$44 (£28) and $12 (£8) per year for online access OR $85 (£55) one-off for lifetime access | Online racing is still in development and while pretty stable, suffers badly if a rogue driver with a very high ping enters the fray. The AI is pretty challenging, albeit sometimes predictable, and if you find the right difficulty level you can have some very challenging races against your offline opponents. The game's recent release on Steam might help with this, but we found single player to be a more consistent source of fun. It's not that it doesn't work, but more because the community is very small at the moment. Sadly, online multiplayer is very limited. Luckily, there are various driver aids to make things easier if you just want to put the pedal to the metal without worrying about spending your time in a cloud of tyre smoke. It can be frustrating at times, but only because you know you're not good enough. The handling model is challenging but rewarding a delicate balance of steering and throttle is required otherwise you'll very easily find yourself in an uncontrollable spin in most of the cars. The cars are very nicely modelled while the tracks look a bit grainy and oversaturated at times. It's a good-looking game, although this is more thanks to the cars rather than the tracks. These are all as much fun as the stock cars, meaning the game has an enormous amount of replayability. While the stock cars form the bulk of the game, there are a selection of seemingly completely random cars from across the motorsport spectrum including 70s saloons, several varieties of go-karts (and tracks to go with them) and Formula One-style cars from various decades. This rating isn't just for show it directly impacts how you're able to play the game, and you can only rank up at the end of each three-month 'season' if your safety rating is high enough. If you make a lot of mistakes such as driving off track or crashing into your opponents, your 'Safety Rating' will decrease. The bulk of the races you'll take part in on iRacing are ranked, meaning every official qualifying and race session is tracked and your actions rated. You can get discounts by buying in bulk, which you'll be doing quite a lot when you first start out. And you'd expect nothing less when each track costs you $15 (£10) and each car will set you back $12 (£8). It's a locked down title: there's no third-party content, with all the tracks and cars in-game fully licenced and meticulously detailed. Even if you want to conduct an offline practice session, you'll need access to the internet in order to begin. There's no main menu to speak of in iRacing: instead, every session begins on the iRacing membersite.

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