Google Play / game_racing / HILL CLIMB RACING
REVIEW
Hill Climb Racing is still the same goofy physics toy it was in 2012, ads and all.
Fingersoft's Newton Bill has been bouncing off Android hills for over a decade. The driving feel still works. The ad load is the reason the rating sits at 4.2 instead of 4.6.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Hill Climb Racing
FINGERSOFT
OUR SCORE
6.8
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.2
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
Hill Climb Racing is a fourteen-year-old mobile game that still gets played, and that’s the interesting fact about it. The Finnish studio Fingersoft shipped this in September 2012, when “free-to-play mobile racer” was barely a genre. The original pitch — a stick-figure driver, two buttons, a jeep with comically bad suspension — has outlived most of its 2012 contemporaries. The driving feel is why.
The physics are the entire game. The jeep wallows on climbs, threatens to flip on cresting hills, and lands its jumps badly enough that recovering from them feels like an accomplishment. There is no realism here, just a consistent and forgiving model the player learns by repetition. Anyone who played this on a 2013 Galaxy phone can pick it up on a 2026 Pixel and still know how the suspension feels in the first ten seconds.
The catch — and the reason the Play Store rating sits at 4.2 instead of 4.6 — is the ad load. Interstitial video ads land between most runs, on death screens, on menu transitions, and the cadence is aggressive enough that recent reviews read like a referendum on the monetisation model rather than the game itself. Fingersoft has clearly chosen to optimise for ad revenue from non-paying players, and they’ve earned the rating that choice produces. The game underneath is still the same charming, slightly silly physics toy it was when it shipped. The wrapper has just gotten heavier.
The wobbly suspension is the joke and the game. Everything around it — the menus, the upgrade screens, the loading gaps — is the price you pay for the joke being free.
FEATURES
Hill Climb Racing is a 2D side-scrolling driving game from Finnish studio Fingersoft, first released in September 2012 and still receiving updates fourteen years later. You play Newton Bill, a stick-figure driver in a knit cap, piloting a small jeep — and later a motorbike, a snowmobile, a monster truck, a tank, and dozens of other vehicles — across procedurally undulating terrain. Two on-screen buttons: gas on the right, brake on the left. That's the entire control scheme.
The hook is the suspension. The jeep wallows, lurches, and threatens to flip backwards on every climb; managing momentum through that wobble is the actual skill. Coins earned on each run buy upgrades to engine, suspension, tires, and 4WD, with each vehicle running its own upgrade tree. Gems, the premium currency, unlock cosmetics and accelerate progression. Free to play, ad-supported, with optional in-app purchases that remove ads or top up gem balances. The game currently sits at a 4.2 rating across roughly 370,000 recent Play Store ratings.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The driving feel is the reason the game has survived three console generations. The physics model is exaggerated but consistent — you learn how the jeep handles a downhill, when to feather the brake on a crest, how much air you can take before a flip becomes unrecoverable. Fingersoft has resisted the temptation to over-tune it into something more "modern." A run from 2012 plays the same as a run today.
The art style ages well. Flat colours, chunky silhouettes, a single horizon line — the visual language was already nostalgic when it shipped, and time has made it more so. The roster has grown without bloating: dozens of vehicles, each with a distinct handling profile, none of them feel like reskins. And the game runs on essentially anything with a touchscreen, which on Android matters more than the genre press tends to admit.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The ad density is the problem the rating reflects. Interstitial video ads land between runs, between menu screens, on death, on restart, and on most navigation actions. Some are unskippable for the first five seconds. Players reporting "an ad after every single attempt" in recent Play Store reviews are not exaggerating — the cadence is aggressive even by free-mobile-game standards, and the one-time $2.99 ad-removal IAP feels less like a courtesy and more like the actual price of the game gated behind a paywall. The 4.2 rating, against rivals in the same genre that clear 4.5, is a direct reading of that friction.
Progression also drags in the late game. Coin economies tighten as upgrade costs scale, and the gem-based shortcuts start looking less optional. The original 2012 design was a one-thumb arcade game; the 2026 version is an arcade game wrapped in a free-to-play retention loop, and the loop occasionally crowds out the game.
CONCLUSION
Install Hill Climb Racing if you want a five-minute physics toy with a decade of muscle memory waiting for it, and pay the $2.99 the moment ad fatigue sets in — which will be sooner than you expect. Skip it if you've moved on to Hill Climb Racing 2 (Fingersoft's sequel addresses some of the monetisation pacing) or if you simply can't tolerate the interstitial cadence. The original remains a small, specific pleasure. Just budget for the ad-removal IAP and treat the free tier as a demo.