NASCAR 25

Overall I'm going to recommend this, since it's fun to put some casual time in racing. It's far from perfect, and I hope there will be updates to it. It would be disappointing to see the team just dropping Nascar 26 for $60 with new drivers / paint schemes but no game mechanics changes. It needs a lot of foundational work in order to justify a new game release at this point. Positives: Good soundtrack, great graphics. Very enjoyable to play with controller, car setups have realistic-ish effects as far as I can tell. I had a few hundred hours in iRacing a decade ago but no sim racing experience recently. A+ for including the tire wear / temperature indicators to help dial in tire pressures / camber. It can be fun when the AI difficulty is set correctly. You have to hit the marks and not make mistakes. And sometimes AI does make stupid mistakes, which I haven't seen since Geoff Crammond's legendary GP series of sims. Negatives: The spotter is by far the biggest issue during races. It lies all the time. It says clear when there are cars, there is no nuance to how it communicates an approaching car, no spotter help with superspeedway drafting at all. Pit stops are also very oversimplified. The career mode is a joke - earn money spend it on cars and upgrades but it just becomes a grind. There is zero soul put into the whole office / crew setup or sponsors. You keep replaying the same seasons against the same drivers and it just becomes boring. The competition should evolve, switch teams or series and have different level of competitiveness each season. The "socials" update after races is a gimmick that gets boring fast. I hoped that drivers I race hard or wreck would race me harder or retaliate in later races, but no. I don't think this has the full iRacing sim / tire model. It seems like the tires aren't building pressure over time and they can't be damaged by running them super low pressure. I wish there was an option to make it a bit more realistic. But I guess at that point it would be more like iRacing, so there's that.

Sadly, I can't get it to run on Linux or SteamOS. I have tried nearly every configuration and custom launch option I can find. iRacing, PLEASE support Linux/SteamOS! I really wanted to play this game.

I waited to get this game on sale, not because I don't have the money but because I feel it is not worth $60. I see a lot of people defending it by saying "It is a good foundation for future installments". But why then should I pay full price for a whole house I'm only getting the foundation? That means I have to pay another $70 next year for the rest of it. GOOD. Track models are the best ever in a console/pc port. Laser scanned straight from iRacing. GOOD. Best on track AI ever in a console/pc port (except for the crashes, see below). They handle racing each other and passing lapped cars very well. You can "bully" them if you take advantage. If you stick your nose somewhere you shouldn't they just jump out of the way and make room for you. So just have some self discipline and don't do it :-). GOOD. Paint booth looks pretty good from the paint schemes I have seen other people create, although this is really not my thing. Driving in cockpit, I don't see the thing anyway. GOOD. Lots of sliders and options to tweak the AI to your liking. The best is "field spread" which increases the speed of the fastest car to the slowest car. This should be mandatory in every racing sim but very few have it. BAD. No DNFs for player or AI. This omission is mind boggling to me. Any damage to player car can be fixed 100% in 10 seconds during pit stop. BAD. Canned AI wrecks are always the exact same. A single car spin that always happens right in front of the player. It's infuriating because half the time you end up getting involved. BAD. When AI are involved in a wreck, they just restart in the same position they were in before the crash. Obviously they should be forced to pit for new tires and start at the rear of the field. BAD. Career mode is as shallow as a puddle. Fix car, hire some guy named Bob, get a new sponsor. Go to next race. Only one sponsor at a time and it will change every 2 or 3 races. You can't check the championship points standings until like after the 4th race of the season until you hire somebody who can read apparently. That's really weird. You're a backmarker for only like 3 races, car upgrades happen way too fast. BAD. Restarts. You fight your way through the pack only to lose everything on restarts. The AI accelerate way faster than the player is able to. This also happens when leaving the pits after a stop. Another thing on restarts, the game will sometimes have you in 1st gear at the top of the rev limiter when the green drops and gives you control of your car. BAD. AI pit strategy. I like running long races with no stages so fuel mileage can be a thing. If a caution comes out where every car could make it to the end of a race, the AI aren't smart enough to pit. They will stay out and pit under green 10 laps later. I have been gifted wins simply because I can do math. Also, I don't like that you have to pause the race to set up your next pit stop, it really breaks the immersion. I noticed that the AI lap times shown during practice are completely faked. I was in a 2 car draft at Daytona. I set the fastest time in practice and the AI car I was drafting with was shown in 35th place, 1.5 seconds off of my time. That is impossible. Overall, the on track racing wheel to wheel feels great, probably the best ever. Everything else just feels half baked.

I am unfortunately still going to be running Nascar 25 because it's the only Nascar game available for purchase. It looks good and I think the cars and tracks feel good. I think the physics are alright and online races are fun. Those are the positives. Sadly there isn't much left to praise. I played a ton of Heat 5 and my list of wishes for a new Nascar game were pretty reasonable. I wanted realistic-ish pit cycles and tendencies, I wanted DNFs and consequences for wrecking, and I wanted drivers to change rides, retire with age and move around the series. My biggest peeve with Heat 5 was that my 20 year career A) never ended and B) still included racing Kevin Harvick for wins. I did not get any of that. The career mode in this game is far from horrible but it's also just boring. Every new series you start with a level 1 car and work your way up. You're racing the same drivers for the win every week. ARCA it's William Sawalich and Brendan Queen. Trucks it's Corey Heim and Layne Riggs. Xfinity it's Justin Allgaier and Aric Almirola. Cup seems to be a little more varied, but I had a friend who had Ty Dillon winning a championship. Which is somehow even worse than what's going on in the lower series. I'm also really not a fan of the resource management in this game. I kind of just wanted to run the races. Whenever you move series you need to rehire all your team. Toward the end of my Xfinity season the game asked me 4 times if I wanted to hire "elite" engineers for the playoffs. Why would I want to burn $110,000 per hire when I'll just need to replace them in Cup? The lack of consequences in this game is a bit annoying too. There's a reputation system in place to gatekeep you from moving series but if you drive well enough it's basically not even there. In Xfinity you'll see the number and thought I might need to run another year, but don't worry, they give you like 60,000 rep halfway through the season and you'll get there with no problem. Mean tweets after the race are all the pushback you'll get. If you want to just wreck a guy for the win every race, there's nothing stopping you. No one will ever pay you back. There are more technical shortcomings this game has that are better detailed in other reviews of this game. Unless your Xbox One has a disc drive and you can find Heat 5, this is the best you'll get.

first review of a game ever...this game is DUNG! waste of my $$.s... shifter will not work on Moza R5...but works on ACC AC Iracing AMS2 Everything... pure crap and stuck with it because ..."I played too long to request a refund trying all the so called fixes that didnt work ...what a POS...Great Job!

Это аркада для геймпада, её ЦА - подпивасы с консолями. Нет нормальной поддержки триплы. Нет регулировок кресла и FOV в кабине пилота. Нет нормального управления с мышью пунктами меню. Нет оптимизации, при очень мыльной графике. Нет радара, при часто ошибающемся споттере. Нет адекватного онлайна.

Pro's: - Off that bat, this is the best overall console based NASCAR game in at least a decade or more, that being said, there are some glaring omissions that IRacing of all people should not overlook, which I'll address later - Beautiful graphics - Great Sound design and music - Good balance between arcade style racing and sim, the overall feel falls well into realistic in terms of handling, but toned down some to allow this to be easy and fun to play with a controller vs a wheel. This is extremely difficult in Iracing, but very enjoyable here, which makes quick races fun - Overall, AI cars behave pretty well, minus some quirks here and there and weird balancing issues Cons: - Lack of FOV adjustment. The in car ones are too zoomed in and you cannot see the reaview mirror or side mirror - Lack of Mirror quality adjustment. This is one that IRacing offers, but not here, and the resolution is horribly pixelated in the mirrors. - Crash physics are terrible. The CAR handling physics are done well, but the crashes and impacts become very blocky and unrealistic - Lots of handholding. Inability to do manual pitting/ very abrupt, jittery and unrealisitc AI over control during. I get it, it's a console based game, so having manual pitting and being able to input the setups on a gamepad is difficult, but the option would be nice - AI of your car. Example, you finish a session, the moment you cross the line, the ai aggressiviely jerks your car onto a predetermined racing line. Example, you hit pit road at 100 mph, the ai automatically takes control for the pit stop sequence anyways, but instantly drops to pit road speed the moment you cross the line. This could be handled better by allowing a slower input from the AI and smoothing it out to not be so rediculous - NO WAY TO DNF.... Come on IRacing - No way to make a pit stop in practice - NO MOUSE SUPPORT!!!! Come on Iracing!!! The gamepad support is quirky for the menu's, and not being able to click is a bit dumb for a 2026 PC ported game. I took an unneccary amount of time to learn to cycle the menu's with the bracket keys.... again, come on, arrows as default? - lack of the ability to mirror left and right sides during paint scheme creations - lack of memory. AI settings I find often recycle to a default low setting... You constantly have to turn on whatever INFO screen you want with each session, vs it saving or having a changeable default option - Smoke is poorly done - Some of the tracks (Daytona, Talladega) have this imaginary rough patch next to the yellow line in the corners that slow your car down. which wouldn't really be bad if it wasn't like a tire width above the yellow line Overall, it is a fun game, and the above issues are mostly quality of life improvements that I hope they will address. A developer as good and known as Iracing should atleast offer some of these things, as they offer many of them on their sim, and many competing games or worse predecessors even offer or do some things better. I think it is a bit of a miss, coming from many of the same team from and a game engine originally developed from NR2003, which has not been touched by anything else since really. I would recommend if you can get passed some the these quirks. They bother me, but they don't prevent me from enjoying what they did do right.