Hot Wheels: Unleashed Review | bit-tech.net

price: £39.99

Developer: milestone

Publisher: milestone

platform: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

Review version: personal computer

I absolutely love Hot: Wheels Unleashed, it’s one of the most exciting, imaginative, and effortlessly fun arcade racing games I’ve played in years. Milestone’s game takes all the best bits from Trackmania, Burnout, and Micro Machines and carefully combines them into one highly entertaining experience. In some areas it could be better, it has good ideas but doesn’t go far enough. But that doesn’t stop Hot Wheels from being a big plastic bucket of die-cast joy.

However, it didn’t get off to the best start. When you launch Hot Wheels: Unleashed, the first thing you see before you even get to the main menu is a loot box. These “blind boxes” are a core part of the experience and will reward you with a random car when obtained. The game is generous with these boxes, and they’re not the only way you unlock cars in the game. Still, adding such loot boxes to the game is tasteless and misleading, making Hot Wheels Unleashed seem more cynical than it actually is.

After this unsettling intro, you’re thrust into a quick tutorial race, which should be the first thing you encounter and properly showcases what Unleashed is about. Select one of the three starting vehicles and you’ll join 11 other vehicles on the Hot Wheels track’s recognizable orange and blue plastic track, looping three times around a giant serpentine track built inside the skate park. lock up.

By the time you cross the finish line, you’ll be completely familiar with the basics. Unleashed’s racing cars can be jumped in and enjoyed immediately. Even the least aerodynamic of the 68 available cars is nimble and nimble, and while the racing itself is less about precise handling and more about maximizing your burnout boost, it will Propelling you down the track like a zinc alloy meteor. Boost replenishes slowly over time, but drifting through corners can speed up the process. The longer you drift, the greater your push, and the greater your chance of overtaking your opponent.

The nuances of each car and track give a simple racing model plenty of complexity. All vehicles have different handling and boost capabilities. Faster, more competitive cars tend to have less boost, while newer cars have more boost to compensate for their slower speeds and looser handling. So if you’re the kind of racer who tends to pinball over obstacles, jumping into a rocket-powered garbage truck might work to your advantage.

Meanwhile, there are various features on the track that can either help or hinder your race, from speed lanes and boost chargers on the track to giant spiders that can trap your vehicle in a sticky web. Gravity is often an important consideration. Most loops require a boost to pass safely, and in some areas, obstacles disappear, meaning an out-of-control drift can send you crashing off the track.

All of this is brilliantly presented as well. Your vehicle is scaled down and the race takes place in a variety of environments, such as a basement or a skyscraper under construction. However, instead of everything around you feeling small and small, it feels incredibly large, with highly detailed materials making your surroundings feel incredibly solid and weighty. Driving under a pool table or chest of drawers feels like walking through a tunnel cut into a mountain. The cars’ textures have also been carefully designed to replicate the unique die-cast look, while the vehicle roster spans the history of Hot Wheels, with classic Chevys and Formula 1 racers sitting alongside outlandish vehicles like dinosaur-themed Motorosaurs and triangular trucks.

Unleashed’s single-player gameplay is a bit unusual. Titled “Big City Rumble,” it lets you explore a top-down city map by moving between different “nodes.” Each node is either a race, a timed challenge, a quest reward, or a secret that requires you to complete a specific race with a specific vehicle before unlocking it. Completing a race will reward you with coins, which you can use to buy new cars, or “gears,” which can be used to upgrade vehicles you already own. While not particularly in-depth, the city layout is a great way to provide some motivation for your progress. It’s fun to walk down a side street knowing there’s probably a new car at the end, especially because Hot Wheels’ eclectic collection of vehicles is so much fun.

While all the matches are fun, the undoubted highlight of Big City Rumble is the “Boss” match. There are five of them, each two to three times the length of a typical Unleashed match, and filled with unique gimmicks and hazards that make for fantastic spectacle, whether it’s a poisonous scorpion or a pool of acid that drains your accelerometer , or rows of conveyor belts that alternately speed up and slow down. They’re fun and challenging enough to keep you focused without getting frustrated.

I absolutely love Hot Wheels Unleashed. However, while the design is tight enough that the wheels never fall off, there are loose nuts here and there. One of the bigger problems is that, despite the wide variety of tracks, they only appear in five “arenas,” making Unleashed feel more repetitive than it actually is. Also, I wish there were more variety of hazards on the track. The web-shooting spiders are excellent and I hope the tracks evolve with increasingly complex and wacky obstacles. They did a little bit, but not enough and it felt like a missed opportunity.

Multiplayer features are also a bit lacking. The biggest issue is the lack of AI pilots in multiplayer, which means that unless you have a full complement of players, the matches can feel rather spartan. There are no public services either, and no matching options or filters. These are pretty basic features for a modern racing game, and Unleashed may be hurting in the long run without them.

That said, Unleashed seems to be seeking its longevity not through multiplayer, but through its track editor, which lets you build your own tracks and import tracks from other players. Frankly, I only changed it slightly because my focus was on the content that comes with the game. But it’s fun to play, and the more creative players will no doubt have a lot of fun building their own virtual Hot Wheels racetrack.

Track editor or not, Hot Wheels: Unleashed is still a great little racing game and the best arcade experience I’ve had since Forza Horizon 4. Totally on the same level, lacking that game. But there’s enough content here to satisfy Hot Wheels fans as well as Trackmania, Burnout, or Micro Machines enthusiasts. Not bad for a racing game about toy cars.