It's Top Gear's Christmas gaming gift guide

Welcome to your official dual-purpose Top Gear Christmas gaming gift guide. On the one hand, you can use this handy list in order to select the perfect gift for your car-loving gamer friend.

On the other, and as is more likely, you can share this link to your loved ones' social media as a not-so-subtle hint that you want to find this stuff in your own stocking come December 25th. Who are we to judge?

Forza Horizon 4 (Xbox One and PC)

It's not difficult to pick our racing game of the year, in fact we haven't seen a fight this one-sided since a T-Rex ate that guy off the toilet in Jurassic Park. Forza Horizon 4 on Xbox One and PC is an astonishing achievement, offering a compact, idealised version of Britain, four separate seasons of weather to negotiate and hundreds of cars that are accurate almost to the micron.

Whether you're cruising around with mates, churning up areas of outstanding natural beauty in a Land Rover or clinging onto a hypercar in an illicit street race, Forza Horizon 4 is essentially all of your road trip fantasies with none of the hanging around on petrol station forecourts. Or accumulating a landfill's worth of Yorkie wrappers, for that matter.

Fanatec CSL Elite F1 Set (PS4 and PC)

We're firm believers that every serious racing game fan needs a wheel and pedals to make the most out of increasingly sophisticated driving sims, not least because if you tried to drive a real car with a twiddly little gamepad you'd be upside down in a hedge before you can say 'snap oversteer'. Fanatec's recent output has been brilliant, particularly the one-to-one replica of a McLaren GT3 wheel, and the world's first officially licensed F1 wheel for PS4 and PC is no exception.

The Fanatec CSL Elite F1 set marries the CSL Elite base and pedals, with its butter-smooth force feedback, to the brand new Clubsport F1 Esports rim used by the Formula 1 esports series competitors. As we've come to expect from the German manufacturer, it's sturdily built and an object of deeply pleasing tactility even before you've plugged it into your console. Plus, wrapped as it is in proper Alcantara, it's the perfect excuse to go full sim and break out the racing gloves. As if we needed an excuse.

F1 2018 (Xbox One, PS4 and PC)

Formula 1 is a complicated sport. We reckon you'd probably need a degree in mechanical engineering just to work out how to swap the drivers' drinks bottle. In F1 2018, through some sort of programming wizardry, all the technical elements of F1 are turned into entertaining gameplay features and married to wheel-to-wheel racing that has gotten even more intense in this year's edition.

Somehow, F1 2018 manages to turn what should feel like a 170mph maths lesson into not just one of the best racing games, but one of the best sports games full stop. A full stop being exactly what we experience when we clatter into the barriers in Monaco for the umpteenth time.

HTC Vive Pro McLaren (PC)

Feeling flush with cash? Perhaps you're mere days away from receiving a vast sum of money from that Nigerian prince who’s been emailing you. If that's the case, the ultimate gaming gift this Christmas is the HTC Vive Pro McLaren Edition, decked out in the team's current F1 colours and weighing in at a wallet-worrying £1,450.

To be fair, the Vive Pro is the most advanced consumer-grade VR headset around, requiring a hefty PC but boasting more pixels pressed up to each eyeball than your 1080p telly and precise motion tracking. That means when you slide into the cockpit of one of the three classic McLaren F1 cars included in the bundled copy of rFactor 2 you'll feel like you're actually nestled in there.

There's also a bespoke VR experience that casts you as a wheel gun-toting member of the McLaren pit crew, which doesn't seem quite as glamorous as heroic racing driver, if we're brutally honest.

The Crew 2 (Xbox One, PS4 and PC)

The Crew understood that driving games aren't necessarily all about racing, they can also be about mucking around an enormous open world with friends, soaking up the beautiful scenery. Sequel The Crew 2 is even more relaxed about what constitutes a driving game, adding boats and stunt planes to the mix. We fully expect The Crew 3 to be a competitive tiddlywinks simulator.

Regardless of how you get around, this compressed version of the contiguous United States is even prettier than it was in the first game, while there's a greater diversity of things to do while you're there too, from drifting a Citroen C3 WRC around the Grand Canyon to skipping a twitchy jet boat through the Everglades. This is basically the Christmas chocolate selection box of video games, but before someone snaffles all the toffee ones.