First back to start. Hot Wheels Unleashed is an arcade racer that at first glance is reminiscent of Mario Kart: colorful cars racing around a colorful track and drifting through the curves to get boosts. Great Absence is an arsenal of weapons. You don’t win races with a blue shield or by throwing bananas on the road. There’s no annoying rubber banding either, so if you’re behind, you’re behind. Winning means learning to drive better. In any case, that’s a plus.
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So it’s purely about racing over the plastic tracks that have been laid out through all kinds of rooms. The scale of these gigantic spaces enhances the feeling that you are driving with toys. The (faithful) design of the various Hot Wheels cars also screams toys. That is probably a feast of recognition for fans of the miniature cars (there has been a real annual Hotwheels collection fair in Los Angeles for 34 years now). For non-fans it is nice to see how much attention to detail all the carts and their materials have been imitated, but you will probably miss the nostalgic bond that the developers went for.
The cars have stats for speed, acceleration, braking and steerability, which can be seen in the handling. Each car’s stats can be upgraded with gears collected by winning races or recycling unwanted cars. This also means that in practice you quickly end up with a favorite car that you maximize. The need to collect more cars then depends on your own collecting rage and how important the appearance of your Hot Wheels is to you.
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Then the racing itself. First a pro tip: set the difficulty to at least medium. The default ‘easy’ is ridiculously easy. Even blindfolded and drunk it is hard to lose. So unless you want to avoid all the challenge in a game. that’s step one to have fun with Hot Wheels Unleashed.
There is a nice feeling of speed, partly due to a low camera angle. The key to success is getting to know the tracks and using the boost button, which will temporarily speed you up a bit. The latter is also the biggest difference between the difficulty levels ‘easy’ and ‘medium’: with ‘easy’ the computer-controlled opponents hardly use the boost. How often you can boost depends partly on your car (some have a number of boost moments, others a boost gauge) and how often you drift. Drifting recharges your boosters, allowing you to accelerate more often. It is therefore important to drift through every corner, and as often as possible either boost or hit the boost spots on the circuit to reach the finish as quickly as possible.
Because the circuits contain all kinds of obstacles and jumps, it is important to get to know them well. This way you know that you might have to save the boost for the next jump or loop and you learn where to take into account toy obstacles that make a turn just that little bit more difficult.
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If you think in all this that nothing new is being described here, then that is correct. Therein lies the big problem of Hot Wheels Unleashed: it is nothing new. Also the ‘campaign’ doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before. You see the map of a city with nodes. Those nodes represent races or time trials. If you achieve the goals, more nodes will become available. There is just no relationship whatsoever between the city map and the tracks or locations where you race. Those locations (for example a living room or hobby room) are recycled again and again with a number of alternating circuits.
There is also a track designer where you can build your own race tracks. You can then also share these online and race online. There are plenty of parts and some interesting toy obstacles (the first to unlock is a plastic spider that shoots slowing cobwebs on part of the track) to do some fun building, but don’t expect the possibilities at the level of a Mario Maker or Little Big Planet sitting. The result always looks somewhat the same.
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There is also a track designer where you can build your own race tracks. You can then also share these online and race online.
This makes Hot Wheels Unleashed a nice racer in somewhat boring environments. The locations themselves are flat and generic. The progression through collecting cars doesn’t really feel very compelling. The only thing that could keep you glued to the screen is your love for Hot Wheels cars.
In fact, Hot Wheels Unleashed feels a bit like a nice mobile game that you play in between, while you wait for the train and unlock a few more cars. But on a real game console on a big screen it all gets a bit stuck
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Hot Wheels Unleashed is available now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Windows. We played on Xbox Series X
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