I’d forgotten about Hot Wheels until about 2 years ago. My son is 6 and for the last couple of years I’ve had the chance to play with Hot Wheels, something I hadn’t done in a good 35 years. The tracks are mostly the same as they were when I was a kid too. The connectors are different and some of the battery operated tracks don’t work quite as well as I’d hoped, but overall, they’re just good, clean kid fun! We’ve probably got around 60 or so laying about now, along with assorted bits of track, loops, and other stuff, and for a buck or so a car, you really can’t complain. When I heard about Hot Wheels Unleashed from Milestone though, I had to try it. Here’s a game that combines the childhood love of toy cars with video games! Seems like a win! The only question was whether it would be good. This sort of thing has been done before and licensed stuff is often quite terrible. On that note, let’s take a look at Hot Wheels Unleashed!
Hot Wheels Unleashed starts out as it should..with a race! Simply jump right in and get going! Immediately, you’re treated to AAA quality visuals and realize that you’re driving actual recent Hot Wheels cars on a Hot Wheels track that looks like it is set up in an actual house! This is the point where my hopes went up. Then the lights go green and the race is on! Right from the get-go, you know there’s something special here. The physics feel like you’re racing actual Hot Wheels, the tracks are snapped together with official connectors, and the other racers are definitely out to win! Unleashed throws in some boosts as well, allowing you to hit the nitro and blast through a pesky pack of cars or around that last die cast racer between you and victory. Using the ZL and ZR triggers for brakes and gas takes a bit of practice but it becomes intuitive fairly quickly and the design of the tracks and controls gives you a fair chance to compete with your AI opponents. In short, it’s fun to race!
And fun is the key factor in Hot Wheels Unleashed. After you win your first race (assuming you won), you’re treated to a blind box. If you’re not familiar with this concept it’s a random Hot Wheels car of unknown design and ‘rarity’ that you can earn in-game or buy with coins you’ve accrued. These types of blind boxes are common to phone-based gatcha games but relatively uncommon in racing games like this one. In this case, you earn a random Hot Wheels car which you can then use in future races. It’s neat that there are random cars to use, not a set progression, and also amazing how many are available. In fact, the base game comes with a whopping 66 cars that you can eventually unlock (I’m not there yet though) and there are DLC passes available that each add another 9-10 cars including awesome licensed properties and a bunch of extras (at an extra cost, of course). Some of the cars available in Hot Wheels Unleashed are really cool too, including a huge list of Hot Wheels originals, some Hot Wheels based on real cars, and a few licensed ones like the Batmobile (haven’t managed to get it yet…), the TMNT party wagon, K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider, and even the Delorean from Back to the Future!
Regardless of what you get, you’ll be cycling cars to see what fits your play style and every car feels different when you race it, a remarkable achievement. While there’s no tactile feedback in the Switch version, the responsiveness, drift, speed, and other stats of each car have a noticeable impact on gameplay which makes changing cars feel like a unique race each time! On top of that, you can use gears you collect in the main game to upgrade your cars and increase their stats, giving you an edge in later races! It all sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it’s not, and we haven’t even gotten to the nuts and bolts of gameplay yet! There are several modes available in Hot Wheels Unleashed and they’re all pretty great. The main campaign mode is called Hot Wheels City Rumble and in it you move from point to point in an overhead city map, running races against AI opponents, performing time trial races, unlocking secret areas, and even fighting bosses!
Yeah, that’s right, there are boss races in Hot Wheels Unleashed! This is a racer with all the fixings. Don’t get your hopes too far up though, because what that really means is that the boss levels are single lap races that are far more complex than the regular levels with their three lap challenges. They still look cool though, and have the requisite giant robot construction that you’ve come to expect from modern Hot Wheels sets! Within races you’ll find all sorts of hazards too, from tracks that run your wheels backwards to slow you down to barricades to giant spiders that trap your car in their web as your opponents race by! The variety is fantastic and even the jumps are cool! There are even special jump controls that allow you to control the angle and descent of your car, making up time in the air if you’re more skilled than I am. For some players, these areas will be a frustration as it’s easy to send your car sailing out into the abyss, but for the most part, it’s just cool to jump Hot Wheels!
In addition to campaign mode, time trials, and a quick race mode if you just want to race, race, race, there’s a multiplayer online component to Hot Wheels. I’m not much for online competition, but I gave it a go. There’s an online mode and an offline split screen. Split screen is surprisingly bearable, but that sort of thing has come a long way since 19” CRT TVs. It’s still easy to look at the wrong screen though, especially with all the cool stuff going on! Online races are 12 person affairs and naturally way more challenging than the AI. As a racing game amateur, I got worked pretty hard by competitors and those first places I got in the single player game rapidly turned into 8th and 10th places awfully quick. Quiet sob.
There’s also a car livery mode that allows you to customize any car you’ve unlocked in your library, paint, decals, window tint, wheels, the works. It’s a great system with an absolutely spectacular amount of customization available, but held back somewhat by finicky controls and a fairly complex menu system that might not be as much fun for younger players. It’s obvious that Milestone was targeting adults with Hot Wheels Unleashed, which is both awesome and kind of a shame. There’s also a basement modification system that allows you to tweak the basement furniture and décor that’s seen in the background during basement races. It’s pretty comprehensive and if you’ve been watching a lot of HGTV, this is a pretty meant inclusion but I’m not one to fiddle with background decoration and stickers myself. The system for the basement is definitely easier to use than the livery system though.
Next (yes, there’s still more!) there’s a track editor system which allows you to build and race on your own tracks. You can design from scratch or use the prebuilt levels and modify them, allowing for a wide degree of creativity. Some people will absolutely love this and others will ignore it entirely, but either way it’s pretty cool. The controls are complex but honestly a really impressive piece of technology. On the Switch, there’s a patch to improve the track editing tutorial coming any day now, but it all works quite well once you get the hang of it. It’ll take some patience to get there at first though, and this could also be tough for younger players. Fortunately, you can also download other people’s tracks from the server and play them offline if you don’t want to build your own! There is also an in-game store where you can spend all those coins you earned on more blind boxes, special cars that only come up for limited amounts of time on the daily roster. Buying cars is awesome and having a use for that in game gold from single player mode is very cool indeed, but I do wish the prices were a bit lower. When you’re earning 30-60 gold per race, 1200 is a bit of a stretch to get to for buying a limited time car, that’s for sure.
Now not everything is roses in Hot Wheels Unleashed. There are definitely a few negatives here. First off is the issue with time trial difficulty. While the races are challenging but overall easily beatable, the time trials are absolute beasts that leave you struggling to master the boost charge mechanics as you strive to grab that last half a second to just qualify. I’m not great at racing games and I managed to pull off first place in most every race, but in the time trials, I could barely qualify and I didn’t manage to hit the higher score goal in a single trial. Not one. After a while I discovered (and I should have read this in the intro material but my button pressing nature bypassed it) that if you use the brakes to drift around corners, it charges your boost meter, so that if you manage to switch between boosting and drifting you can be blowing through courses with nitro most of the time. But even with that knowledge and a ton of practice, it was legitimately difficult to beat those time trails. From a racing standpoint, it’s great to see this kind of challenge, but a large part of the audience for something like Hot Wheels is kids and this will be hard for younger players. I know this because my six-year-old found the game to be too difficult for him to play easily. He was unable to keep his car facing the correct way and had difficulty managing the controls over all the twists and turns of the complex tracks. After a while, he just wanted to watch me play.
That brings me to the overall difficulty of the game. While any casual racer will be able to play Hot Wheels Unleashed, there’s no kid mode built into the game and no assistive mode that allows for younger audiences to do all the cool stuff they’ve been imagining with their actual Hot Wheels. It’s important to note this because it feels like the game misses the mark by not having a dedicated kid mode when Hot Wheels are primarily intended for kids, even if adults have taken over the market and bought up all the cool cars at toy stores, virtually ensuring that the brand will suffer in the long run in some ways. Even on easy mode, some races present a challenge and if the difficulty is cranked up, Hot Wheels Unleashed is a bruiser designed for season racers. And that’s awesome. But there definitely should have been some kid consideration tossed in here for a license targeted at children. The same goes for the secret levels, which stop you from progressing until you hit some unknown goal that unlocks them. Sure, you get there eventually, but as a kid playing this, it would be incredibly frustrating to just get blocked when you want to go somewhere on the map and then artificially herded toward time trials and more races when that secret icon is sparkling away with the temptation of a new secret car or who knows what else. Grr.
Finally, there are the blind boxes. I love the idea that you can just randomly win a rare car and do better in races. But unfortunately, in the build I was given for this review, I kept pulling the same three cars over and over again. There’s nothing quite as disappointing as going through race after race and finally winning a new car only to find that it’s the same one you started the game with that you’ve now pulled for the third time. There were way too many blind box repeats and even if you buy a blind box (which I tried as well) you can easily pull a car you already have (which I did). The unique cars you can buy are a better investment but it would have been cool for the algorithm to compensate for this by at least giving you new common cars each pull or every other pull or something. It actually got to the point where I was dreading the blind boxes a little for fear that I’d just pull the same thing again. A bit too much of the mobile gatcha concept for comfort is probably the best way to describe the blind boxes.
Despite those issues, Hot Wheels Unleashed is an absolute powerhouse racing game with tons of personality, solid controls, and well-designed courses and interfaces. There are still some tutorial updates to the track editor that have yet to launch for the Switch version, as well as some quality of life tweaks in other areas but the game honestly runs smooth as silk and unless your primary goal is to design tracks, it’s not a big deal. The versatility included for car and track customization is essentially endless and the game is an absolute blast to play. It might be a bit harder than you like and the blind boxes might be a bit too rigged, but this toy car racer is simply brimming with fun and personality. At $50 for Hot Wheels Unleashed, you’d better like racing games but there’s no question that for the amount of content you get and the quality of the racing, you’re definitely getting your money’s worth with one spectacular game! The only thing left is to start your engines!
This review was based on a digital copy of Hot Wheels Unleashed provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and was excellent in both. Hot Wheels Unleashed is also available for Playstation 4 and 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on Steam. All screenshots are of actual gameplay.