Hot Wheels Unleashed: Colorful arcade racing game with nostalgia factor in preview
Building slopes for your own new Hot Wheels like you did as a child – who has the time for that anymore? Mattel and developer Milestone now want to fulfill this dream for us, although this time we don’t even have to listen to mom and clean up. Hot Wheels Unleashed wants to bring the fun of childhood to computers and consoles. The development studio is now known for good racing games, which gives hope for a pleasant racing experience. We could try a demo version.
The Arcade Racer should lure to release with a total of 60 carts from different parts of the Hot Wheels toy car series and 40 stages. For our preview, we got to see about half of each, as well as a small selection of modes.
speed racing
For some slopes you need a good stomach, like here in the high-rise. We like to get to dizzy heights.
A total of six game modes are planned for the finished game: online multiplayer with up to twelve people, Challenges in Time Attack, a career mode, a track editor, split screen and quick start. In the preview we could only access the last two variants, even if we would have liked to try the track editor. In the split screen we prove ourselves against a fellow player on the same device.
Quick Start, on the other hand, is, as the name suggests, suitable for a quick introduction to the game. After choosing the car and the train, we compete against AI opponents. We can adjust the difficulty of our computer opponents, with only the hardest of them representing a real challenge. Even beginners will be able to assert themselves against the mid-range CPU quite quickly. So there isn’t a big learning curve, but there are lots of curves in the game. Basically, we need to know little more than how to accelerate, steer, drift and use the boost that we generate while driving.
Fast car
The carts sometimes have funny names, sometimes less funny, but they are almost always puns.
But we have to learn the peculiarities of various mobile vehicles and the routes. In the preview, a fairly large selection of cars was available right from the start. In the finished game, the simpler but somewhat slower carts should be made available to us at the beginning. Then, as we progress through the game, we can unlock other sleds of varying rarity and difficulty, all thankfully without microtransactions. Many Hot Wheels bear puns as names such as Veloci Racer or Buns of Steel. In the finished game we should also be able to personalize them with skins and other adjustments.
The stage is set
Which cart we choose can affect how easy or how difficult we have it on the track. High speed is not always the key to victory and sometimes we end up off the track. In fact, it can also be quite funny, since we can then simply explore the surroundings if we set the best time for it. A lot of love was put into this to make the world around it seem alive. However, we would have liked it to be possible more often to find shortcuts based on knowledge of the area. This is only possible to a limited extent with the current routes. But maybe something like that is possible with the full release with the track editor.
Off the track we can explore the area, but that rarely gives us a real advantage. The skate park offers a lot of space.
The stages are located in different areas in which Hot Wheels tracks were set up, just like in the living room. In addition to a college campus, a workshop and a skate park, there are also more unusual places such as a skyscraper construction site. The environments themselves offer the greatest variety, the tracks themselves only offer a few obstacles such as roadblocks, spider webs and missing crash barriers.
Nice cart
Overall, however, you notice the quality that Milestone brings with it. The toy car models already look great in our preview and the rest of the graphics don’t show any blurred textures or other beta diseases. Driving felt very smooth with Xbox controller on PC.
For Hot Wheels fans, children and nostalgics, the title is expected to provide some fun, but it is not particularly challenging. Maybe the finished game with self-created maps and online matches can also attract die-hard racing game fans. Hot Wheels Unleashed is to be released on September 30 for PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. The standard version costs just under 50 euros, but other special versions go up to 120 euros.
