Hill Climb Racing

Hill Climb Racing from Finnish studio Fingersoft launched in 2012 and became one of the biggest mobile hits of its generation thanks to its near-artless simplicity of control. The player drives a vehicle across a hilly 2D landscape using just one button for the gas and another for the brake, while a physics model determines how the car tilts in the air, bounces on impacts, and lands on a markedly uneven terrain full of steep hills and deep drops.

The goal is simple — drive as far as possible without crashing on your head or running out of fuel halfway through the course, while the coins earned go toward gradually upgrading the vehicle and unlocking entirely new machines, from a motorbike through an off-road car and a tank all the way to a monster truck. It was precisely the combination of easy-to-grasp controls and surprisingly demanding, unpredictable physics that created an addictive gameplay loop, which spread the game among players worldwide practically without any major marketing.

The success of Hill Climb Racing kicked off an entire wave of similar physics-based racing titles on mobile platforms and brought Fingersoft a direct sequel of its own. The chosen model was free-to-play with ads and the option to buy coins with real money, which was by 2012 already an established but still fairly sensitively received approach to mobile game monetization. Two simple buttons and unpredictable terrain kept the game playable even on the smallest displays and without needing any tutorial.

Why play it: suited to anyone wanting undemanding but addictive fun for a few minutes a day, with the understanding that ads and microtransactions are an integral part of the whole experience.