The player can perform stunts such as driving the vehicle into the air for a prolonged time or flipping it over to earn more coins, which after the race may be spent on upgrades or to unlock new stages and vehicles (including a monster truck, racing truck, moon lander, dirt bike, tank, and Santa's sleigh).

Hill Climb Racing was developed by Toni Fingerroos, a self-taught Finnish programmer who was 29 years old at the time of the game's release.

Fingerroos returned to and revived Fingersoft once more in late 2011, where as the company's sole worker, he designed a photography application every few days to see whether some of them would turn out to be successful.

The app's profitability strengthened Fingerroos' confidence, helped him pay off debts, and secured the creation of his next project, Hill Climb Racing.

[5][6] Fingerroos said he spent 16 hours a day for a couple of months developing Hill Climb Racing in a compact bedroom before completing the project.

As Fingersoft's business manager, Jarkko Paalanen, states, the visuals were intentionally drawn to be "naïve and childish", as part of the game's character.

Paalanen saw an opportunity to appeal to the Chinese audience by altering the game's theme to match their culture, while keeping the gameplay unchanged.

[11][12] Hill Climb Racing's critical reception was somewhat positive, Modojo's John Bedford respectively dismissed the graphics and soundtrack as rudimentary and repetitive but found a great deal of satisfaction in mastering the controls and called the game "furiously addictive.

"[2] SFGate's Peter Hartlaub praised the ability to upgrade vehicles, as he found it to dramatically improve the player's experience and demonstrate the game's "subtle" physics.

"[3] Pocket Gamer's Harry Slater compared it to Trials and found it to be less "bombastic" and the graphics slightly ugly but praised the simplicity of the gameplay.

[13] Swedish magazine Mobil's Elias Nordling considered the game's freemium model and noted the progression system as fast enough to not make the in-app purchases tempting.

[1] In the book Finnish Video Games: A History and Catalog, Juho Kuorikoski also found the monetization to be reasonable and the mechanics addictive.

[4]: 271–272 A sequel, titled Hill Climb Racing 2, was released to Android devices on November 28, 2016, iOS in December 2016 and Windows 10 on March 23, 2018.