Do you like to be athletic? Do you want to look incredibly sexy inside an equally sexy supercar? Yes, you do; unlike me, you play Sports and Racing games for that reason (I play them as an extension of my life, of course). Following last year’s reasonable-enough year, 2023 will have a few outings to grab your attention, including some long-awaited competition from WWE.
Naturally, as the start of 2023 progresses, we want to look at our most anticipated Sports and Racing games of the year, ideally before one of them is released. So, without further ado, let’s get to it. Of course, before you check this list out, you can also check out Wccftech’s other most anticipated games of 2023: Fighting, RPG, Multiplayer, Action, Adventure, Horror, Indie, and Strategy & Simulation.
Forza Motorsport
Genre: Racing. Platforms: PC, Xbox Series S/X.
Forza is a strange series, with the two branches having veered in quality and how they treat the user. The core series, which last saw a release in 2017, declined over time and eventually fell foul of the ever-expanding loot box plague of the time. Sure, Turn 10 didn’t turn on microtransactions as initially planned, but they had still gutted a core part of gameplay – read my review here).
The reality is that Turn 10 is still working on this, enough so that what was expected to release last year (if featured in the most anticipated sports and racing games then, too) is now expected this year. The quality certainly seems to be there, and we can expect to see more soon with the Xbox Games Showcase rumoured to be coming early this year.
Football Manager 2024
Genre: Sports (simulation). Platforms: PC (and others).
Due to how thin on the ground the Sports and Racing list tends to be, it’s the second year in a row that I’ve brought this over. Yes, it hasn’t been announced, but we know it’s coming. If there’s one thing to look forward to with Football Manager 2024, it’s mainly that this year’s version has been more about refining what was there than pushing it along with something new.
Sports Interactive have often gone in cycles with the series, arguably a curse of it being annualised. Every time you get a year that refines what is there, you know they’re working on something big that often comes the following year. Still the best football game in the world and arguably the best management series ever made, Football Manager will be back again, bringing joy to all the Man Utd fans everywhere, which is everybody!
AEW: Fight Forever
Genre: Sports. Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox.
AEW: Fight Forever is primarily here down to the calibre of the developer behind it, the encouraging attitude they have brought, and AEW themselves. More than that, it’s a wrestling game made to feed into the fun factor the WWE series arguably lost around a decade ago. Fans of the WWE series will remember the pure class of Smackdown vs Raw, the GM mode, and the fun arcade action.
AEW: Fight Forever wants to bring that fun wrestling back. I’m not going to argue that it looks like the best game ever; it doesn’t. However, having played it, I found myself having fun, and I quickly got into the swing of things. For fans of wrestling games who felt left out by the atrocious decline in quality from the WWE 2K series, this is one to keep your eyes on.
Here’s the summary from my hands-on at Gamescom last year:
It’s not perfect, but I must admit I like what I saw from AEW: Fight Forever. For better and for worse, this is undoubtedly a throwback to the older style of wrestling games. There needs to be a little more polish, which THQ Nordic likely knows is the case, with a release date still to be announced.
Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown
Genre: Racing. Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X.
Test Drive Unlimited is one of the long-lost franchises. When Test Drive Unlimited: Solar Crown releases later this year, it will have been eleven years since the last Test Drive game (Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends) and twelve years since Test Drive Unlimited 2. Returning to the open-world style of TDU and TDU2, Solar Crown will take you to the streets of Hong Kong, with KT Racing promising a 1:1 version of the city and its surrounding areas.
The difference between this and the rest of the games on the list is that Solar Crown isn’t all about racing; sometimes, it’s just about driving and enjoying the car. Possibly a terrible comparison, but it is more like a Forza Horizon game than a Forza. Or, even, it’s a Test Drive Unlimited game.
Honourable Mentions
As always, with this list, it isn’t easy because the most important names are annualised titles, so we know they are coming, but we don’t know what they will bring. As such, I try my best to avoid putting them above others. Football Manager gets to go there simply because I’m me, and it’s Football Manager. Still, there are more games to think about, so here are the honourable mentions:
Sports Games
- EA Sports PGA Tour
- EA Sports FC
- NBA 2K
- PGA Tour
- WWE
Racing Games
- Wreckreation
- F1 23
- Dangerous Driving 2
- F1 Manager 2023
- Monster Energy Supercross 6
Sports and Racing lists always offer a challenge thanks to annualised titles and not having as many releases. Still, I would say that with what has been announced – and what we know is coming – we’re in for an interesting year. It will be even more interesting if EA does something interesting with football now that they’ve dipped out of the FIFA license.
