BeamNG.drive

It all started with developers of Rigs of Rods, an open-source simulator. In 2011 they set out to make it a spiritual successor, and a video of the new physics in May 2012 got over a million views overnight, the studio says.

The game reached Steam Early Access in May 2015. A writer who played it then called the driving probably the most realistic of any car game he had played, but warned that there were few levels and no progression, and that the store page promised at least a year until it was feature complete. By version 0.39 in 2026, early access had run for 11 years.

The film industry took an interest too, as a cheap way to rehearse stunts before a stunt driver wrecks a real car. A separate version, BeamNG.tech, was made for education and research. Players give it 97% positive across 397,768 reviews. In our Recommended Score it ranks 562 of 4,736 games.

Liked it? Try Wreckfest, banger racing and demolition derby where damage also runs on a soft-body model, and My Summer Car, where you have to build a car that starts fully disassembled, with no instructions during a Finnish summer in 1995.