Written by: Rik
Date posted: December 10, 2025

World Racing 2 may be the kind of title given to a racing game on cassette tape bought from a petrol station in 1986, but is very much a mid-00s effort, to the extent that if you were to look up ‘2005 racer developed in Germany’ in the dictionary [you can’t do this – Ed.] you’d find full colour screenshots of this game [you wouldn’t – Ed.] As it loads up, you’re hit with a menu picture of a woman in short shorts while extremely twiddly guitar music plays; you can then select an avatar from a variety of characters who all look like Eurodance DJs, before heading into some sunny-day, primary colours arcade racing that just screams ‘cheery mid-range title you hadn’t heard of but once saw in the second-hand shop and decided not to buy’.

The original World Racing, released in 2003, evidently based itself entirely around the Mercedes Benz brand (a move that rarely feels as exciting to the player as it does to the various corporate bigwigs as they arrange the licensing deal). The sequel expands the roster to a whole range of major manufacturers, although proper brand and model names are conspicuous by their absence in this Champion Edition, presumably because whatever commercial arrangements were in place have now long since expired, and the removal of this intellectual property was a condition of the game being made available for purchase again.

Legal quibbles about such things seem like an extremely boring reason for a game to be removed from sale, and it does take a small amount of sheen off proceedings for made up names and logos to feature, although you don’t have to be a crazed car fiend to recognise what most of them are meant to be. On the plus side, the game has been patched and spruced up slightly so that widescreen resolutions and modern gamepads are supported with no fuss or faff for the impatient modern gamer (or, for that matter, the impatient retro gamer).

The main event is the career mode, which offers a considerable variety of races and timed challenges across a number of different vehicle types and terrains. In theory, you can use progress in this mode to unlock cars and tracks for use in the ‘free ride’ mode, although by the time you finish the career, you’ll probably have seen almost everything the game has to offer at least once.

It’s a veritable international buffet of different 00s arcade racing cuisines, served up in no particular order, and with little wider context other than brief and occasionally eccentric explanations like, ‘Your friend Brian has arranged a racing tournament. He wants you to finish at least third!’ There are hints of the game’s manufacturer-based origins, too, when challenges mention colleagues at the factory or dealership, although these are sprinkled randomly amongst the rest, and there’s no coherent storyline about being a test driver, as in the little-remembered Porsche-based instalment of Need for Speed.

Speaking of which, early races call to mind a lower-budget entry from that series, as fake VW Golfs race against each other through country roads while trying to avoid traffic. When the action shifts to the city centre, Midtown Madness comes to mind, while timed checkpoint events vaguely resemble Trackmania. There are echoes of Rally Trophy and Flatout, too, particularly in the way that the many road and off-road based challenges take place in wide open spaces, with no artificial barriers to keep you on course. To be fair, there are also some touches that are completely original, for example the fact that roadside wildlife are apparently made of a cheerfully puntable lightweight plastic, minimising the physical and emotional trauma usually associated with the accidental collision of machine and beast.

There are good and bad challenges within each of the various race types, with the needle pointing mainly towards the positive end of the dial in most cases, although the game is less strong when attempting ‘proper’ track-based races with high-powered cars against a field of opponents, where the AI is consistently unforgiving and the action often strung out over a number of similar events before you’re permitted to progress.

For the most part, though, the action chugs along nicely, with a good proportion of events leaving the best times lingering out of reach until you find just the right way to shave off those extra few milliseconds. Some of the checkpoint based off-road challenges initially have you scratching your head as to how such times could possibly ever be achieved, until you work out exactly how to put together the correct combination of sneaky shortcuts (and then make sure you can actually pull them off without crashing out and unleashing a volley of unkind language about yourself).

City-based capers against other racers are another highlight, as you strive to find corners that can be cut safely without any risk of ploughing into a post box or lamppost and enabling your opponents to sail past (while you unleash a volley of unkind language about yourself). The game does make an effort to discourage you from such tactics by noting infractions in the bottom left hand corner of the screen and making deductions from your total number of points earned at the end of the race.

In reality, though, these penalties are far too light to act as a deterrent, and even if your aim is to accumulate as many points as possible to unlock vehicles, wheel rims or whatever else for use outside the career mode, ultimately the biggest rewards come for completing the race, not for eschewing any slightly dirty tactics. In general, the penalty messages can safely be ignored, although you can’t help but catch a glimpse of it smugly noting a ‘severe driving error’ as you recover (or not) from a hefty crash.

Some other requirements are ignored at your peril, as occasionally you might also be asked not just to finish in a particular position, but also achieve other targets, such as minimising damage, maintaining a certain average speed, or earning a number of ‘drift points’. It has to be said that it’s quite easy to overlook these at first, until you find out the hard way (although to be fair, even if you miss any introductory messages and/or fail to consult the relevant information on the menu screen, there is a summary present in the top left corner of the HUD throughout the race). Ditto the use of nitro, which is available in only a few events, but appears and disappears at will (again, this is displayed next to the speedometer, if you bother to look) depending on the capricious whims of Brian, the Mercedes Benz/Tycoon Motors factory, or whoever else is calling the shots.

The eccentricities of the career mode mainly fall into the ‘charming’ category, particularly if you’re sympathetically inclined towards 00s arcade racers, but there are moments where they become a bit more annoying. Your correspondent attempted to shrug off the repetitive nature of one event, noting that its title (‘No Escape’) hints at an intended endurance element, but after what seemed like an entire afternoon repeatedly driving around the same rally track in an unlicensed Skoda Fabia without further consequence, the whole endeavour started to feel rather like a piece of performance art. (It turned out that winning just makes the event go on forever, and all you have to do to progress after a certain point is not beat the target time.)

More significant are a minority of events that just seem out of line, difficulty wise, with the rest. In most races, you can live with the chaos and misfortune of various setbacks, whether caused by your own misjudgements or the frankly suicidal behaviour of some of the civilian traffic, because a level of AI rubberbanding will allow you to remain within touching distance of your opponents. However, on some events, a mistake will see them disappear towards the horizon, along with your chances of ever catching them up again. Even upgrading corner cutting tactics from ‘sneaky’ to ‘ignoring the course boundaries altogether’ fails to produce anything other than some tut-tutting from the game’s ‘fairness gauge’ mentioned above.

Due to a number of factors, most critically my preference for using the GOG offline installer and forgoing access to a playtime counter, I have absolutely no idea how long I played World Racing 2 for. ‘A little bit too long’ is perhaps the answer. There were several events that I didn’t manage to finish successfully and, under normal circumstances, had this been a bar to progress, I might have left it at the 70%-80% complete stage. However, for some reason, my marathon ‘No Escape’ session confused the game, and with its final events unlocked early (I had ‘100%’ completion when I was nowhere near the last race), I felt a compulsion to push through to the end.

Fittingly, the final race was extremely low-key, and provided anything but an appropriate climax, which left me to conclude that there really was no particular structure to the career mode at all. And though it might feel a bit backwards to reminisce about more technologically limited days, at various points throughout World Racing 2 I did start to think, ‘remember when arcade racers had 6 tracks and the last one was the hardest?’

While I was feeling pretty overstuffed and slightly disappointed upon reaching the end, a bit like I’d failed a challenge on Man vs. Food, by that point I’d already had a lot of fun with the random miscellany of racing challenges World Racing 2 had sent my way. I can’t recall exactly why I ignored that second-hand copy all those years ago – probably a combination of ‘you’ve already got 10 games like this that you haven’t played’ and unfavourable reviews of the console versions retrieved via a casual Google search – but it was a much better time than I was expecting.