Racinggames have come in many different forms over the years, with the most popular subgenres being street racing games like Need for Speed and Burnout and kart racers like Mario Kart. One genre that gets overlooked by fans is off-roading games.
The biggest appeal of off-road racing games is the creative liberties studios were given when crafting their environments. Rather than a limited cityscape or racetrack, players could drive through deserts, jungles, and even icecaps.
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The real-life sport of rally racing, which mixes street racing with off-roading, has become a major inspiration for video games like these, with franchises like Dirt and Forza leading the charge. Pure off-road titles took an even grittier approach to the genre, and were standouts especially in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
These are the ten games I feel are the best of the best when it comes to off-roading. I have decided to go for a mix of rally and pure off-road games to show off the variety of the genre.
While several off-roading franchises have multiple standout entries, I will be limiting this list to only one game per series. I will also be strictly focusing on car-based racers, as I feel motorcycle and ATV games are worthy of their own list.
10Sega Rally Revo
A Last Hurrah For ’90s Arcade Racers
SEGA Rally Revo
The Sega Rally series helped put off-road racing on the map thanks toa pair of arcade hitsthat later found their way to the Saturn and Dreamcast. However, following the second game, the franchise’s future seemed to be in doubt due to Sega’s move away from the console market.
Sega Rally Revo was called that because it was intended as a revolutionary game for the rally racing genre, taking everything that made the first two games hits and updating them for the new console generation. And in that aspect, it worked.
All the gameplay fans knew and loved was masterfully ported over to the PS3 and Xbox 360, and the graphics and game engine were better than ever. It’s a great experience that will make fans of ’90s arcade racers very impressed, with its main drawback being its slower framerate.
Unfortunately, despite the positive reception this game got, it underperformed commercially, as its arcade-style gameplay was pretty outdated at a time when racing games were embracing a more simulation-based style.
This led to Sega Racing Studio, the development team formed specifically for this game, shutting their doors shortly afterward, and no new Sega Rally game has been released since.
Test Drive: Off-Road - Wide Open
Test Drive has always lingered in Need For Speed’s shadow, as, despite the latter being a younger series, its more consistent release schedule and having the EA juggernaut behind it helped it maintain a consistent spotlight. One thing Test Drive did better than Need For Speed was its off-road spin-offs.
V-Rally, while a solid game series, doesn’t do much to stand out from other rally racers. Test Drive Off-Road, after a slow start, hit it out of the park with their third installment, Wide Open, its sixth-generation console debut.
Wide Open’s highlight was its well-crafted open worlds based on the Utah Arches, Yosemite National Park, and Hawaii Island. Each one perfectly encapsulates what makes these places iconic tourist attractions, and makes many a player want to visit them in real life.
There was a lot of gameplay variety unlike other off-road racers at the time, with three unique race types that were well-designed for all three locales. A standout, in my opinion, was the scramble race, in which players had to collect twelve flags scattered across the stage in any order they wanted.
At the time, Wide Open was vastly overshadowed by other racing games released around the same time, and this ended up being the final entry in this subseries. Still, it’s a hidden gem that a lot of PS2 and Xbox owners have fond memories of.
8Rallisport Challenge 2
OG Xbox Exclusive Often Gets Overlooked
RalliSport Challenge 2
The Xbox had a lot of popular exclusive racing games in its library, like the Project Gotham Racing series and Midtown Madness 3. But one name that is often forgotten about when talking about the console is Rallisport Challenge 2.
The original Rallisport was released in 2002 and while it was well-liked, the sequel vastly improved on everything. The gameplay was more refined, there was a wider variety of cars, and the graphics got a noticeable upgrade in just two years.
There was a move away from arcade-style racers to more realistic driving simulators around this era of gaming, and while Rallisport 1 was a pure arcade experience, the second game added a hint of realism while not straying too far from the original’s DNA.
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Perhaps the biggest shift the game had from the original was that cars could take damage and lose parts, which made races feel more realistic and added a new layer of strategy, as damaged cars would slow down cars and make it more difficult to turn.
As a PS2 and GameCube owner during this era, I never really got a chance to play Rallisport Challenge 2, but I can definitely understand why Xbox players would have such a great experience with this.
Sadly, this would end up being the last Rallisport game, as developer Digital Illusions would be sucked up by EA a few years later to start working on the Battlefield series.
74 Wheel Thunder
Midway Game Tried To Be Mario Kart With Big Trucks
4 Wheel Thunder
Midway’s Thunder racing series was a big hit in the late ’90s, and they experimented with brand-new types of vehicles for their games. 4 Wheel Thunder was not your typical off-road racer in that regard, with four unique classes of vehicles to be chosen, from monster trucks to buggies.
Rather than play like your typical off-road racing game, it had more of a Mario Kart feel to it, with a reliance on power-ups that boosted vehicles' speed and creative courses, each with their own unique gimmicks. It was a decent attempt to make their game feel more unique and flashy, but if I wanted to play Mario Kart, I’d just stick with that.
The single-player modes can be a chore to get through, thanks to the very difficult AI, but with a little practice and patience, you’ll get through it just fine. The multiplayer is where it really shines, and players in 2000 had a lot of fun challenging their friends to races on the Dreamcast.
While there were a few other Thunder games, like Hydro Thunder and Arctic Thunder, 4 Wheel Thunder never got a sequel, which is kind of a shame, since I feel it had a lot of potential on the PS2.
It’s also the only Thunder game not to find an Arcade release, which, as the enduring popularity of Arctic Thunder has proven, is where games like these shine the best.
One Of The First Racers With Open World Tracks
4x4 Evo was Take Two Interactive’s take on the off-road racing genre, and it was a true pioneer in what would come next. While most racing games of the time, even off-roaders, still limited vehicles to a fixed racetrack, 4x4 Evo took major creative liberties with its track design, as there were many different paths to get to each checkpoint.
This is one of the first games I remember owning on the PS2, and I had a lot of fun playing it. Seeing all the real-life car brands being ported into 128-bit glory and exploring the breathtaking tracks the guys at Terminal Reality came up with kept me coming back to this all the time.
That’s not to show the game hasn’t shown its age in many ways. The graphics, while very impressive for their time, are pretty outdated over the two decades since its release, and given its origins on the Dreamcast, the PS2 port can seem a bit below the quality of games that originated on Sony’s console.
Having variations of tracks at different times of day and weather conditions was also a nice touch, though it’s a bit disappointing that these changes are mostly only cosmetic, and repeating these variations during career mode can get very frustrating.
A sequel was released a year later, and while it did get a graphical buff from its predecessor, it didn’t do much to innovate itself beyond the first title, and the series ended afterward. While 4x4 EVO 2 is not a bad game, I am partial towards the original given it’s the only one I ever owned.
5Smuggler’s Run
PS2 Launch Game Turned Players Into Outlaws
Smuggler’s Run
Smuggler’s Run was one of two games Rockstar and Angel Studios released as PS2 launch titles, the other being Midnight Club.
And while Midnight Club ended up being much more popular and launched a highly successful series, that also meant it got a lot more copycats,allowing Smuggler’s Run to have a more unique place in gaming history as a result.
In this game, the player is a member of a drug smuggling gang working at the U.S.-Mexican border, and they are tasked with completing many missions while dueling with rival gangs and evading the authorities. Imagine a TV show like Narcos or Sons of Anarchy, but as an early 2000s video game, and that is Smuggler’s Run.
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While Smuggler’s Run does contain traditional racing like you’d see in most car-based video games, the highlight of the game was its missions in the open world, a concept that Rockstar would later implement in the Grand Theft Auto games. Indeed, GTA owes a lot to both this game and Midnight Club.
A sequel was released a year later focusing on arms trafficking in a foreign war in the Middle East, and while it got similarly good reviews, it was kind of tasteless to release at the end of 2001, given what was going on in the real world.
Rockstar tried to clean up the game to avoid any unfortunate similarities, but the damage was done, and it would end up being the last game in the series.
4FlatOut 2
Insane Sequel Turned Drivers Into Human Cannonballs
FlatOut isn’t a purely off-road series, given it was crafted primarily as a competitor to the strictly on-road Burnout series, with its focus on high-octane car crashes.
But FlatOut 2 not only expands the reach of the series to go in a more off-road direction, but it also perfectly executes the series' signature gimmick: being able to send drivers flying out of their cars like ragdolls.
These ragdoll physics were not just for show either, as launching your drivers like cannonballs is a core part of the game’s gameplay, especially with the many stunt minigames. Some of the highlights include human bowling and dart boards, and all of them are a lot of fun to play.
While the first FlatOut was a fun experience, the sequel improved on pretty much everything, with better track design, a larger variety of minigames, and fine-tuned graphics and gameplay. It honestly made something like Burnout look like a relaxing car ride in comparison.
Unfortunately for FlatOut fans, this game marked the peak of the series, as FlatOut 3 in 2011 was an absolute car wreck of a game that basically killed off all interest in the franchise.
While a fourth game released in 2017 was a step up from the third entry, it was a far cry from the greatness of the first two installments, and it’s unlikely we’ll see a comeback any time soon,though many fans hope otherwise.
3Motorstorm
Multi-Vehicular Off-Roader Was A Highlight Of The PS3
Motorstorm
The arrival of the PlayStation 3 meant that several new video game franchises would make their mark over the coming years, and in the world of off-road racing, there was no bigger name than Motorstorm. While all three games in the trilogy have their strengths, I have to go with the original here as it was the one that set the stage for what was to come.
Most racing games focused on one specific type of vehicle, but in Motorstorm, you could choose from cars to trucks to motorcycles to take to the races. I was initially worried that the gameplay would be totally unbalanced and broken due to the different playstyles, but the team at Evolution Studios managed to make it work.
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The racetracks in the game had multiple different pathways players could take, and each of the eight vehicle types would excel at taking different routes to the finish line. It added strategy to a genre that prided itself on simplicity, and I feel it was a much-needed refresher to keep games like this from getting stale.
The next two games in the series would mostly follow the same formula, with Pacific Rift changing the setting from a desert to a tropical island and Apocalypse being set in a natural-disaster-prone California. Fans of the original will enjoy the sequels too, but none of them exactly reinvented the wheel any more than the original game did.
Unfortunately, after Apocalypse underperformed commercially, Sony retired the franchise, with no mainline game being released since, and with Evolution Studios being bought out by Codemasters, that looks unlikely to change. Still, the franchise has made an impact on many a gamer alike, anda fourth game is long overdue.
Rally Racer Turned Into An Immersive Experience After Losing Colin McRae
The Colin McRae Rally series was the most prominent video game series focusing on rally racing throughout most of the early to mid 2000s. However, the series was getting stale by the time the next generation arrived, and to shake things up, it was reborn as Dirt for the seventh generation.
Unlike Colin McRae Rally, Dirt had several other game modes besides traditional rally racing. Other types of events featured in the series include rallycross, trailblazer, and gymkhana races, and each of them was a breath of fresh air in a genre that definitely needed one at the time.
The pinnacle of the series came with 2011’s Dirt 3, which had the smoothest gameplay of the series and some very impressive online features. For a series that a lot of people thought would be retired after Colin McRae’s tragic death in 2007, I’m glad that it was able to evolve beyond its original namesake.
Despite Dirt 3’s success, the series went on a long hiatus afterward, andwhile the next two Dirt gameswere also very solid racers, they weren’t quite able to live up to the heights of the third game. To date, Dirt 5 in 2020 is the most recent game in the series, but here’s hoping that isn’t the case forever.
1Forza Horizon 5
The Pinnacle Of A Standout Xbox Series
Forza Horizon 5
The Forza Motorsport series started out as the Xbox’s answer to the highly popular Gran Turismo games on the PlayStation. They were well-received, but it was the spin-off series Forza Horizon thatbecame a true game-changer in the world of racing video games.
Whereas Motorsport focused on simulating a race taking place on fixed circuits, Horizon’s mix of arcade-style gameplay and vast open worlds felt like a much more immersive experience, in my opinion.
All of this culminated in Forza Horizon 5 in 2021, which not only had by far the largest open-world the series had yet, based on the lush Mayan environments of Mexico, but the multiple climates made you feel like you were actually in the country. If you can’t afford a vacation, visiting a virtual Mexico is the next best thing you could do.
As a PlayStation owner, I’ve never played a Forza game before, but Horizon 5’s recent arrival on the PS5 means that I’ll finally get the opportunity to check the series out. Playground Games' work on the Fable reboot means that it might be a while before Horizon 6 comes out, but they’ll have a very high bar they need to clear to top this game.
