Tony Stewart's Sprint Car Racing

I'll be straight with you: dirt oval racing is one of the most underserved genres in PC and console gaming, and I walked into this one expecting a mid-tier cash-in riding a famous name. What I found was a simcade racer that actually commits to the bit. Monster Games, the studio behind the NASCAR Heat series, knows how to build a racing game loop, and that experience shows here in ways that matter more than the budget presentation might suggest. The handling is the first thing worth talking about. This is not asphalt grip racing where you trail-brake into a corner and call it a day. On dirt, you are managing slides constantly, blending throttle and steering inputs to carry speed rather than just hammering the gas. The three car classes - All Star TQ Midgets, 305 Sprint Cars, and the 900-horsepower 410 Winged Sprint Cars - each feel meaningfully different to drive, and working up from the slower midgets to the full-fat 410s gives the career a satisfying mechanical arc. With 24 dirt tracks spread across the country, each with different banking, gradients, and bump patterns, the oval format stays fresher than you might expect. Laps are short - we are talking 12 to 30 seconds per circuit - so races clip along at a pace that suits a gamepad session or a late-night couch session just fine. A steering wheel makes it sing, though; if you have a wheel and pedals collecting dust, this is a solid excuse to dust them off. Career mode is the main draw. You start broke and unknown, signing sponsor contracts, managing wear on your engine, chassis, shocks, tires, and wing, and grinding heat races to set the grid for the A-Main. The upgrade loop across five car components - each with 18 tiers of parts - gives you genuine decisions to make between performance and reliability. The grind can feel a little predictable once you figure out the meta (save cash, upgrade, repeat), and the career does not punish failure in any interesting way. The flag system also has a notable quirk: cautions only seemed to trigger when the player was involved in an incident, which deflates the sense of a living race field. Track surface does not degrade over the course of a race either, which is a missed opportunity for a dirt racer specifically. These are real limitations, and dedicated sim racers will feel them. For couch multiplayer, the news is mixed but leaning positive. Two-player split-screen works and is genuinely fun for a head-to-head session, though you are locked into the chase camera view, which is annoying if you normally run bumper or cockpit. Online supports up to 25 players and has weekly tournaments, though launch-era lag reports were a genuine problem; later accounts suggest stability improved. Driving aids are adjustable, which means a casual player and a seasoned sim fan can share the same lobby without it being a disaster. On the accessibility question I always ask - yes, a newcomer with a gamepad can get into this without reading a manual, even if mastering the throttle-slide balance takes a few sessions. The visual side is functional rather than impressive. The dirt tracks are relentlessly brown, and the damage model is superficial at best - big crashes register as little more than a fender kiss, with the real consequence showing up as repair costs between races rather than visible car deformation. It is not pretty. But the core racing rhythm? It pulls you back. There is a particular satisfaction to threading a 410 through lapped traffic on a tight short-track oval that this game nails better than anything else in this niche since the Ratbag era.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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