Hot Wheels Unleashed (Switch) review

There are few licenses that are better suited to a video game than Hot Wheels. After all, when the entire brand revolves around collecting a wide variety of small cars and then creating exaggerated tracks for them to race on, it’s fair to say that any game that manages to capture that essence of pure fun is well on its way to becoming. exit.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is the latest attempt to digitize the toy series and is probably the best Hot Wheels set to date. That said, there is something about it (at launch at least) that leaves us wanting a bit more.

The game’s main single-player mode is City Rumble, a series of races spread across a large world map with multiple routes. Naturally, the plan is to fight your way through all the races by clearing them all, earning stars, and collecting rewards along the way.

These events are the standard fare you’d expect from a racing game: quick races (where you must finish first) and time trials (where you must beat a certain time to earn a star, or a shorter second time for two). . Aside from a handful of ‘boss battles’, which are just longer races around a big toy, there really isn’t much variety in these races. You don’t even have the typical ‘eliminator’ style run that most games add to mix things up a bit.

It’s quite fun and it will take you between 6-10 hours to complete, depending on your skill level. It’s possible to set it to Easy, in case a kid is playing it, for example, or just fancy a more relaxing ride, and the rewards are the same regardless. That said, time trials don’t have difficulty settings, and some of the tighter limits can be tricky for newcomers.

The goal of completing all these races is to earn coins and gears. Coins can be spent on new cars, while gears can be used to upgrade the vehicles you already have in your collection. Given that half the fun of Hot Wheels in real life is collecting them, it should come as no surprise that it’s the funnest part of the game too, even if it gets a little bit square.

You can buy cars in two ways. The most common is to spend coins on ‘Blind Boxes’, which are your loot boxes mentioned above and will give you one of the 68 cars in the game at random (and the common ones obviously appear more frequently).

However, this is not the kind of game that a new car gives you every time. It is possible to buy a Blind Box and get a duplicate of a car that you already have in your collection. In situations like this, you can sell them or ‘dismantle’ them into gears to update your original.

If you’re starting to think “wait, this will make it difficult to complete the whole set” then … well yeah, frankly. But there is at least some support in the Limited Offer section, which picks five cars at random and presents them for you, allowing you to purchase a specific one (think of it as the Trophy Shop in Smash Bros on Wii U / 3DS). . Cars are changed every few hours in the workshop, which means that if you are patient enough, you can finally get the last ones you need.

That’s all well and good, but what about the racing itself? Well, it’s okay, really. The tracks are ingenious as a concept – expect a lot of those iconic bright orange and blue plastic tracks to glide all over the place as you go on loops, steep turns, and the like. Each track also has a great real-life backdrop, similar to Micro Machines games, to make it clear that you are racing toy cars. However, unlike Micro Machines, these venues rarely veer onto the slopes, meaning they usually only serve as eye candy rather than actual obstacles.

While there are a large number of rinks, they are all grouped into just five themes: basement, skate park, college campus, garage, and skyscraper. This means that while the layouts can change quite a bit, the courses themselves start to look similar in no time. We hope that upcoming DLC ​​packs add some new environments to provide much-needed variety.

On the track itself, handling can take a bit of getting used to. Acceleration, steering, and normal turns are perfectly fine, but drifting isn’t as intuitive as in other arcade racing games. As such, it will take a bit of time for you to stop bumping into the edges of the curves. It’s imperative that you find out too, because successful drifts are what fire up your turbos the fastest.

Speaking of turbos, the game’s boost functionality is a clever way to add some diversity to each car’s racing style. Some cars have a boost meter that drains when you hold down the turbo button, while others have a set number of unique boosts (similar to a mushroom in Mario Kart). Both can be recharged while drifting, but each requires a different strategy when used on the track. Also, different cars have different sized boost gauges or may contain different boost numbers.

Things would start to look a bit underwhelming here if it weren’t for the cars, which are undoubtedly the star of the show (well, hopefully so considering the game is named after them). The 68 cars offered at launch range from sensibly licensed vehicles like a ’55 Chevrolet or a Fiat 500, to more ridiculous designs like the Motosaurus (a big Stegosaurus on wheels) or the Roller Toaster, which… well, it’s a toaster.

Unlocking these cars is the highlight of the game, and we are sure that anyone who has a true love for Hot Wheels will be delighted to see some of the models that have been chosen for this game. There are also plans to bring in more licensed cars in the future, but unfortunately these will be paid DLCs (because those licenses don’t pay for themselves we guess).

As for the other modes of the game, we are at a standstill here. The pre-launch curse means we’ve been struggling to find cash games online, although the few we’ve managed have been fine. With that said, there is only one ‘Quick Play’ option right now, no ranked mode or anything like that, and that could get old quickly if not updated.

Perhaps most importantly, there is also a ‘day one’ patch coming to the game, but the Switch version won’t get it until October 4 (that is, more like a day five patch). This patch will include “general and minor fixes” and a “significant update” to the Track Builder tutorial, which in its current form is a bit all over the place.

The theory is that once it’s been patched, players will be able to create their own tracks with a large selection of larger ‘module’ parts and toys, and then share them online for others to compete. With the DLC packs offering more backgrounds and modules, there is a real chance that this mode could provide the longevity the game needs at this point and almost turn into a toy car racing Super Mario Maker. But that remains to be seen.