SimRacing Roguelike: Build Your Rig and Become a Champion

SimRacing Roguelike combines classic sim racing with roguelike mechanics and hardware management. The career begins with a simple, basic rig and spans eight championships, leading up to the World Tour. Gameplay requires strategic decisions: Players must weigh whether to invest their resources in training the driver or in better hardware. Due to the roguelike nature of the game, mistakes have far-reaching consequences, as a defeat can mean the end of the current career.

Introduction – What Is SimRacing Roguelike?

Roguelike games are characterized by ever-changing playthroughs, random events, and decisions with tangible consequences. If you fail, you start a new run and try again with a better strategy. No progress is saved, and any items you’ve collected during the run are lost if you fail. You can find more background information on the history of the genre here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike

This sim-racing roguelike applies this principle to a virtual racing career: You choose your route, train your driver, and upgrade your sim rig step by step. If you lose a race, your current run ends, but your next attempt could play out completely differently.

From a Beginner’s Rig to the World Tour

Your career begins with choosing a driver. You choose between three character types, each with different traits

• Hotlapper: High Stamina, but low Consistency.
• Safe Finisher: High consistency, but very low base stamina.
• Late Braker: Excellent braking skills complement an otherwise very well-balanced driving style.

Next, you’ll need to find the right balance and carve your own way through the various nodes on the ever-changing maps. Over the course of a run, you’ll need to improve both your skills and your Consistency and Stamina stats. Be sure to visit the Hardware Shop to gradually upgrade your starter gear into a high-end setup. It’s also important to rest regularly at one of the Rest Nodes. This is the only way to ensure you don’t start a race with too little Stamina, which will almost certainly lead to defeat. At the end of each level, a boss enemy awaits, posing a significantly greater challenge than the regular enemies. This is where you’ll find out whether you made the right decisions throughout the level and prepared yourself optimally for the decisive race.

Tip: Each race track consists of three sectors in which pace, cornering, or braking are crucial. The driver’s consistency also affects how reliably they can deliver their performance in each sector.

The Various Nodes and Their Functions

After just a few runs, the functions of the various nodes become almost self-explanatory. When you start the game, you’ll find a total of eight different node types in addition to the start node:

• Race Duel: This is probably the most frequently visited node and the easiest way to earn extra money in addition to the driver’s stats. The various races offer different cash bonuses and become less and less challenging in later levels, but they also require more stamina as you progress through the levels.
• Training: Here you can improve your driver’s pace, cornering, or braking. Training sessions consume stamina but can be crucial for the
• outcome of the run.
• Gym: At the gym, you can permanently increase your driver’s maximum stamina for the current run by spending money or stamina.
• Rest: Here you can rest and recharge your stamina.
• Shop: In the hardware shop, you can purchase products from the categories Steering Wheels, Wheel Bases, Pedals, Cockpits, and Accessories. Only one purchase is allowed per visit, so every decision should be carefully considered.
• Mystery Event: A node with particularly high variability. In addition to helpful rewards, serious disadvantages, financial losses, or defective hardware may also await you here.
• SimRacing Expo: A very rare node that can either earn you money or improve your pace.
• Boss Enemy: At the end of each level, the respective boss enemy awaits you.

Hardware and Hardware-Upgrades

To defeat the increasingly powerful opponents, your starter hardware will quickly become insufficient. You’ll need to replace it with new gear from the store and gradually complete your sim racing setup. Every purchase must be carefully considered, because when you later make essential upgrades to high-end hardware, you’ll only get back a portion of your previous investment as a trade-in bonus, much like in the real world of sim racing.

• Steering Wheel: Affects the Cornering value.
• Pedals: Affect the Consistency and Braking stats.
• Wheelbase: Determines Pace.
• Cockpit: Reduces stamina consumption by increasing the Comfort stat and boosts prize money through the Money Boost.
• Accessory: Accessories can provide various bonuses to stats such as Pace, Cornering, Braking, Consistency, or Comfort.

These values are roughly based on the prices of the hardware or the torque in Nm for the wheel bases. However, they do not necessarily reflect the quality of the individual components in the real world.

From the Rookie Cup to the World Tour

At launch, the game features eight different levels with increasing difficulty and stamina points for each race. You’ll need to simultaneously improve the driver’s endurance, skills, and equipment to master the increasingly challenging levels and set new records in the end.

If that’s not enough, you can also activate Hard Mode. In this mode, the odds of winning are no longer displayed, and only the next two achievable levels are visible.

Statistics, Achievements, and Hall of Fame

No game is complete without statistics. In SimRacing Roguelike, you’ll find three separate windows filled with information. First, there are the regular statistics, which include details about your runs, the nodes you’ve unlocked, and more. In addition, there are unlockable achievements, some of which can only be earned through skillful play and, at times, a little luck. Rounding out the experience is the leaderboard, which you’ll find under the Hall of Fame menu item.

Important: Personal statistics, achievements, Hall of Fame entries, and your player name are stored exclusively locally in your browser or within the app. If you completely uninstall the app or clear your browser data, this information will be erased. For general analysis of game balance, small, anonymous gameplay events may be transmitted, such as runs started, levels reached, platform, and game mode. No player, device, installation, or session IDs are recorded.

Playable directly in your browser and on your smartphone

SimRacing Roguelike can be played not only on a PC in a browser, but also easily on a smartphone. You can use either the mobile version of the website or our own Android app, which can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. Once installed, the Android app can be played even without an active internet connection. The web version launches directly in the browser and requires an internet connection, at least to load the game files for the first time.

We’d love to hear your feedback – New Features and Balancing

Even though countless hours of gameplay have gone into the game and the balancing has been steadily improved over many iterations, SimRacing Roguelike is, of course, still far from perfect at launch. So feedback is very welcome, both regarding new features and the existing game. Whether it’s persistent bugs, minor inaccuracies, or opponents that are too difficult. The target win rate for experienced players is around five to ten percent.

The best place to leave your feedback is on the SimRacing PC Discord server, which you can find here: