This free to play PC sim got off to an inauspicious start, not least because it had a name that was about as exciting as Chemistry revision. R3E, as it’s known, was always fundamentally brilliant to drive, though, and in the last six years the game has built up a vast and often unique selection of cars and circuits. We have a particular soft spot for the period-accurate 1992 DTM field, which in real life featured racing so good even ex-F1 champ Keke Rosberg sacked off competing at Le Mans in favour of it. Still well worth a look even today.

Adding a storyline to a driving game is always risky business. Usually it turns out to be some sub-Neighbours soap opera schlock. Driver: San Francisco, on the other hand, was just plain weird. Your character suffers a car accident at the very beginning and spends the rest of the game in a coma, something you’d have thought would put a severe crimp on his career as a wheelman.

Quite the opposite as the entire game takes place inside his head and he becomes a sort of vehicular poltergeist who can possess literally any driver in the entirety of San Francisco. Utterly hatstand.

Certainly slower paced than the majority of the entries on this list, Euro Truck Simulator 2 is not really about scything through traffic at speed. Instead it’s the understated joy of spending multiple hours in the cab of a Scania trying not to fall asleep at the wheel and jackknife your load across three lanes.

There’s a sort of hypnotic beauty to watching the rolling countryside evolve as you gradually cross the continent and a surprisingly involved management element means you’re not just racking up the miles and empty cans of service station energy drinks, but also building a mini haulage empire. Far more fun than it sounds, which we’ll admit is a fairly low bar to clear.

In some driving games, the greatest challenge is the intimidating 14-mile long, 150-or-so corner Nurburgring Nordschleife, famed for its complexity and unforgiving nature. In Mudrunner it might be a particularly large puddle.

This offroading title is all about getting stuck in a muddy bog and then attempting to extricate yourself using a combination of low range gearing, measured inputs and a spot of tactical winching. It can take 20 minutes to cover the same distance you would clear in a tenth of a second in a racing game, but there’s something enormously satisfying about dragging an enormous truck out of a seemingly inescapable mire. In the interests of balance, there’s also something enormously frustrating about realising you’ve become irretrievably stuck and that your vehicle will remain fossilised there until you admit defeat and restart the mission.

We like an ambitious game here at TG and they don’t come much more ambitious than attempting to cram the continental United States into your open world racing game. That’s precisely what The Crew did with its scaled down, coast-to-coast highlight reel of North America. What’s more, it was a playground that was shared with other players, offering the chance to embark on trans-continental road trips with your mates.

A nonsensical storyline, grind-heavy progression system and a main character that looked like a geography teacher did their best to spoil your adventure, but the game shepherded you across the US in such a way that it felt like a proper Kerouacian voyage of discovery. Much cheaper on fuel than the real thing too…

If you’re not plugged into the world of hardcore PC simulations, you might never have heard of rFactor 2, but if Einstein had been into motorsport (and made it to the ripe old age of 140) this would be his favourite racing game.

The level of detail in the physics model is far beyond what our primitive monkey brains can comprehend, but on release rFactor 2 was sorely lacking in content compared to other sims. The game’s current custodians Studio 397 have spent the last few years remedying that by adding real world stuff as diverse as Formula E’s Hong Kong street circuit, an Ayrton Senna era McLaren racer and a laser-scanned Le Mans. If you’re good enough to be quick in rFactor 2 it’s probably time to start ringing round the F1 teams…