Hot Wheels Unleashed Review: Fun, Fast-Paced, Flawed
For as long as I can remember, there were two things my excitement filled shop visits consisted of most during my childhood: picking up a brand new game, and buying a bunch of new Hot Wheels cars to play with. Like most car guys growing up, Hot Wheels among many things was one of the early influences into the love and appreciation for car culture I have today.
But Hot Wheels wasn’t just about collecting cool cars to show off on your shelf, it was also about racing them on death-defying stunt tracks at insane speeds, with wacky vehicles and out-of-this-world obstacles – something the team at Milestone has managed to capture the essence of perfectly with Hot Wheels Unleashed.
Hot Wheels Unleashed’s City Rumble campaign offers up a meaty experience for racing fans to sink their teeth into, with around 100 events to play through as you progress and explore through Hot Wheels’ top-down city, which will no doubt have you reminiscing on the old-school city carpets you’d play on as a kid.
City Rumble’s event selection has a branching path design which is both great yet irritating. As you complete one event, you’ll unlock another and from there could unlock others that go in different directions around the city-based map, which can lead you to little areas offering cool little rewards for following along that path such as currency and Blind Boxes.
One problem however is with the games ‘Secret’ events – specific events that will only unlock after completing an unknown objective. While the events themselves do give hints how to unlock them, some of these events can roadblock your campaign progress, which makes it even more of a struggle if you’re unsure how to unlock them in the first place.
In my first few hours of play, I found Hot Wheels Unleashed’s approach to driving mechanics quite annoying, with the drifting camera pulling you closer and preventing your side view ahead, constantly slamming into barricades and struggling to maintain a solid drift. Fast forward 15 hours later however, I've come to both master the mechanics and appreciate the depth the developers have gone to to make this racer both accessible for a younger, more casual audience, but with depth for those who play racing games religiously like myself.
The annoying thing about the cars in Hot Wheels Unleashed is while there's great diversity, with modern muscle and supercars to licensed greats from Back to the Future and TMMT to crazy rides Hot Wheels are known for, it doesn't encourage you to want to use these vehicles. Most of my play time I mainly used the same 3-4 vehicles, anything remotely slow I'd be left in the dust with the AI, essentially making them unfun to want to use in races. It's a shame too, because even with upgrades, these vehicles aren't just as viable to want to use in time trials or online against other players.
Cars aren't filtered by classes either, so any car can go up against each other, which can lead to uneven balance when using a Rubbish Truck with Zero Speed compared to a Rocket Car with Max Speed. While there's a great range of real, licensed and wacky cars in the game, they feel more akin to skins with different speed and physics than anything distinct.
The tracks you race on in Hot Wheels Unleashed are excellent and really capture the Hot Wheels joy, with a variety of different environments including an overly detailed basement setting as you race under and over a gaming setup, a garage setting loaded with tools and bright neon lights, a college dorm loaded with books and shelves and a construction site dangling you above the clouds.
These maps are great and provide some excellent fun, but do tend to feel very samey once you start grinding through the campaign. What’s even more annoying is the lack of interactivity with these backdrops, which would greatly help set these maps apart more. I’d have loved to have been able to race my cars on the pool table in the basement, or along a railing in the construction site – some cool unique part of the course from each of these layouts.
Hot Wheels Unleashed also comes with a Track Builder tool suite that lets you build your own races with a bunch of the various track pieces and stunt props to really let your inner childhood creativity run wild. You’ll earn new props and designs as you complete various campaign races to further add flavour to your courses as well.
While some elements of the Track Builder can be quite intuitive, others can be quite annoying and definitely need some adjustment. One inparticular is the ability of modifying tracks, which once they’re “validated” by completing a test track, they can no longer be edited and are then uploaded. Most disappointingly is there’s no way to actually filter and search for community-made courses, they’re just randomized when searching for an online game.
Hot Wheels Unleashed features an online multiplayer mode, or even split screen if local couch co-op is your jam, which lets you race both the developer made and player built courses online with friends or other people. It’s great fun and has its fair share of hilarious moments when playing with players, especially when still learning the mechanics and you overtake them on that final stretch with a well-executed drift boost combo, but your mileage may vary if single player races are more your style.
As you progress through the City Rumble campaign or take on other players online you’ll earn coins and gears, two types of in-game currencies which can be spent towards purchasing new cars – either via Blind Boxes or a rotating Shop - and upgrading them. However, the earn rate of Coins and Gears is not only abysmally low but doesn’t seem to consider difficulty settings or race length.
Completing a later stage campaign race will typically net you around 60-90 coins or 25-40 gears, with Boss events offering around 140 coins/90 gears – something quite worrying when there are trophies/achievements for earning 100,000 coins and 25,000 gears... These rates are fixed between difficulty settings, and in Multiplayer you can farm coins by competing player-made ‘one second races’ with a friend and constantly earn the same amount.
What makes things even more frustrating is the vehicle purchasing system – Blind Boxes. These are a form of lootbox where you’ll constantly earn duplicates of the car repeatedly in a weird way of prolonging your playtime. It can be fun to unlock a rare and exciting new vehicle, but c’mon guys I’m getting quite tired of the same El Camino over and over again…
The developers have promised there are no plans for Microtransactions in Hot Wheels Unleashed, but with the currency earns and loot box based unlock design currently in place, its hard to not feel skeptical about their monetization strategy going forward. I REALLY hope Milestone can adjust and nail the currency/loot box drop rates in future updates to make it feel more rewarding but not overly so.
You might read through all this and think I have more complaints about Hot Wheels Unleashed than I do praises, but that’s not the case. There’s a great deal of fun and enjoyment to be had with Hot Wheels and something I find myself coming back to constantly during this period of big blockbuster releases to get in some pure fast-paced arcade racing fun .
Milestone have shown they’re dedicated to improving Hot Wheels Unleashed post-launch, with a slew of content on the horizon promising free DLC, new vehicles, track builder modules, customization items, racing seasons, expansions and not one, not two but THREE season passes in the near future. With all this promised, I hope Milestone takes into account the community feedback and addresses a lot of the concerns in post-launch updates alongside the new content.
Over the 15+ hours I’ve put into Hot Wheels Unleashed over the last two weeks, I’ve had a great deal of genuine fun that I wasn’t quite expecting. Hot Wheels Unleashed captures the childhood toy racing fantasy in a fun yet flawed fast-paced arcade racer suitable for casual and experienced gamers, and I’m excited to see what the future has in store for this larger than life racer.
[Reviewed on PlayStation 5. Special Thanks to Koch Media ANZ for providing my review copy!]