If you’re a reader of the Daily Downforce, you’re likely to be a hardcore NASCAR fan. So, in that case, let me save you some time. The answer is Yes. If you’re looking for a high-quality, authentic NASCAR racing experience on your home console, NASCAR 25 is it.
But read on, as there’s important context to the game that players should be aware of. While NASCAR 25 decidedly breaks the historical chain of Double-A licensed shovelware on console, it is still not a polished AAA game ready to take on mainstream titles like Gran Turismo or F1 in the contemporary gaming space.
From the moment you launch the game, the difference in tone hits you squarely. The intro cutscene has all the adrenaline and ferocity that you get from watching the giants of the sport battle it out each weekend. It’s a far cry from, say, the croaking “refuse to lose” clip art animation from NASCAR Heat 5.
Then the soundtrack hits you. The menu music by System of a Down establishes the unique sound of NASCAR 25, with a much darker, angsty, and more aggressive soundscape than any other NASCAR title, and it feels so right to the mood of both the playerbase and the wider fanbase of the sport. NASCAR 25 eschews the Temu honky-tonk vibe of previous titles, opting instead for the revolutionary choice of artists you’ve heard of and songs that you know. Hanumankind, Killer Mike, and the aforementioned System of a Down are particularly worth highlighting.
Click Career Mode and you’re greeted by an in-universe episode of the Dale Jr. Download, with the man himself talking up your chances at the discovery race. The game is dripping with authenticity, and you haven’t even turned a single lap on track yet.
When you do hit the track, the immersion is palpable. Close your eyes, and the engine sounds and crowd roaring might make you think you’re watching a real NASCAR race. Open your eyes, and you’re greeted by some of the best graphics ever seen in a console NASCAR game. There are over 175 real-world drivers on the roster, and you’ll see their paint schemes lovingly rendered, including community favorites like Cleetus McFarland, as well as the lesser-known drivers still building their names in the lower series.
The laser-scanned tracks are a standout feature. The fidelity of the surface feels on par, if not better, than the gold standard of Forza Motorsport’s scans. You will feel the slipperiness of IRP, find the groove at Charlotte, and rage while you spin out over the elevation changes at Watkins Glen. While the expansive roster of drivers is commendable, the lineup of tracks and the detail in which they’re represented are truly the standout selling features of the game.
Players have a few different options for how they want their authentic NASCAR experience. Career mode allows you to build your career from ARCA all the way through Cup Series, and contains some light story elements (such as teams closing down and selling their spare parts) to help build the immersion. You can also do the Championship mode, allowing you to take your custom driver or favorite from the roster through a complete championship season. And you always have the quick race option, allowing you to jump onto the track with your favorite driver at any of the available tracks (which are locked to series schedules, mind you).
And the final significant feature is the paint booth. Here you’ll be able to customize your paint scheme (of course), but also your helmet, firesuit, and hauler. You can decorate your car with custom shapes (unavailable in multiplayer), but the breakout star is all the real-world sponsors available for your designs. While not comprehensive, players have a huge variety of sponsors to choose from when designing their look. The tools for building these designs are rudimentary, but fans are already just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible with these designs.
All of this is what leads me to strongly recommend NASCAR 25 to any fan of the sport. It looks like NASCAR, it sounds like NASCAR, and most importantly, it feels like NASCAR. If you’re the type of fan who just wants to sit down in front of your TV at night and race against your favorite driver, you’ll get that out of the box with NASCAR 25.
However, if you consider yourself more than just a fan of the sport, and you’re a gamer looking to get invested in the latest release long-term, there are several outstanding issues with the game that need to be addressed. Before we delve into these issues, I want to emphasize that none of them directly pertain to the core gameplay, specifically the racing. The cars feel good, the tracks feel amazing, and the AI is (mostly) smart and challenging.
The racing is awesome. It’s everything else we need to talk about.
No beating around the bush. The multiplayer is absolutely atrocious, and it’s downright scandalous that this is being sold for money in the year 2025. There is no option for matchmaking at all. I’ll repeat that, in case it didn’t sink in. No Matchmaking. No quickplay button, no series hoppers, no scheduled races like iRacing, nothing.
You have no choice but to scroll through pages of spreadsheets listing empty lobbies in a server browser, hoping and praying to find something that looks like it has a chance of more than a handful of drivers to a race. It’s an ancient, outdated interface, and it lacks even basic filters. I understand that NASCAR fans are nostalgic for the early 2000s, but this is ridiculous.
Does NASCAR 25 have multiplayer? Maybe? Sometimes? If you’re lucky and you have 35 friends online right now, you can get something close to a real race going. But if that’s not you, you’re probably not going to get much out of the multiplayer. The lack of matchmaking is going to have most players bouncing off after a single session.
There are “ranked” races, but this only covers your last five races, and only for very specific tracks at any given time. That means one bad race and you’re back with the scrubs, possibly leading to a spiral. And there’s also a weird catch: there’s no talking in ranked races. That means no voice chat and no text chat. Maybe that’s a good thing, though, with how bad the entire online mode is structured. But make no mistake, these ranks are not a progression system, and these lobbies are not what you’re expecting from a ranked mode in a typical game.
And this is before we get into more ambitious features, such as drop-in/drop-out multiplayer in career mode or championship, progression systems and unlocks, or even basic social features like showing friends who are currently online playing, none of which you’ll find here. Remember, you’re going to struggle to get even just a single online race off the ground with no matchmaking. Banish the thought now of any kind of “modern” multiplayer features like talking in lobbies or unlocking cool items.
I’d say the developers at iRacing need to talk to…the developers at iRacing and see if they know of any better way to structure their online multiplayer racing experience. Or at the very least, try playing literally any other multiplayer racing game made in the last decade.
Should you buy NASCAR 25 to play online? No way. If you’re looking for a good online racing experience on console, you’d be better off playing anything else.
NASCAR 25 has several compelling ideas for its single-player gameplay, but they can often feel undercooked or, at best, disconnected. Let’s start with the Career Mode. It’s full of little RPG-lite systems that hint at what could be an expansive career management game, but these systems never expand on their ideas or interact with each other.
In Career Mode, you face off against real-world drivers, all of whom have a Driver Rating based roughly on their real on-track performance (supposedly). This is cool, in that playing an ARCA season will see you battling it out with stars like Sawalich and Queen, just like you watch on TV. The problem is, this magic trick only works once.
On repeated playthroughs, you’ll find yourself battling the exact same drivers for the exact same positions on the exact same tracks. That means your favorite underdog drivers will always be backmarker NPCs, and you’ll never see them go on a moonshot season to take the Championship. There should at least be an option to randomize these ratings, so storylines can change season to season.
This isn’t helped by the baffling inaccuracies with some of the big names of the sport, some of whom have criminally low ratings compared to their real-world counterparts. What is the purpose of this? How did this make the game more fun? Players want to battle with Rajah Caruth or Michael McDowell for the lead, not pass them in lapped traffic. The developers took the time and care to reproduce everyone’s favorite drivers across every series, but they seem to have misunderstood why a player would want that in the game in the first place.
The Career Mode also has in-character social media posts from drivers and personalities following each race. This is an interesting idea, but it is poorly implemented. The posts are eyerollingly generic and appear to have been generated by AI. Which feels wrong, because there are also so few of them that you’ll see duplicate posts within just your first season of ARCA. If it’s AI-generated, why not just make thousands of possible posts?
Social media is also confusing because the posts, whether angry or friendly, seem to have nothing to do with the events that just took place. Drivers will berate you for wrecking them when you never even saw them during the race. Whereas drivers you dumped on purpose to force a caution (I’m so sorry, Lawless), will talk up how we’re becoming such good friends in the garage. They seem to just be randomly picking names and posts from a hat.
This is made all the more strange by the fact that they have a reputation system already built into the career, and yet it has nothing to do with social media. Your reputation is a simple level gate that has no interaction with your driver’s reputation on the track. Accrue enough reputation XP points from completing races, and you unlock the next series, that’s it.
Why is this reputation system completely disconnected from the social media system? It seems like they’ve collected all the right ingredients for an extensive reputation, rivalry, and friendship system, and then just never cooked.
There are choices you’ll make throughout your career, offering you the option between a bonus amount of two different currencies. The choices give you little micro-stories about hanging out with the team or posting a viral video on social media. But these choices don’t actually matter.
Reputation is one of the currencies you might be offered, but as mentioned, reputation is a soulless experience bar, with no incentive to build it beyond just completing races (which you’ll do anyway). The other two choices are money (used to buy parts and hire staff), and work points, which are used to repair parts.
Money and WP are equally valuable, in that you can either spend work points to repair a car part or pay money to replace it, which means the choice between the two doesn’t matter. And if you are ever offered the choice between Reputation and anything else, it’s always better to choose the other option (making it also not a choice).
With only the barest amount of optimization, the entire Race Shop element can be trivialized, allowing you to easily repair and/or buy anything you need every single race. Granted, you can purposely not engage with the race shop systems (don’t buy items, don’t hire staff) if you want to roleplay as a backmarker team.
But if your choice and economy systems come down to either picking the easy right answer or just not engaging with it at all, that’s a sign it probably isn’t working. It’s not a choice if there’s always one right answer, and it isn’t an economy if you never have to make a trade-off in your decisions. What’s really painful about all of this is just how much they nailed the Race Shop vibe and atmosphere. I want to hear the tools, I want to listen to the radio on a dusty old boombox, I want to be here making interesting decisions. But it never goes anywhere.
Again, it’s as if someone on the development team had a great idea for player choice, progression, and team economy in the career mode, but then immediately gave up on it and decided this was good enough. Finish your thoughts, iRacing, you were definitely going somewhere interesting with all of these systems.
Not only is NASCAR 25 an authentic game for race fans, but it’s also a good game for players who like menus. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking this game is mostly about menus.
From the controls to the difficulty to your car, and even the audio mixing, the developers put little to no effort into curating the experience for different types of players. If you’re a casual who just wants to jump in and go head-to-head with Joey Logano, or if you’re a sweaty league racer looking to min/max every percentage of gear ratio, you’re both going to be spending a lot of time in menus tweaking dozens and dozens of settings until you get the game to a playable state.
This problem isn’t like the career mode, where the developers had a good but unfinished thought. The menu issues are more in the category of insulting laziness, like the state of the multiplayer.
Let’s look at audio, for example. By default, all sliders are cranked to 80 in the menu. That means that your spotter, the soundtrack, the ambient noise of the track, and the gigantic race car engine a foot away from your face all play at exactly the same volume. There appears to have been zero audio mixing done by the developers. Be prepared to spend a lot of time on the Audio menu.
For a lot of NASCAR fans, playing Settings Menu 25 won’t be a problem, especially concerning car setups. In fact, the extensive customization of options is likely a selling feature for some. Spending hours adjusting tiny percentages of camber to get it feeling just right? Welcome to Larry Mac’s whole life! But the audio mixing? The minute idiosyncrasies of AI behavior? These are fairly esoteric and inaccessible settings to not have extremely clear and intuitive presets for.
A quick glance online and you’ll see reports from countless players struggling to figure out the right settings. Certain tracks (short tracks, Lime Rock) are being talked about as unplayable by some players, all directly caused by this issue.
The game developers don’t know how to configure their controls, and your average player knows even less, so of course, they’re running into disaster on track. They’re wrong that the tracks are unplayable, it’s definitely a settings issue. But why are they forced to play Settings Menu 25 instead of NASCAR 25 in the first place?
It’s as if the developers knew they had a problem. They knew their presets were clunky and unsatisfying to most players. So the solution was to just dump a bunch of menus on players and say, “Here, you fix it.”
I haven’t spoken yet about the various launch issues the game has suffered in Early Access. But there’s a reason for that. Since the early access launch on Friday, there have been multiple hotfixes issued by the developers, including one early Saturday morning. These have mostly focused on force feedback issues with steering wheels, but the dedication and quick response from the developers is a fantastic signal from them on how seriously they take the long-term health of the game.
But there are some signs for caution as well. They scrambled to launch a Discord server over the weekend to provide a place for players to share their feedback and technical issues. And this was only after they seemed to be getting overwhelmed by the feedback on other channels like Reddit and social media.
The morning before the official launch, one iRacing exec took to X to demand users stop messaging him and instead utilize the official Discord channel. Fair enough, but how were players supposed to know this? What about if players weren’t on X at 7:00 a.m. on a Monday?
So, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the developers seem actively engaged and dedicated to fixing issues quickly. The bad news is that they appeared to be wholly unprepared even to receive player feedback in the first place.
All of which is to say that if you’ve seen players posting about technical issues at launch, for example, force feedback on steering wheels, controller vibration, or optimization on Series S, there’s a chance these issues will be solved by the time you go to make your purchase, or even not long after. Do your due diligence, particularly if you’re a wheel user. But the developers are working around the clock to address the issues, and the tempo of their patches proves that. Just don’t expect them to be very organized about it.
NASCAR 25 represents a victory for all NASCAR console gamers. Many have struggled for years, forced to slog through licensed shovelware junk just to get a taste of their favorite drivers or tracks on console. With the release of NASCAR 25, that era is definitively over, and we are now in the iRacing Generation of NASCAR console gaming.
But as with any victory in NASCAR, this now inarguably raises the stakes and the expectations placed on the franchise. Having Dale Jr. host your Career Mode provides a huge sigh of relief to any NASCAR fan worried about authenticity. But the lack of depth in Career Mode means it remains in the shadow of even basic live service progression and management systems found in competing titles. High-fidelity laser scans bring your favorite track to life, rendering every bump, crack, and groove with remarkable detail. But the lack of a multiplayer system more modern than GameSpy on Windows 98 is absolutely deadly to the future active player count.
NASCAR 25 is a must-own title for any NASCAR fan on console. It is without a doubt the best NASCAR game in at least the last two console generations, if not longer. But for gamers looking for that gateway drug into NASCAR fandom, like the hallowed NASCAR titles of the ’90s and 2000s once were, we still don’t have it yet. Hopefully, NASCAR 25 is the foundation on which iRacing will build it.
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