Oh hell yeah, someone's making a game about customizing and off-roading RC cars in your backyard

TrophyRC demo gameplay - YouTube

Some of the absolute best simulators recreate a hobby or career that you don't have the money, time, space, or energy to pursue yourself, but which you definitely, 100% find incredibly rad and would love to do. Thus the enduring popularity of flight sims, or the delightful joy of ruining big trucks in SnowRunner.

Well, here's one for just that niche: Indie dev Eugene Hatskevich is making TrophyRC, a game where you tinker with and drive little remote control cars over elaborate obstacle courses you build in your backyard. It's a to-scale offroading and bouldering game with all the whimsy and inventiveness you expect from the concept. You shouldn't build a giant seesaw for your multi-ton off-roader but you can totally build one for your little RC Cars.

TrophyRC plans to focus on realistic physics using Unreal Engine 5 as a base, with meticulously designed backyard-bouldering tracks in addition to an open world to explore and make your own fun in—multiplayer included. You'll also have the ability to tinker with your little cars to modify their technical stuff: suspension, engine, transmission, and appearance.

As a game based on obstacles and bouldering it's bound to be more of a traversal challenge than a racing one—which the developer emphasizes. There's a real appeal here if you're into games like SpinTires or SnowRunner, where the point is getting vehicles from point A to B at all, let alone quickly. I love that idea, and I'm excited to see the whimsical things you can traverse in a small-scale world like this one. RC Car hobbyists make some incredible courses, and I hope we get half that much creativity in TrophyRC.

You can find TrophyRC on Steam, where it doesn't yet have a release date.

If you're excited about it, however, you can try out a prototype that the developer made last year. Though from their YouTube you can already see a lot of improvements have been made—to water physics and more. Still, you can find that prototype and fiddle with it on itch.io.

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A screenshot from TrophyRC of a small remote controlled truck traversing a backyard obstacle course — (Image credit: Eugene Hatskevich)

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.