstars and Karting Superstars, releases on Steam on , with console releases following later this year.
I initially didn’t plan to cover this game, but iRacing Motorsport Simulations reached out with a review key, most likely due to my NASCAR 25 coverage, so here we are. I played iRacing Arcade for several hours over the past week, and progressed through multiple seasons of the single-player career, submitted several bug reports and impressions, and benchmarked it.
It is Arcade, but is it iRacing?
Let’s get a few things out of the way: this is not a serious racing game with simplified physics, like TOCA or GRID. What we get here is an experience similar to Circuit Superstars, with a chase camera first introduced in Karting Superstars; whether that’s a good thing or not depends on how much you vibed with the way CS handles. It is best to think of iRacing Arcade as Circuit Superstars 2 with licensed content – and on that front, it delivers.
Coming from Circuit (or Karting) Superstars, you might have a bit of deja-vu: the entirety of the race UI and most UI sounds are reused straight from that game. The overall experience, however, is significantly expanded: a questionable Grand Prix mode with fixed championships is gone; instead, iRacing Arcade provides a brand new calendar-based Career Mode with team management.
The career experience is hands down the best part about this game, and I enjoyed it greatly. The career appears to consist of 7 seasons, although I only finished two so far; I don’t know if the seasons are going to loop after that, or if the career just ends. With each season, more championships open up to the player, and they can choose to participate in them directly, or expand the team with hired drivers and send them to race. There are no restrictions whatsoever: you can participate in all championships personally, delegate them all to the rest of the team (provided you can hire enough drivers, that is), or simply skip championships you are no longer interested in. You can invest in your own fleet of cars or rely on rentals, in exchange for a part of the prize money. The game gives you all the freedom you need.
When you’re not racing, you’re left to explore another interesting addition to the career loop: campus building. In this mode, stylized not unlike a very simplified version of a Two Point game, players get to expand their team campus with bigger garages, workshops, R&D teams, and more.
Decorations and the road layout are only for show, as this map is not interactive, and the player cannot visit it on foot or in a car. Building better facilities
lets the player hire more drivers, buy extra cars, and provides better Boosts. Boosts are yet another addition in Circuit Superstars 2 iRacing Arcade,
and they work as “perks” for the player: providing benefits like a permanent or a temporary increase of grip or engine power, more leeway regarding time penalties,
extra fuel given at the last lap, or… the big head mode.
I wish things were different
So far, I’ve been really positive about the game, because at the core level, iRacing Arcade delivers exactly on what it promises: lighthearted, yet not simplistic racing in a cartoony setting. The gameplay loop keeps me engaged as I get to alternate between multiple different racing classes, and the driving model clicks. But…
If you played Circuit Superstars, you probably remember how varied the car selection was. Compacts, touring cars, muscle cars, stock cars, buggies, race trucks… iRacing Arcade throws that all away in favour of 8 cars. Yes, eight: two licensed road cars, a generic touring car, three generic open wheelers, a generic LMP, and a generic Hypercar. When the iRacing acquisition was announced, the hope was that their reputation and influence could help Original Fire Games integrate more licensed content in their games, but the result seems to have been the opposite – the car selection was the best part of Circuit Superstars, and it’s the worst part of iRacing Arcade.
It’s an abysmal decision, and one I can’t understand at all: if most of the vehicles in the game are not licensed, why are we not seeing more of them? Why don’t we get an opportunity to race stock cars, muscle cars, or trucks? This is not an Early Access release or a solo-dev indie game made on a shoestring budget – so this car selection is simply not enough. And even that is not a good excuse: for comparison, the recently released Super Woden: Rally Edge is a solo-dev indie game with no licensed vehicles, but it has 90 cars.
At least the track selection is more varied: 12 licensed courses, including some tracks less commonly seen in games, and two fictional circuits returning from Circuit Superstars. They each offer only a single layout, but still, it’s not the worst.
There are a few other things that didn’t sit right with me. Just like in Circuit Superstars, difficulty is all over the place: sometimes I struggle to finish in the Top 3 on a Pro difficulty, while in other races I comfortably win on Master. The AI competitiveness seems to vary wildly per class: they are just right in Fiat 500s and Porsches, really easy in Touring Cars, a little too difficult in open wheelers. Building a “team brand” is difficult, as the game lacks any presets for car and driver colors; if you want consistency in your fleet, you are in for a lot of manual color adjustments. The campus feature is interesting, but a little underutilized: the decorative elements are pointless, scrolling around this area with a gamepad is unintuitive, and there isn’t much you can do with that campus; is it too much to ask for to be able to drive around it, or have people walk around it? There is no photo mode or even an ability to hide the UI in replays, so you can’t take nice screenshots easily. There is no split-screen either, even though a game like this is an ideal candidate for local multiplayer. It is said that split-screen is going to arrive with the console versions, but it’s unconfirmed whether it’s going to be available on PC too.
None of those drawbacks make iRacing Arcade feel like an unfinished experience, but it could have been something more. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for post-launch support, as most of my complaints could be addressed in future updates. To my knowledge, there was no official communication on whether the game will be expanded or not, so all we can do is wait and see.
The technicalities
iRacing Arcade is in a slightly different league from the other games I’ve reviewed in the past. It runs on Unity 6, so none of my usual technical comments apply here. The game is significantly simpler and more lightweight because of this, and the minimum requirements indicate that the Steam Deck LCD is considered to be a minimum spec machine that they support. I threw the game at two setups:
- Intel Core i9-12900K with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti.
- Intel Core i7-6700K with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070.
For my impressions, I’ve been using exclusively the primary PC. However, for benchmarking, I used both. All screenshots in this article were taken on the max details, unless stated otherwise.
Graphics options and presets
iRacing Arcade goes beyond a single “Low/Medium/High Details” selection commonly found in Unity games:
There are no upscalers or any “fancy” options, but honestly, this game doesn’t need any. That said, I wish the Anti-Aliasing options were better described, as I don’t know what kind of an AA solution the game uses, and even on High, it can appear a little jagged. It also appears to always run in a borderless window and caps the resolution at a desktop resolution, so I was unable to use DSR.
iRacing Arcade doesn’t have presets; instead, most options can be individually turned on/off and changed between Low/Medium/High. For Lowest, I turned everything as low as possible. For Medium, everything is on Medium. For High, everything is maxed. Those “presets” correspond to what I later used in benchmarks.
Disabling the Volumetric Fog and Bloom makes the biggest visual difference and is the reason why the Lowest screenshot looks so lifeless. Other options simply increase the quality of particular effects like shadows and Anti-Aliasing, so they should only be reduced if you need to reclaim performance. However, with this being a Unity game, you’re unlikely to need to turn down the details, unless you’re using a Steam Deck or another handheld.
Benchmarks
For my benchmark, I utilized the in-game Replay option and recorded a race closely resembling a setup from the public demo of the game; this way, you may easily compare my results with yours if you try that demo. The benchmark sampled 30 seconds of data from the very start of a race in a Porsche 911 GT3 Cup on Tsukuba Circuit.
Since I was unable to use DSR, I ran the benchmark at 1080p on the RTX 5070 Ti machine and at 720p on the GTX 1070 machine. I ran the benchmarks with the following settings:
| Low | Medium | High | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quality | Low | Medium | High |
| Anti-Aliasing | Off | Medium | High |
| Ambient Occlusion | Off | Medium | High |
| Bloom | Off | Medium | High |
| Volumetric Fog | Off | On | On |
| Light scattering | Off | On | On |
| Haze | Off | Off | On |
| Screen Space Reflections | Off | Off | On |
| Tire marks | Off | On | On |
To be fair, looking at these results, benchmarking this game feels like a pointless endeavour. These results tell me something important, though: the official minimum requirements of i5-7500 and GTX 1070 Ti are most likely too conservative, and the game can run just fine on lower-end hardware. If it wasn’t for one important detail, I suspect that a GTX 1050 could have reached 1080p at 60 FPS on the highest details without much trouble…
…except the game does something strange on the initial startup: it seems to preload all the assets to VRAM, loading over 8GB of data!
I haven’t noticed any issues caused by this on the 8GB GTX 1070, but I imagine it might make 4/6GB VRAM cards rather unhappy. I’m not sure if this is intentional or if it’s simply a mistake in the resource management, so I forwarded this as a bug report.
Steam Deck
At the time of writing this review, iRacing Arcade is not Deck Verified yet, but it’s clear that it was developed with Deck in mind, as the minimum system requirements state:
Additional Notes: LCD Steam Deck equivalent or higher.
Launching the game on a Deck, it defaults to a mix of Low and Medium details, and that preset reaches 60 FPS with ease and some headroom. I did spot one spot where performance tanked to 40 FPS, but I forwarded this to the developers as a bug report, as this spot seems to be a clear outlier. Notice that VRAM usage hovers around 8GB, just like I remarked in the previous section.
If you need more battery life, the game can target 30 FPS and 40 FPS with no issues, making it an excellent game to play on the go. Steam Cloud is not used, but a cloud sync is set up – the game uses some sort of a custom solution (possibly PlayFab).
To buy or to skip?
I liked playing Circuit Superstars, and I like playing iRacing Arcade. I try not to lock myself to a specific sub-genre of racing games and enjoy experiencing different approaches, and both those games are very much different than a typical racer. That said, with the game launching with such a narrow range of cars, I’d not blame anyone for thinking that $24.99 is too steep for the amount of content it offers. Diverse championships in the career mode can only help so much if you keep using the same few cars over and over, after all.