Pop quiz: What’s going to be this year’s biggest racing game on PlayStation 5? Will it be Forza Horizon 6? In theory, yes — although Playground Games is leaving it rather late to confirm a promised 2026 release date. Will it be Star Wars: Galactic Racer? It’s brilliant, but probably not.
In fact, there’s a third contender you might not have heard of, but which is certain to be a huge deal when it arrives on PS5 on Oct. 19. It’s a car simulation sandbox called BeamNG.drive, and it might be the most realistic driving game ever made.
BeamNG.drive is Steam’s most realistic driving game ever
BeamNG.drive has been available on Steam in early access for over 10 years. In that time, it has quietly become massively popular. It has over 200,000 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam, and is estimated to have sold between 8 and 15 million copies. Its audience has built slowly but steadily over time and recently hit a peak of 47,424 concurrent players.
The secret to the game’s success is an outstanding soft-body physics model which allows for extremely realistic car behavior and crash physics. You won’t find licensed cars in BeamNG.drive, but there’s a huge variety of vehicles and landscapes that you can do almost anything you can imagine with.
There are 12 open-world environments, all available in free roam. There are activities like time trials, circuit races, rock crawling, police chases, trucking delivery missions, drifting, rallying, gymkhana, free roam missions, and more. You can tweak the weather and even gravity to experiment with what developer BeamNG’s peerless physics engine can do.
But is it actually a game? Increasingly, yes. Over time, BeamNG.drive has acquired a career mode with progression, a suite of driving scenarios, and a proper tutorial for the free roam mode. Although it’s still in early access, and probably will be forever, BeamNG.drive is definitely ready to find a new audience on PS5. Playground Games had better move fast with that Forza Horizon 6 port…
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