Six reasons why 2015 was the year of the racing game

After a fallow few years for racing game fans, 2015 felt like the point when game developers removed digits from posteriors and finally delivered some genuinely exciting new experiences. The result was 12 glorious petrol-soaked months in gaming that spoilt us with a variety of brilliant racing titles and downloadable add-ons designed with a proper, authentic passion for cars.

Here are our six biggest highlights of the past year in racing games. Let us know in the comments if you agree and keep an eye on TG.com for what promises to be a similarly sim-stuffed 2016.

It's fair to say that the series formerly known as Colin McRae Rally had lost its way by 2012's Dirt Showdown, a bizarre hybrid of Ken Block's hooning and budget banger racing. It was neither fish nor fowl and, most importantly, nor was it a very good game.

Suitably penitent, Codemasters offered up Dirt Rally in 2015 as a PC-only Early Access title, allowing fans to play and offer feedback as the game was still being developed. It's properly finished now, with a console version arriving in April, and despite doing all its growing up in public like some teen boyband toe-rag, Dirt Rally is exactly the reboot series fans were looking for.

Easily the most challenging, convincing and rewarding rally title out there, it takes a proper simulation approach to the art of sideways gravel churning and focuses on authentic rally stages and official World Rallycross Championship events. You genuinely can't get closer to the real thing without remortgaging your house and splashing out on a 'previously loved' Group N Subaru Impreza.

Released at the tail end of 2014, Assetto Corsa is a spectacularly tactile PC sim that offers up a garage full of cars that will tug at your very loins. But Italian development team Kunos Simulazioni wasn't content to sit back, sip on a jet black espresso and watch the money roll in.

Instead, we received three rather appropriately titled 'Dream Pack' add-ons to augment the experience for a modest price. The first added the Nurburgring Nordschleife and 10 new cars, including McLarens P1 and F1 GTR. For hours of rigorously scientific comparison, presumably. Dream Pack 2 introduced eight more cars, the highlights being the thunderous Ford GT40 and contrary Lamborghini Countach, plus Barcelona's Catalunya circuit.

The third distinctly British flavoured expansion arrived as an early Christmas present this very month. A laser-scanned recreation of Brands Hatch offers the perfect location for lobbing the new 1970 Ford Escort RS 1600 around, or staging a retro motorsport revival with a classic Lotus 25 or 72 formula car.

That's not all Kunos was up to in 2015 either. Somehow they found a moment or two to begin preparing a console version of Assetto Corsa, which you'll be hearing more about on TG.com in early 2016.

Back in 2013 Forza Motorsport 5 represented a wobbly debut for the series on Xbox One. For all the stunning graphics and big budget car list, one or two crucial errors in the handling model made the cars unnecessarily unruly at the limits of grip.

Forza Motorsport 6 fixed all that, meaning you could push cars to the peak of their cornering performance without worrying that you'd end up spat out into the Armco by some rogue mathematical equation hidden in the physics code.

In Forza 6, you're far more likely to be launched off the circuit by the lake-sized puddles in the new wet races. Featuring weather more traditionally associated with the book of Genesis, negotiating a fully saturated Spa Francorchamps in a high-powered GT car is one of the highlights of the gaming decade, let alone just this year.

It's also the only game where you can pit yourself against The Stig's digital cousin on the Top Gear Test Track. Prepare for a lot of time staring at the back of a crisp, white helmet...

On the big list of clichés, 'built by fans, for fans' arrives just above 'it's a game of two halves' and just below 'the apple doesn't fall far from the tree'. In Project CARS' case though, the idiom absolutely rings true. The entire enterprise was built with constant feedback and funding from dedicated racing game players and the result is a racing game that has something for everyone.

Whether your kink is dropping the hammer in a 90s NASCAR, hustling a Ford Focus RS or sniping apexes in a GT3 racer, Project CARS somehow manages to satisfy all of your whims without ever feeling over-stretched. It also boasts a roster of circuits that will keep you busy until about this time next year.

As with Assetto Corsa, Project CARS developer Slightly Mad Studios has spent the months since release furnishing us with equally varied downloadable addons, including a historic pack that is far less stuffy than it sounds. There's also a sequel in the works already, which will again be involving fans in the development process. Start preparing your pedantically detailed forum posts and blog comments now...

Free-to-play sim RaceRoom Racing Experience might have a name that's as about as inspiring as a quarterly meeting of the Traction Engine Enthusiasts Club, but this criminally underrated game delivers drama in spades with its expertly chosen selection of classic metal.

Around this time last year we got an unexpectedly authentic recreation of DTM 1992, inarguably the greatest season of German touring car racing of all time. In Spring 2015, the team at Sector 3 Studios set its sights on fleshing out its grid of Group 5 equipment with some rarer morsels.

If you're not familiar with Group 5 it was a comically extreme series of racing regulations made famous in the late 70s and early 80s because it actively encouraged ridiculously powerful engines, aerodynamics straight from a 10 year old's doodle pad and massive flared wheelarches.

RaceRoom's selection is a motley bunch, ranging from an excessively turbocharged and bewinged Nissan Silvia to the monstrous, V8 powered Greenwood Corvette. What unifies them is the fact that they're all absolutely savage in their power delivery and entirely unsullied by modern driver aids. Expect plenty of wheel-sawing oversteer and engine notes that sound like Satan with an upset stomach.

Since the Nurburgring started flogging its own laser-scanned data of the sinuous 14-mile Nordschleife to all-comers, it seems just about every racing game has a centimetre perfect replica of The Green Hell.

The one serious sim heads were waiting for, though, was iRacing's version, which arrived this month. Generally accepted to be the most realistic simulator you can get outside of a Formula One team's basement, iRacing offers one of the most sophisticated physics models around. If you're quick in iRacing's unyieldingly faithful vehicles, you're probably going to be quick in real life.

And the best bit? Practising on iRacing's take on The Ring before you make the pilgrimage to the real thing minimises the chance of you ending up bankrupted by the fruit machine fines the circuit dishes out when people stack it into the barrier. It's that sort of fiscal responsibility that New Year's Resolutions are made of...