Top 5 Car Games

1: Forza Motorsport 7 (2017)

If they ever invented racing game Top Trumps, Forza Motorsport 7 would be the all-conquering card you'd covertly sneak into your own hand when you were shuffling the deck. You simply can't argue with the numbers in FM7 – over 800 cars from 99 manufacturers and 30 circuits on which to stretch their legs. If your favourites aren't in here, have you checked you're not into horse racing instead?

As befitting of a game with a production budget that would match the GDP of a small country, Forza 7 is also visually stunning. This semi-sim pushes current top-end Xbox hardware to its absolute limits with its silky 60 frames per second motion and crisp 4K visuals. It's like a spa weekend for your eyeballs.

2: Rocket League (2015)

Ernest Hemingway is famously quoted as saying that there are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering and that the rest are “merely games". We'd be curious to know what old Ernie would have made of Rocket League, which is a bit like his beloved motor sport but instead combines kerosene-powered cars, a giant football and literal explosions when you score. Not enough dead bulls for him, probably.

We'll confess, Rocket League is a driving game in only the very loosest sense of the word, in that you'll spend a good proportion of your time airborne, but we're claiming this brilliant multiplayer sports game as our own regardless. As we've established many a time on TG TV, football is infinitely better with the addition of wheels, not least because we've never had a goal disallowed by VAR in Rocket League...

3: Dirt Rally 2.0 (2019)

Dirt Rally 2.0 might not be able to compete with the budget of your Forzas and your Gran Turismos, but what it does do is perfect the art of offroad handling in a way we've never experienced before. Whether you're dancing a modern R5 machine through a sequence of fast sweepers or muscling a Group B monster around a narrow mountain hairpin, Dirt Rally 2.0 is absolutely convincing, to the point where we now insist on having pace notes read to us during the morning commute, wear a bobble hat to bed and have changed our name by deed poll to Juha.

Drop a bit more change on the DLC and Dirt Rally 2.0 offers remastered versions of the stages from the first game in the series, making it a complete rally package. Which incidentally is what people have started calling us too, only in slightly ruder terms.

4: Assetto Corsa (2014)

Assetto Corsa has become so much a part of the simracing furniture, it's difficult to remember a time before it existed. Like all great racing sims, AC nailed the fundamental handling first and foremost and then set about adding cars and tracks to taste. While there's plenty of racing machinery sitting on slick tyres in there, such is the nuance of the physics model the game's actually rarely better than when you're slithering around in an E30 BMW M3 on far less grippy road rubber. We've never been more keen to have less grip in a racing game.

By the time the Ultimate Edition of the game swung around there were over 170 vehicles to sample and one of the first laser-scanned versions of the Nordschleife to test them on. Now if we can just prise ourselves from the cockpit of that E30 M3...

5: Forza Horizon 4

Here it is then, our pick for the best driving game of the decade and the one that most accurately captures our love of cars. The Horizon series forcibly injected fun back into the Forza franchise back in 2012, taking the series' comprehensive car list and giving you an open world sandbox to enjoy them in. Forza Horizon 4 was that intoxicating cocktail refined, but also introduced seasonal weather transitions and was set in a compressed, greatest hits of the British countryside. It's basically like tearing across the intro to Emmerdale in a McLaren Senna.

Most importantly, while it features real cars it doesn't spend time wringing its hands over being realistic. Instead it's the sort of automotive adventures that you fantasise about but would never be able to achieve in real life because dry stone walls are actually remarkably solid and landing a 1000ft jump in a Bugatti Chiron would launch a very expensive pair of front shocks into a low earth orbit. But if there's one thing this entire list proves, it's that reality is overrated anyway...