Hot Wheels Unleashed Review: More Showroom Than Speedway
Designed more for collectors than racing fans, Hot Wheels Unleashed is a soulless take on the toy line that isn’t worth the initial investment.
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The first thing Hot Wheels Unleashed showcases as it loads up is a loot box. Before racing, players have to open several boxes to unlock a set of initial vehicles, earning an achievement entitled “First One’s Free” for their trouble. These bold choices reveal exactly what kind of game Hot Wheels Unleashed is before a single tiny rubber tire meets the plastic road. While developer Milestone provides a refined racing experience, the priority in the full game lies in car collection and endless progression. It’s a fitting attitude when it comes to tackling a popular line of toys, but that’s cold comfort to anyone hoping to just blaze through a few sets of tracks at a steady pace.
Most who play Hot Wheels Unleashed will end up starting with the game’s City Rumble campaign, a Smash Bros. World of Light-esque board game menu full of races and time attack challenges. It’s the only way to unlock all the racetracks for local multiplayer and the primary way to generate currency for upgrading and accruing new vehicles. While it works fine as a way to dole out race after race, the City Rumble mode features a barebones presentation, explaining both its mechanics and its monster-themed boss battles via tiny bits of text that pop up in brief spurts. There’s no narration, no graphical flourish between events, and no stop to a soundtrack filled with the type of music that warms up a crowd before a press conference.
Said boss fights are less impressive than Forza Horizon’s “follow the plane” challenges, presenting a simple race with slightly more complicated elements embedded in the track. The monsters themselves are simply a quartet of some of the more extreme track pieces from the toy line, and they show up in other tracks as default hazards as time goes on. While these are some of the best tracks in the game simply due to how much they shake things up from default racing, it’s disappointing that the appeal doesn’t lie in some over-the-top gameplay experiment. It’s a disappointing monument to one of Hot Wheels Unleashed’s strangest juxtapositions.
Milestone is known primarily as a developer of simulation games, helming everything from MotoGP to Monster Energy Supercross. This translates awkwardly to the world of Hot Wheels, with Unleashed playing out as if it’s trying to dial in how an actual toy car would operate on tracks full of loops and impossible curves. Cars can veer wildly off course in sections without track, fall from the top of loops due to a lack of momentum, and flip into the air because of an awkward landing. Each of the many famous toys randomly doled out to players has stats attached to them, meaning that a fan-favorite model might play in a suboptimal way when compared to a licensed Nissan truck or K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider. In a world where arcade racing games thrived, this dedication to presenting Hot Wheels Unleashed as realistically as possible might be admirable, but the result makes that same style a baffling choice.
With all that being said, Hot Wheels Unleashed is pretty good once the racing actually begins. It’s a drift-heavy style that borrows a lot from the latest Mario Kart outings, and it demands precise input in order to grab victory on anything but the easiest difficulty. Holding down the gas pedal constantly will not lead to great results, something that might be unexpected when compared to other games bearing the Hot Wheels name. There’s a good sense of speed and plenty of opportunities to get physical with enemy cars online or in single-player. It works, and playing through hours of matches can be a breezy good time, but it all fails to leave a meaningful impression because of the systems that surround it.
Hot Wheels Unleashed feels less like a cohesive racing experience and more like a framework where more and more Hot Wheels branded content can live as the months go on. This comes through not only in the lackluster presentation but in the currency system that robs players of any sense of urgency to complete missions. It doesn’t feel satisfying to go through an hour of races and grind up currency to get a single box that contains a duplicate of an already-unlocked car. Instead of unlocking cars like heroes in Overwatch, the game operates as a video slot machine. While there’s no way as of this writing to purchase currency with real-world money, the entire system feels tailor-made to support exactly that kind of philosophy. At that point, it might be a better investment to simply pick up some actual Hot Wheels and just watch them zoom around the track in real life.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/hot-wheels-unleashed-game-review/