HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED
Hands-on with Milestone’s licensed loop-de-loop-’em-up
Games like Hot Wheels Unleashed were abundant in PC gaming’s beige era. You’d pop a demo disc into your Voodoo 2 tower and find an Airfix Dogfighter or a ReVolt, in which toys raced across suburban bedrooms. They were never going to hold your attention like Richard Burns Rally, but it was an afternoon of giggles.
Enter Milestone’s straightforward Hot Wheels racer. Once again a magical and unknown force has imbued collectable toys with sentience—and also rather thoughtfully arranged a number of tracks around college campuses and skateparks—and your mission is to race one of those toys to victory.
The full release will include a track builder and 12-player online multiplayer, but for this preview, simple quick races were my main event. They walk a line between the exuberant loop-de-looping you’d expect from the official toy licence it carries and a sterner, more straight-laced style. It’s Trackmania without the restarts. MarioKart, but with straight-line braking. A world of gravitydefying tracks that imply arcade forgivingness, and then chuck you miles away from the circuit.
It’s a bit frustrating, because even after several hours of racing on it, I’m still not totally sure what Hot Wheels Unleashed wants from me. Is it a game about powersliding around every corner, or about learning the tracks and finding braking points? It’s a mystery.
HEAT WAVE
All tracks include acceleration strips: Blue spots that charge your boost, and pink spots that boost you instantly. On paper, there’s an advantage to weaving lines that take you through as many of these as possible, but often they fling you at disadvantageous trajectories towards the next section of track.
The most effective way to approach a race, then, is to know its undulations and traps before the green light and tip-toe around them, coasting through some corners, powersliding very rarely, and boosting only when you’re damn sure the track’s straight for the next five seconds. It isn’t unsatisfying, it’s just not what the pedal-to-the-diecast-metal trailer implies.
Ostensibly, different circuits will focus on various disciplines, like drifting or navigating environmental hazards (such as the confounded spider that spat its web at me at point-blank range on the final lap and cost me 11 positions). But after a few races, the distinction becomes unclear.
The vehicles, however, are wonderfully distinct. Milestone nails the cuteness of its miniatures, the sparkle of their various paint jobs, and even the scratches across their bodies. They also handle wildly differently. There are a couple of different boost styles—a series of bursts or a long continuous release—and some cars offer a button-bashing minigame on the starting grid to nail a quick start. This being the modern era, cars are arranged into color-coded rarity tiers, and I expect acquisition of top-tier vehicles will account for much of the long-game draw.
The variation in their handling is also a factor in why I haven’t yet sussed this game’s handling. The Hot Wheels High school bus and Night Shifter hot rod require completely different touches to convince them round corners, much to the game’s credit. Success looks like it’ll be earned by spending time with one vehicle and figuring out its behavior.
It’s unlikely Hot Wheels Unleashed will keep its hooks in me for months, but it should be good for a quick thrill. There’s a lot to be said for racing you can access a few seconds after hitting ‘play’ on Steam in the games-as-a-service age, and the toy car collection adds to the long-term draw.
I’M STILL NOT TOTALLY SURE WHAT HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED WANTS FROM ME