Simulators

If you feel massively overwhelmed about FPV, you're in good company. After five minutes of research, popular internet opinion recommends starting your FPV journey on a simulator. The top reason is that crashing is expensive, so let's make it affordable by destroying some ones and zeros. As it turns out, there are a bunch of sims out there, and since I decided to try a few, I thought I'd write down my own experiences with the four I've tried.

Liftoff

It seemed fitting to start with Liftoff. From Joshua Bardwell's excellent Learn to fly an FPV drone YouTube tutorial to the Steam store's Overwhelmingly Positive review rating, you might have heard about this one. Liftoff gives you a great starting point for the experience of flying a drone. While not the cheapest option, you can jump into Steam and get up and running in short order.

The built-in First Flight tutorial was informative, albeit slow. That aside, as linked above, there are tons of great resources to get going. Once you complete (or abandon) the tutorials, you'll find 19 different maps with multiple races each. Compared to some competitors, that alone adds a ton of value.

Outside of racing you've got a pretty fun freestyle mode, track builder, and my favorite: workbench. I have yet to tinker with the digital workbench, but that's because you can search through many user-submitted Community drones. Can you handle a fast five-inch drone? Search through the community submissions and send one up.

Overall, my biggest two negatives are graphic fidelity—it's good but not great—and the race line direction. I assume that, much like learning a race course in real life, you'll be pressing the R key often to reset the match after missing the 6th gate because the arrow sometimes just points in the wrong direction.

Uncrashed

Someone in the FPV community recommended Uncrashed to me. That said, I'm glad I decided to download it. Uncrashed immediately delivers on one of Liftoff's shortcomings; its graphics are fantastic. It was only a short time before I put more hours into Uncrashed over Liftoff. Its most significant benefit is that it has fewer features than other sims. Jump on it and pick one of the 19 included maps. There is no need to select a drone; Uncrashed does it for you by picking one of the four presets:

• 5" freestyle
• 5" race
• 3" cinewhoop
• 3" freestyle

Each map has multiple features to fly around and at least one race to jump into. You can see what each map offers by pressing the escape key.

Uncrashed does the best job coaching you through races with brightly colored gates and a neon race line. It's a great way to start and to get the feel of your controls and the quad. While I have yet to experiment to much, the Steam community has embraced the map editor with many downloadable options.

TRYP FPV

In my opinion, this is an important one to have on the list. Tryp, by all definitions of the phrase, is a big boy. Drawing parallels between this sim and the others is challenging. Yes, it's an FPV sim, and that's where the comparison stops.

The first difference is that this simulator was built using Unreal Engine 5, the same engine backing games like Fortnite and The First Descendant. It immediately shows when you start flying. The second is the size and scope. Tryp features four maps—I call attention to that word because of the size and scope of each map.

Once you get into the map, you can easily explore for hours. Hit the Escape key, and you can see all the features, including races and scenarios. The scenarios, to me, are the key standout of Tryp. Want to practice following a fast-moving rally car or dirt bike? Or how about a downhill ski jumper? Well, Tryp has you covered.

Because of its scale and graphic quality, Tryp deserves a careful consideration. Anyone interested in flying a large cinematic drone or following a fast-moving target will definitely benefit from it.

Velocidrone

My first simulator was Velocidrone, and I initially found it underwhelming. The graphics are easily the most dated of all the simulators on the list, and it's clear the focus is on racing. After clocking more hours in other sims and returning to Velocidrone, I found it offers something unique in the drone feel and physics.

While it follows the same cues as Liftoff by not holding your hand, ditching the race line, and clear gate direction, it does offer a good selection of real-world drones and built-in and community tracks to keep you busy. For those reasons, I decided to add Velocidrone to the list for anyone interested in getting into the FPV racing scene.

Roundup

After reading through all four options, which simulator is best for you? Having spent time in all four, you have to evaluate what kind of flying you want to do. Heading up into the mountains to chase after a friend on their motorcycle—well, download Tryp. If you are considering entering a local FPV race, you can't go wrong with Velocidrone.

That said, if you have no idea what kind of flying you want to do and just want to give the hobby a try, my overall pick is Uncrashed. At an affordable price, I think it couples just the right amount of features with simplicity. That said, if you have fun in one, there's nothing wrong with grabbing another sim in the future to expand your horizons.