Play Drive Mad Online

Drive Mad is a free physics-based driving puzzle in which you steer a truck across short, brutally unforgiving obstacle courses made of ramps, seesaws, collapsing platforms and swinging weights. Reaching the flag intact is the only objective, and the smallest amount of extra throttle at the wrong moment will flip your vehicle nose-first into the ground.

Each level is a single self-contained physics problem. The truck has only two inputs — accelerate and brake — but because the whole course is built from objects that react to your weight and momentum, those two inputs cover a surprising amount of nuance. Braking mid-air pitches the nose down; accelerating pitches it up; and getting a landing angle right is usually the difference between clearing a gap and cartwheeling into it.

The difficulty curve is honest rather than cruel. Levels are short enough that a failed attempt costs a few seconds, and the retry is instant, so the game encourages the kind of rapid trial-and-error where you learn a course in eight attempts and clear it on the ninth. Later stages introduce hinged bridges and stacked crates that behave differently depending on how fast you hit them, which turns a handful of levels into genuine timing puzzles rather than driving ones.

Press and hold the accelerator to drive forward, and use the brake to slow down or pitch the truck's nose downward while airborne. Work your way across each obstacle course to the chequered flag. If the truck flips, lands on its roof or loses its cargo, the level restarts immediately and you can try a different approach.