The best Mars rover simulator game depends on what you want simulated: real terrain, rover operations, real-time driving, the landing or the build. Mars Rally Championship, a free browser rally game, is listed first because it is ours; it simulates Mars physics, not rover operations. The rest, grouped by what they simulate: NASA's free Experience Curiosity and Explore with Perseverance rebuild real ground from rover and orbiter images; Take On Mars, Mars 2030 and Occupy Mars put a rover under your control on PC; Mars Rover Landing flew the landing on Kinect; Mars First Logistics builds rovers.
Diagram: six NASA rover tools from this guide by date, against two landings: four from weeks before Curiosity's in 2012 to 2017, two around Perseverance's in 2021.
What does a Mars rover simulator game actually simulate?
A Mars rover simulator game can model five different things, and most model only one or two:
- Real terrain. Ground rebuilt from rover and orbiter images, so you stand where a real rover stood.
- Rover operations. Commanding a rover and working its arm and cameras, the actual job of a rover team.
- Real-time driving. Steering a rover live, ideally under Mars's gravity, air and soil rather than Earth's.
- Landing. Entry, descent and touchdown.
- Building and repair. Putting a rover together, or keeping one running.
A planet named Mars is not always Mars. The sandbox game Space Engineers has a planet called Mars that is 120 km across and pulls 0.9 g, according to the game's official wiki; Mars Rally Championship uses the real planet's 3.72 m/s², or 0.38 g. Check what a game simulates, not what it is called.
Mars Rally Championship simulates the planet, not the mission
Our game, listed first for that reason. This is Mars Rally Championship's own site; everything below it is grouped by what it simulates.
Mars Rally Championship is a free 3D rally game that runs in a browser tab with no download, no install and no account, on a keyboard, a gamepad or a phone's touchscreen. It is not a rover simulator in NASA's sense. Its rover is a fictional 3,000 kg pressurized rally machine, driven by a pilot in a pressurized suit and limited to about 240 km/h; Perseverance's top speed on flat, hard ground is 4.2 cm/s, roughly 1,600 times slower.
What it simulates is the planet. Gravity is 3.72 m/s². The air is 0.020 kg/m³, about 1.6% of Earth's, so there is no downforce at any speed. Tyre friction on dry basaltic regolith is 0.70, plus the soil's own cohesion, which leaves about 3.1 m/s² of grip to share between braking, cornering and throttle. Stopping from 100 km/h takes about 125 metres and 9 seconds, roughly 2.4 times the distance on Earth gravel with the same tyres; what driving on Mars would feel like works through each number.
What it leaves out is everything that makes real rover driving slow. There is no signal delay: the physics reads your controls 60 times a second. There is no autonomy, no science instrument and no landing. The terrain is a hand-sculpted heightmap shaped to Martian morphologies, not a reconstruction of a real place, so NASA's free tools below beat it on geography. There is one rover, with no performance upgrades (paints, rims and calipers are cosmetic), and two stages are open; a new pilot's first timed run is on Stage 2, The Long Run.
Free roam is the nearest it gets to a rover's working day: no timer and no checkpoints, so you can creep along at walking pace, still far faster than any real Mars rover, and watch the long-travel suspension work each wheel over rough ground.
In-game screenshot: free roam at about 7 km/h, the front wheel stretched down into a dip while the rear stays planted; sculpted ground, not a real place on Mars.
Pick Mars Rally Championship to feel Mars's physics at speed, race up to eight pilots live, or watch any leaderboard run rebuilt from its recorded inputs; pick something else to see what Curiosity sees.
Play free — no downloadHow real rover driving works, and NASA's free tools that show it
No Mars rover has ever been driven live. Commands take between about 3 and 22 minutes to reach Perseverance, depending on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits, so its drivers at JPL cannot steer it with a joystick. They study the ground in images from orbit and from the rover, sometimes in stereo through 3D glasses, write the drive as a sequence of commands and send it up, and the rover carries it out alone.
Perseverance's AutoNav maps the terrain ahead in 3D, spots hazards and plans a route around them without waiting for Earth, at no more than 4.2 cm/s, or 152 metres an hour. Nearly all of its science data comes home through orbiters passing overhead, and those pictures become the next plan. The loop turns over about once a sol, a Martian day; how fast Mars rovers go shows what that does to their pace.
Diagram: one command cycle of a real Mars rover, plan, uplink, drive, downlink, against a game's loop, which reads the controls 60 times a second.
Games rarely simulate that loop. NASA's free browser tools show two sides of it: one makes you command a rover, and the others put you on real ground rebuilt from rover and orbiter images.
Explore Mars: A Mars Rover Game
NASA Space Place's Explore Mars is a coding game: you drive the rover by sending it commands to reach rocks and study them. That is real rover work in miniature, and it is free in a browser. Our guide to Mars games online covers it alongside NASA's other browser games.
Experience Curiosity
JPL launched Experience Curiosity in August 2015, on the third anniversary of Curiosity's landing. It simulates Mars in 3D from data returned by Curiosity and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, lets you work the rover's cameras and robotic arm, and reproduces events from the mission; it won a Webby Award in 2016. Open it to handle the rover itself, not just to look around. It dates from 2015, so test it in your browser before planning a lesson around it.
Explore with Perseverance
Explore with Perseverance, released by JPL in September 2021, puts a 3D model of the rover on a landscape built mostly from the rover's own images, with orbiter images added. It is adapted from ASTTRO, the tool Perseverance's science team uses to choose targets, so you see the ground much as the mission does. Its companion map, Where Is Perseverance?, is updated after every drive.
Access Mars
Access Mars, from Google Creative Lab and JPL, came out in 2017 as a WebVR experiment that runs in a browser with nothing to install. It rebuilds four places Curiosity visited, the landing site, Pahrump Hills, Marias Pass and Murray Buttes, as 3D terrain from the rover's stereo cameras with its real photographs laid over it.
NASA Mars Trek
Mars Trek is a map, not a game, and a free way to see real Martian geography at planetary scale. NASA launched it alongside Experience Curiosity in August 2015: you fly over Olympus Mons and through Valles Marineris with standard gaming keys, follow rover paths, measure features and export terrain for a 3D printer. A NASA team used it to weigh landing sites for Perseverance's mission.
Mars rover driving games in real time
Real-time driving is what most people picture when they look for a Mars rover driving game, and it is the least like the real job. These three paid PC games hand you the controls, and each wraps something different around the driving.
Take On Mars
Take On Mars, from Bohemia Interactive, makes you the operator first: its space programme campaign sends instrument-laden rovers, landers and probes to Mars to collect scientific data. A second campaign casts you as astronaut Mark Willis, building a habitat and managing power and survival. It spent 2013 to 2017 in Steam Early Access before its full release on 9 February 2017. Pick it to run a mission rather than race a vehicle.
Mars 2030
Mars 2030 is the paid game here built on real geography. FMG Labs at Fusion Media Group made it in partnership with NASA, on terrain mapped from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery, and you explore it on foot and at the controls of a rover, collecting geological samples. It came out on 31 July 2017 for PC, with VR headset support, and it is about exploring more than driving.
Occupy Mars: The Game
Occupy Mars, from Pyramid Games, is a survival sandbox in which the rover is a machine you keep running. You build a base, produce water, oxygen and food, and drive and repair the vehicles that make it possible. Early Access opened on 10 May 2023 with five vehicles, a heavy rover and a drone rover among them; version 1.0 arrived on 30 January 2026 with several heavy rovers to build, plus miners, crushers and trailers. You can upgrade the rover in a garage, change its crane hydraulics and work its robotic arm. It plays alone or in online co-op, with optional VR.
Two smaller Steam games named for the search
Steam also lists two smaller games named almost exactly for this search: Mars Rover Simulator (DexterCoding, 2022), about managing a rover's energy and resources as it explores, and Mars Simulator – Red Planet (Stonehill Games, 2017), about landing a rover, drilling rock samples, photographing the landscape and sending data back to Earth. Read recent player reviews before buying either.
Mars rover landing simulation games
Two NASA projects put you inside a rover's landing, one through your body and one on a clock.
Mars Rover Landing (Xbox 360 and Kinect, 2012)
NASA and Microsoft released Mars Rover Landing as a free Kinect game on Xbox Live in July 2012, weeks before Curiosity landed. You steer the spacecraft with your body through entry, descent and landing, dropping the heat shield and opening the supersonic parachute through what engineers called the seven minutes of terror. The Xbox 360 store it came from closed on 29 July 2024, so it is no longer on offer.
NASA's Eyes: the Mars 2020 landing
NASA's Eyes on the Solar System ran a real-time simulation of Perseverance's entry, descent and landing for its touchdown on 18 February 2021, in a browser on any device, and the app is still on NASA's Eyes site. It starts 17 minutes before touchdown and ends with the sky crane lowering the rover to the ground; you can zoom, look all around and change the clock's speed. Its clock ran on Earth receive time, 11 minutes 22 seconds behind the events on Mars that day. You watch the landing; you do not fly it.
Perseverance also filmed its own landing, and footage from Mars covers that video and the rest of the real recordings.
Games where you build or fix a Mars rover
Building games simulate the engineering, not the planet: one has you assemble rovers, the other repair them.
Mars First Logistics
Mars First Logistics, from the Melbourne studio Shape Shop, is the rover-building pick: a physics-based delivery game in which you assemble rovers and other vehicles from parts to carry unusual cargo across Mars. It entered Early Access in June 2023 and reached version 1.0 in September 2025, on Windows, with co-op for up to three players.
Rover Mechanic Simulator
Rover Mechanic Simulator, from Pyramid Games, the studio behind Occupy Mars, makes you the mechanic at one of the first Martian colonies, repairing and maintaining its rovers. It came out on PC on 12 November 2020, after Early Access from February that year, reached Switch on 18 February 2022 and is on PlayStation too.
For how the real machines are built, rocker-bogie suspension, explained covers the six-wheel linkage NASA's Mars rovers ride on.
Mars rover games compared: free, paid, browser or download
Mars Rally Championship is first because it is ours; the rest follow this guide's sections, grouped by what each simulates. Prices change, so the price column says what kind of thing each title is, as of October 2026.
| Game | What it simulates | Platform | Price model | Browser? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mars Rally Championship Play | Real-time rally driving under Mars gravity, air and grip; sculpted terrain | Browser, phones included | Free, no account | Yes |
| Explore Mars: A Mars Rover Game | Commanding a rover to reach and study rocks | Browser | Free | Yes |
| Experience Curiosity (2015) | Curiosity's cameras and arm, in terrain built from rover and orbiter data | Browser | Free | Yes |
| Explore with Perseverance (2021) | The rover's surroundings in 3D, from its own images | Browser | Free | Yes |
| Access Mars (2017) | Four Curiosity sites rebuilt from its stereo cameras | Browser (WebVR) | Free | Yes |
| NASA Mars Trek (2015) | Real Mars maps, 3D flyovers and rover paths | Browser | Free | Yes |
| Take On Mars (2017) | Operating rovers, landers and probes; a crewed survival campaign | PC (Steam) | Store purchase | No |
| Mars 2030 (2017) | Orbiter-mapped terrain, on foot and by rover | PC, VR headsets | Store purchase | No |
| Occupy Mars: The Game (2026) | Survival with drivable, repairable rovers | PC | Store purchase | No |
| Mars Rover Landing (2012) | Curiosity's entry, descent and landing, steered by body movement | Xbox 360 with Kinect | Was free; store closed 2024 | No |
| NASA's Eyes: Mars 2020 landing (2021) | Perseverance's landing in real time, to watch | Browser | Free | Yes |
| Mars First Logistics (2025) | Building vehicles from parts to haul cargo | PC (Windows) | Store purchase | No |
| Rover Mechanic Simulator (2020) | Repairing and maintaining Mars rovers | PC, Switch, PlayStation | Store purchase | No |
Seven of the thirteen are free in a browser tab: Mars Rally Championship and six NASA or JPL tools. That is the short answer for a Mars rover game online, free: Explore Mars to command a rover, Experience Curiosity to operate one, Mars Trek, Access Mars and Explore with Perseverance for real ground, NASA's Eyes for a landing, and Mars Rally Championship to drive one fast. Every other driving or building game in the table is a paid download.
Where to try this
Mars Rally Championship is free in a browser tab, with no download and no account.
- Free roam: no timer and no gates; creep at walking pace, or find out how long 125 metres of braking feels.
- Stage 2, The Long Run: 2,306 metres and 12 gates, where a new pilot's first timed run starts.
- How many rovers are on Mars: every real rover these games borrow from, and which still work.
- Games set on Mars: the wider list, by genre, on PC, console and browser.