If you had told me last year that a Hot Wheels licensed game would be one of my top games of the year I’d have told you to get your head checked. Well here we are, and Hot Wheels Unleashed is not only one of the best games of the year, but one of the best racing games of all time.
Hot Wheels Unleashed
Developer: Milestone S.r.l.
Price: $50
Platform: PC, PS5, Switch, XSX
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
It’s no understatement to say this game is a Hot Wheels fan’s dream come true. When the trailers for this game first dropped I scoffed at the idea that the game actually looked that good and let me tell you, it does. The detail on the cars is simply insane, with every aspect of the original toy replicated perfectly to almost photo-realistic degrees. On top of that, on certain cars, you can even notice faint fingerprints on them, or scuffs as you get physical during a race. The track strips themselves look just like their real-world counterparts, particularly the way light shines through them or the stress lines from bends. The only shame is how limited the photo mode is because I just want to sit around doing that all day. Now I wouldn’t say it’s terrible, but it is missing a considerable amount of settings that you just come to expect and it would have been the cherry on top for this game to feature a fully fleshed-out photo mode.
With well over 60 cars to collect, you’ll no doubt find at least a few from your childhood that you’ll want to take for a spin. It’s simply absurd how many cars got put into this and the variety of which there is. Everything from traditional cars, to the gimmick ones like Bone Crusher or a tank, it’s all here. The only (minor) bummer is that you unlock these cars via loot crates which you can acquire in the game’s campaign mode, or by buying them with in-game currency. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but for some reason the game seems to overwhelmingly favor giving you duplicate cars over new ones. It’s incredibly disheartening to pop open a couple boxes you’ve been saving, only for half of them to be cars you already have. You can scrap those dupes for money, but the bitter feeling is still there. It’d make more sense to roll dupes the more cars you have, but I was pulling duplicates right at the start of the game when I had maybe three or so cars. That’s just silly. Hot Wheels Unleashed also features an in-game “store” that will stock five random cars for you to buy and will refresh after five hours. Only issue here is that it’s five in-game hours which is a mind-boggling design choice. There’s so much good in this game, that these moments that take you out of it really make you wonder who thought some of these decisions were good.
An arcade racer lives or dies by how well it captures that feeling fans of the genre expect from a game of this type and Hot Wheels Unleashed delivers on that front. Milestone are known for their sim racers, and you can definitely feel a tease of that here with the game’s physics system, but it’s an arcade racer through and through with simple to tap drift mechanics and just the right amount of looseness to the cars. The game even dips into some Trackmania territory with the aforementioned physics system allowing for air control that, when mastered, can allow you to skip massive chunks of the track. In fact, the game wholly encourages this as some time trials absolutely cannot be finished without figuring out how best to skip parts of the track to cut time.
The game features five environments (basement, skatepark, college campus, garage, skyscraper) but because this is a Hot Wheels game, you’re racing on tracks laid out in these areas. So you’ll find yourself launching into air ducts or looping around bookshelves in these brilliant tracks that have an impressive sense of scale to them. The tracks made up for this game are some of the most thrilling races I’ve seen in the genre that could only be done because of the creativity only offered by it being Hot Wheels. All the track pieces you remember as a kid are here mixed together into courses you could only dream of back then. You’ll even encounter moments where you’ll need to flip your car in the air to magnetically attach to the next track that’s above you and continue the race driving upside down. There’s some genuine insanity to some of the tracks on offer here that’s sure to fix a smile on your face. And I’d be pressed if I didn’t mention the near-photorealism again because some moments of this game are absolutely jaw dropping.
Hot Wheels Unleashed features a custom track and car editor, and boy is the community making damn good use out of it. Want Speed Racer’s Mach 5? Of course that’s already there. Want a car themed after Star Fox’s ship, or one based off the Halo warthog? The community’s gotchu. What about a racetrack that’s just all loops? Or one that’s too many loops? There’s such a plethora of creations made it’s really amazing to see a community dive into the creation tools like how they are here.
The editors themselves are surprisingly deep. You can customize an ungodly amount of points of color on the cars along with the material of specific sections too. The track editor itself is a monster of a system, simple to start laying down tracks but with an abundance of options to really let you make some crazy stuff. With this editor in particular, you can make a track floating free in an empty track creation room, but the really clever stuff comes from the folk making things in the already preset environment settings. Here you’re free to drop tracks wherever you want, but you’re able to really make use out of all the environmental details. One track I played recently had heavy Trackmania vibes to it as you would launch through the air and need to use your boost to air control your way to the next ramp, with some ridiculous sense of speed.
However, for some bizarre reason Milestone chose to practically hide the community-made maps. To view or create your own maps you simply go to the track editor menu, but to play community made ones you have to go into the quickplay menu, then specifically time attack and there you can find the community maps. I genuinely don’t get why they’d be hidden here, on top of being strictly limited to the time attack mode. The only way to actually race on a user-made map seems to be to have it come up on the track rotation screen when in a multiplayer lobby, but from my experience people almost never vote to play on those. It’s a bummer, and what I’d assume to be an easy fix that I would hope Milestone has plans to do.
Speaking of customization, the basement level actually allows you to personalize the entire thing to an equally overwhelming degree as the car and track editor. You’ll unlock cosmetics to decorate a staggering amount of your basement, from the various decorations to the furniture and even walls and ceiling. You could spend a good chunk of time simply doing just that, but it makes it all the more satisfying when you get to race around your personally customized basement.
There’s a lot to love with Hot Wheels Unleashed, with just a few minor nitpicks here and there, but there’s one issue with the game that might upset some folk and that’s the severe difficulty spike when going from Easy to Medium. There’s an unusually wide skill gap between the two difficulty settings, with Easy having the AI racing at an almost braindead level as you swiftly outpace them within the first few seconds of a race. Medium however sees the AI coming at you with a vengeance, as they’ll refuse to let up and really make you work not only for that first-place finish, but a spot at the podium. It’s an admittedly thrilling challenge as a veteran of the genre, but casual fans might find the difficulty spike almost too much.
The Final Word
Hot Wheels Unleashed delivers on that arcade racer thrill I haven’t quite felt since Burnout Paradise or Sonic Racing Transformed, and has quickly cemented itself as a genre essential.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
