Cyber Truck Drive Simulator

Almost every browser driving game lies to you the moment your wheels leave the ground. You launch off a rock, the nose starts dropping, you tap left — and the car obediently rotates in mid-air, because the developer wired an invisible turning force to the steering keys. Cyber Truck Drive Simulator does not do that. Press what you like in the air; the truck ignores you until a tyre touches something.

That omission changes how the whole game reads. It runs on Realistic Car Controller v3, a Unity physics package from BoneCracker Games that drives the truck through real wheel colliders, and a wheel touching nothing has nothing to push against. So the take-off is the decision. After that all you can do is watch the damage bar and hope you set it up right.

The frame around it is small and honest: three levels that unlock in order, flags to collect against a timer, an arrow pointing at the next one, and a Free Ride map with neither timer nor flags. The setting is a sandstone canyon — rock walls, dry ground, an asphalt strip cutting through it — and the truck is an angular, flat-panelled pickup modelled on the electric one everyone was arguing about that winter.

It was published on 5 December 2019 by Hit Games, a Turkish studio founded that same year; the game's HTML carries their credit line and the in-game MORE GAMES button links to their taxi game. Its ratings are scattered across small portals rather than piled on one big one — 4.0 out of 5 from 475 votes on SilverGames, 358 votes and roughly 120,000 plays on PacoGames. It never landed on Poki or CrazyGames, which is why nobody has written a proper page about it.

What actually happens when you launch a two-tonne pickup off a rock

The moment the last wheel leaves the ground, the truck is a projectile. Gravity pulls on every particle of it, which is the same as pulling on its centre of mass, and a force through the centre of mass produces no torque about the centre of mass. So the rotation you take off with is the rotation you land with. Nose down at the lip means nose down at touchdown, and there is nothing between the two.

Steering genuinely does nothing. A tyre generates force by pressing against a surface. Off the ground it presses against nothing, and turning the front wheels just points them somewhere else. That is true of real cars, and true here for the same reason — Unity's wheel colliders return no force out of contact. Most arcade racers quietly add a torque tied to the steering keys so you can flatten out a bad jump. That torque is a pure invention with no counterpart in physics.

There is exactly one real mid-air control, and it is the wheels. Angular momentum has to be conserved. Spin the wheels faster in the air and they gain angular momentum one way, so the body of the vehicle must rotate the other way — the nose lifts. Hit the brakes in the air and the wheels slow, and the nose drops. That is how motocross riders and rally drivers set their attitude in flight: throttle to raise the front, rear brake to drop it. Unity's wheel colliders do not feed that reaction torque back into the chassis, so it does not work here either. The game is wrong about the one input that would have worked and right about the one that would not.

Mass does not change the flight, only the arrival. Launch the heaviest truck and the lightest hatchback off the same lip at the same speed and they trace the same parabola — that is Galileo, and it has held for four centuries. What mass changes is the landing, because the energy the springs, tyres and structure have to swallow scales with it. That is the damage bar.

And weight makes rotation slow. A long, heavy vehicle has a large moment of inertia, so it turns lazily about its own axis. Leave a rock level and the truck stays level. Leave it crooked and you get to watch the crooked landing arrive.

Free Ride, and the goal you set yourself

The FREE RIDE button opens a map with no timer, no flags and no fail state. On paper that is not a game at all. In practice it is where a lot of players end up.

The philosopher Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978), defined playing a game as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. The key word is voluntary. A game does not have to supply the obstacle; it only has to make one possible. Free Ride hands you a canyon and nothing else, so you invent the rule yourself. Get to the top of that ridge. Land this one on all four wheels. Reach the edge of the map without dropping the damage bar below half. The moment you say it out loud you have a win condition.

That only works because the physics answers consistently. If the truck behaved differently every attempt, there would be nothing to get better at.

The truck is not a Tesla, and this is not a Tesla game

Worth stating plainly, because the artwork invites the confusion. Cybertruck is a registered trademark of Tesla, Inc. This game is an independent, unlicensed browser title by Hit Games, not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by Tesla or any other vehicle manufacturer. The vehicle you drive is a lookalike model built for the game, with its own handling and no connection to any production car's real specifications.

The timing explains it. The angular electric pickup was unveiled in November 2019 and dominated internet argument for weeks; this game went up on 5 December 2019, less than a fortnight later, and Hit Games followed it with Uber CyberTruck Drive Simulator in February 2020. It is a period piece from the corner of the industry where a studio turns a news cycle into a Unity build in days.

One more correction. A run of portals describe the game as being set on Mars. Its own material says otherwise — the key art is a blue-sky rock canyon with cacti in it, the scenery uses terrestrial sandstone cliff and desert props, and the ground materials are asphalt, grass, sand and terrain. It is a desert on Earth.

Playing it unblocked at school

There is nothing to install and nothing to sign into. The whole thing is a single Unity WebGL page at 900 by 600, so on a locked-down Chromebook it behaves like any other web page. That is the entire reason these titles circulate on school networks.

Two honest caveats. It is a 2019 WebGL build with a real 3D scene, so expect a slow first load on an old school laptop. And it is keyboard only — there are no touch controls, so a tablet gets you a menu you cannot drive out of.

More games by Hit Games

Hit Games built a run of these lightweight Unity driving titles, and two are here. Real Taxi Driver 3D came first, in August 2019, and it is what the MORE GAMES button inside this build links to. Real City Truck Simulator followed in March 2020, swapping the canyon for city streets and a much longer wheelbase.

If it is the rough ground you came for, Russian Taz Driving 2 covers the same off-road, break-the-vehicle territory. For driving with a competition attached, try Superbike Hero or Stock Car Hero, or browse the whole driving category.

1. Pick a level. The menu has three level buttons and a FREE RIDE button. Levels two and three stay locked until you clear the one before, and the panel buzzes if you try.
2. Drive with W A S D or the arrow keys. W is the throttle, S brakes and then reverses, A and D steer. The dashboard has a km/h speedometer, a rev counter and a fuel gauge.
3. Follow the arrow to the flags. The on-screen arrow points at your next objective. Collect the flags and reach the end of the route before the timer runs out.
4. Keep the damage bar down. Every rock you clip and every bad landing takes a bite out of it, and the dents stay in the bodywork.
5. Press C to change the view. The camera controller ships with six modes — chase, hood, orbit, wheel-level, fixed and cinematic.

Five things worth knowing before your first run:

• Space is the handbrake, not the brake. Every portal listing this game says "brake with Space". In the physics package underneath, Space is bound to the handbrake, which locks the wheels. To slow down under control use S; to swing the tail round a rock, use Space.
• The ground is not one surface. The build defines four ground materials — asphalt, grass, sand and terrain — each with its own friction and its own skid marks. The tarmac strip is genuinely faster than the sand beside it, and worth a detour.
• Hood camera for the flags, chase camera for the rocks. The hood view lines the truck up on a marker; the chase view is the one that shows what you are about to hit.
• Damage does not reset mid-level. There is a repair routine in the code, but nothing hands you a free repair between flags. A level started carelessly gets harder as it goes.
• Do not aim for air. See below. Every jump you take is a jump you cannot correct.