These Are the 10 Most Overrated Racing Games Ever

1. Forza Horizon 4 (2018)

Image: Xbox Game Studios

Forza Horizon typically receives mention in discussions of overrated racing games, and it’s not hard to see why. The series is massively successful, and easily the most popular mainstream racing game of the past 10 years. A new one releases every two or three years like clockwork, a testament to Playground Games’ work ethic. While the locale changes with each installment, many other factors — the car list and assets, the physics, the anything-goes structure of the campaign and even more granular things like car customization and livery editing — rarely do. And yet, the Metacritic scores are always, always through the roof.

I didn’t want to just lambaste an entire series here, though, because Forza Horizon does not deserve that; there is a reason these games are so popular, and why we all still come crawling back every time a new one comes out, regardless of our misgivings with the franchise’s past. Forza Horizon 5 did indeed make meaningful changes to the game’s physics engine, so I’ll spare it the mention here and save my pointed finger for 2018’s Forza Horizon 4.

Personally, this was the one where I felt the fatigue really set in. Replicating the changing of the seasons was a neat gimmick, but setting the game in the United Kingdom wasn’t the most exciting choice. The usual complaints of too-familiar content and longstanding feature deficits applied, but the frivolous nature of event payouts and Wheelspin frequency truly ballooned to laughable proportions in FH4, making the entire career feel meaningless and curbing any pride of progression. This series is in need of a rethink, but as it’s such a cash cow it’s hard to imagine Playground flipping the script with the inevitable Forza Horizon 6.

There you are — 10 overrated racing games. What do you think of this list? Which titles shouldn’t have made the cut? Which deserved to instead? Let us know in the comments.