Props to the current rights holders for bringing a game like this (a licensing nightmare) back from the dead.
Going through the extra work for a 64-bit port AND Workshop support is very nice.
Thank you for not doing the bare minimum!!!

The game is itself great, those who played it back in the day will appreciate it.
Now somebody needs to port all the MBWR maps :)

Thanks to KuruHS, I did not know this game was on the storefront and I get to enjoy my childhood again! Still cannot believe this game made it to the States back in the day! Thank you for putting this back on the store!

This game was my childhood. And im more than glad too see it back on steam.

- The physics are fantastic, grippy but not too grippy (more like tsc off in most other games).
- Ai is difficult to an extend but in a good way.
- Graphics still look fairly good... but the car damage, i'd say still be best to this day. The softbody as crazy as beamNG but the parts can break into several pieces.
- Sound mostly good but there are 1 or 2 sound effects I would tone back a bit.

overall - 91/100 "A must try hidden gem".

Shoutout to obscure racing games from the 2000s, gotta be one of my favorite genres.

No Starforce

Middle market racing game from 2005 that became something of a cult classic, has plenty of content to boot with a good variety of locations and cars, but was very much kept alive by a dedicated community of modders. Old mod sites still exist with a wealth of cars and maps to download, on top of having workshop support.
In order to ensure that it would run nicely on modern systems it has been put in the hands of the talented Silent so you know it just runs without issues and can handle any aspect ratio or resolution you want to throw at it.

No StarForce, no broken computer.

Old but still good game

Driving it feels good, and exploring all the open world maps is fun.
The Damage Model still holds up very well to this day, better than what most AAA titles these days offer...

The steam version also got some Improvements over the retail version.
Alone the fixed controller forced feedback is a big plus.

The only catch to me is that they had to debrand all the cars because of licenses, by no means a dealbreaker to me, but still…

Also an very important point about this game is the gigantic modding scene, besides steam workshop there still 1000’s of cars and maps on https://games.reveur.de/ and other sites.
If you can think of it, you probably gona find it for this game xD

World Racing 2 has been published back in 2005, the champion edition is a remastered version of it. The game looks decent, has some older textures in it, but overall I dig this look, although occasionally the game screen freezes for a short time on the highest graphics. Soundtrack is also pretty nice, controls are pretty easy and works really well on controller. The campaign is surprisingly interesting and mixes well it's mission. Difficulty is another question: on occasions the game is fair, but in later missions the player has to find shortcuts and get better at driving, since the AI is on point with it's inputs. Not impossible to beat, but it can make player sweat. However, this game's strongest point is the multiplayer: if you can get others with you and you have most tracks and cars to play with, you can have some fun and good racing with the game, and I didn't even mentioned the still alive modding community in World Racing 2, in which you can add tracks and cars to the game. It's crazy to see that this game after this many years has a strong community behind it.

However World Racing 2 is not without flaws. Even though the physics is decent enough in the game it still has that "old game jankiness" in it, which the player has to get used to it. The game don't have a story, so you are only resorted to the constant racing, which usually would make me bored of the game but I enjoyed, but I'm sure there are others who would find this bland.

But probably which was a bit annoying to me, is the exploitable mission. There is one mission called 'No Escape', where the AI is not really strong and you get a pretty handy rally car. In this event you can keep playing the second part of the mission until you get a specific amount of drift points, you are under the damage limit and you are in first with more than a tenth. However, if you would start lap the AI, this head start gets buggy and the AI won't start for minutes. At one point I lapped the cars by 2 laps and I got completely stuck, they didn't budged for 4 hours. I had to restart the whole mission and with that somehow I got 100% completion in the game and I was able to play the last mission, when I still had a lot to go. I don't know how this happened, but it was weird and completely broke the progression, even though I was able to finish the game sooner.

This last example is an extreme one to mention, but even though I do think this game can be fun in single player, but if you need a game for a friend group and you like racing, give a try with World Racing in Remote Play Together. I can definitely recommend it to buy, but get it around 6€.

O man, o man, o man, o man Synetic games are back !!!!! And what a bang of a start with World Racing 2 remaster. The memories of my childhood are back and now on ULTRAWIDE & 4K and most important WITH STEAM-WORKSHOP NOW SUPPORTED. Is unbelievable how easy is to install car-modes and new maps for the game. Only think that is missing is the multiplayer mod, they really need to reintroduce the MP portion for this game, because is really fun to freedom with fends on open.maps , race and crash spectacular ( i forgot to say that this game has damage models for the cars )
We really need to support the dev's , to bring back all the ALARM OF COBRA // CRASH TIME games on steam !!!!!

Score: PC 94 //// 100
Steam Deck 75 //// 100

The steam deck has some problems with incompatible audio files on Linux resulting in lack of sound for the game, they really need to fix this problem, otherwise the game runs perfect on the deck.