Hot Wheels Unleashed Review – IGN

Perhaps best described as a head-on collision between a little Burnout and a little Trackmania Turbo, Hot Wheels Unleashed is an endearing arcade stunt racer that feels great and looks absolutely extraordinary. With tracks creatively woven through luxuriously detailed, life-size environments and brimming with a catalog of cars straight out of the toy bucket, developer Milestone’s decision to duplicate a racing brand 64 times smaller than usual has been a consummate success.

Highly accessible yet packed with advanced techniques, devilish shortcuts, and creative tools to master, Hot Wheels Unleashed is one of the best, most customizable, and imaginative arcade racers I’ve played in at least a decade.

Hot Wheels Unleashed recreates the world’s most popular die-cast cars at their true scale, and in environments dwarfed by barn-sized basketballs and sound boxes as large as buildings. This makes Hot Wheels Unleashed more in line with tiny companions like 1998’s Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver or 2007’s Hot Wheels Beat That! unlike the no-style rags like Hot Wheels Turbo Racing or Hot Wheels World’s Best Driver, which simply increased the size of the toys to compete with them like normal cars.

Staying tiny was an excellent choice, and not simply because the atmosphere is infinitely more charming on a toy scale; the 1: 1 recreations of the Hot Wheels cars here are regularly impressive.

The toy meets the world

The range leans toward more recent models, or at least recent versions of classic castings, such as the iconic Twin Mill, and even a 50th anniversary version of the quirky Dodge Deora, one of the first 16 cars Hot Wheels ever made. There are also a handful of real cars in the mix, which I think is great for variety and perfect for anyone who isn’t a huge fan of giant burger-shaped cars. The small selection of TV and movie cars are easily my favorites though, and I don’t expect it to run much in anything other than Back to the Future DeLorean now that I’ve unlocked it.

Finishing the campaign has given me some ultra-rare original models, which are excellent Milestone picks. However, I still have quite a few cars to unlock, and doing so is slow because the cars can only be purchased à la carte from a selection of five random models that rotate every four hours of play, not in real time. That just seems too long; all I want my children to do for four hours in a row is sleep. The remaining option is to win or buy blind boxes (which, thankfully, can only be bought with in-game currency) to try to get something different. Of course, the last time I kept a bunch of these, I opened four from the same car in the space of a few minutes, which was deeply unsatisfactory.

That said, the car models themselves are simply beautiful, and each one I have collected so far is an unshakable and faithful recreation of the miniatures they represent, down to the smallest detail – the differences in texture between plastic and plastic. lacquered metal parts; the subtle mold lines left over from the assembly process; the wide range of paint finishes; the text stamped under the chassis with the model name and the year of production. I still find myself just spinning them, stopped in my tracks by how fantastic they look.

As impressive as they are out of their boxes, they look even better after some door-to-door action on the track. This is where they really start to look like the toy cars strewn about my youngest son’s room – chipped, scratched, and worn down by the demands of his seven-year-old automotive lord. The most surprising thing is that the damage has not been applied unconsciously or randomly; cars successfully lose paint at their vulnerable corners and raised edges, slight scratches appear on larger flat surfaces, black plastic is revealed under the silver layer, and printed pads are partially erased. In the right light, child-sized fingerprints can be seen, especially on the windshields, and even your plastic wheels get ringed with the kind of grooves that a pristine Hot Wheels car will pick up after an afternoon of hitting the pavement. Milestone’s success in making cars look so believable is a big part of what makes Hot Wheels Unleashed so much fun to play.

This ridiculously good level of detail also extends to the environments themselves, from the scratched and etched surfaces of iconic soft plastic tracks to almost imperceptible embellishments like air bubbles under hastily applied railing stickers. The backdrops are great too, especially the vast cloud-buried cityscape surrounding the construction site.

What sells it especially is the standout lighting, which regularly comes from multiple sources around each map, be it the neon of a jukebox, cheeky fluorescent tubes, or the glaring sun. Lighting sits cars in the environment in an exceptional way.

The level of granular detail seems to say a lot about how deeply everything has been considered here, and it all comes together to create an extremely believable miniature world. It’s a bit hard to soak up the speed at times, but there’s a brilliant camera mode included to take a closer look at everything. My only problem with the camera is that it seems to be tied to the track rather than the horizon, so every time my car was running backwards or vertically the camera axes get confused and adjusting it to find the shot was a bit tricky. . break exercise.

Pedal to Mattel

“Okay, Luke,” you’re probably saying. “It’s beautiful and it touches the heartstrings of the Hot Wheels faithful. But how does it play? Fair! And you’ve probably been waiting for the other shoe to drop … but in a surprise twist, Hot Wheels Unleashed handles really well, actually. Your typical arcade brake-to-skid racing is intuitive and easy to learn, but there are plenty of hidden nuances in its air controls. Once mastered, or at least moderately tamed, air controls can be exploited to discover stealth shortcuts, navigate opponents, or salvage a misdirected jump. Boost builds nice and fast, although the higher your car’s core stats, the less boost you’ll have at your disposal. This creates an interesting balancing act, as opting for a weaker car overall will give you more momentum to compensate. Personally, I prefer to improve my cars as high as possible and work with less impulse, because I think I am faster this way… I think.

There are four levels of AI, and the slowest one seems very tolerant of errors and a good starting point for the young or less experienced. Medium proved to be an amazing leap for the children in my household, it is much less forgiving and they often found it difficult to catch the pack even after a single comeback, but it was much more satisfying for me. Difficult and superior really demands improved cars.

Hot Wheels Unleashed Screens (from Nintendo Direct, September 2021)

The tracks range from simple to very technical, but the design of the tracks is brilliant across the board. Constructed of curved and twisted stretches of Hot Wheels tracks, but tied together with segments of the environments themselves, one moment it will slide through orange plastic and the next it will be whizzing through benches, air vents, shelves, and the floor itself. . flanked by tiny cones. Particularly impressive is the use of all axes, with a magnetic track that allows vertical climbing and descending and even running on the roof. It means that while six maps don’t seem like much on paper, in practice, the way Hot Wheels Unleashed uses the layers of each level, and every nook and cranny they contain, keeps you fresh for the entire duration of your most kids. -Friendly campaign.

Each event has a lower goal that will reward you for achieving and allow you to continue, but there are more difficult goals for the finalists, and some of the later time trials really forced me to experiment and look for high-stakes shortcuts. I can only speak anecdotally, but so far Hot Wheels Unleashed has done a good job entertaining both kids under 10 and a 40-year-old car nerd, although I feel like a few more types of racing would have been nice. Little police car chases, or eliminations, or just … something else. As it stands, there are only races and time trials, and the online options seem sterile as a result. With that said, my kids have enjoyed playing a makeshift brand of split screen tag on the map floors. The split screen is for two players, not four, sadly, but it works very well on Xbox Series X and has been an absolute hoot.

Even if you get tired of the available tracks, Hot Wheels Unleashed features an extremely deep custom track editor that allows you to create and share your own. You are also not limited to clicking preset corners and track lengths; The rails can be shortened, lengthened, angled, twisted, curved and bent in any way you see fit, and raised or dropped anywhere. It probably took me an entire afternoon to get familiar with the tools, which are quite complex, but once I really learned how to bend the editor to my will, I was able to create Mt. Barf-O-Rama, a monster that wrapped around and through pretty much everyone. my Hot Wheels-themed basement furniture. I expect great things from user created tracks.