The debate was visceral and passionate. “What are you talking about?” I insisted. “There isn’t any comparison. Hot Wheels is clearly better than Barbie! For one, Barbie is always pink and all she does is wear different clothes. Hot Wheels come in a massive variety of colors spanning the entire spectrum, and you can make them do jumps. And besides, Barbies are for girls!” My mystified seven-year-old self scoffed with disdain and frustration, and just a little hint of anxiety (admittedly with considerably more childlike vocabulary). I was adamant that the girls among my Kindergarten classmates who chose the Barbie toys at McDonald’s were wrong for doing so. I loved Hot Wheels. Looking back more than 20 years later I’m a little embarrassed at the silly argument. But I think I understand the intensity.

For much of the time since Hot Wheels was introduced in 1968 it has been a solid staple toy for children most everywhere it’s been sold. Between being cheap and not taking up much space they’ve been an easy sell for parents, mine included. This means that they’ve been an important part of a lot of people’s lives and I was no exception. It’s personal for people. People that at this point range from Grandparents down to today’s Kindergartners.

With all that in mind it’s exciting to have a new proper Hot Wheels video game on our hands. There have been DLC add-ons in other games (Forza, Rocket League, and others) recently and the obligatory mobile games but it’s been some time since we’ve seen these die-cast speed machines have a full game unto themselves. Add to that the fact that the arcade racing genre has slowed down to a crawl for years, and it’s easy to get excited that we have another fully formed Hot Wheels racing game on consoles again. I have not personally wanted a game to be good as much as I wanted this one to be in a while. Hot Wheels deserves it. So, then let’s talk about how well it lives up to the legacy it’s pulling from.

Classical Gasoline

Normally the first time you boot up a racing game is nothing special, but I was impressed and excited by the first time I booted up Hot Wheels Unleashed. You’re greeted with the usual options to set the screen brightness, and contrast, and then your difficulty level. Right away, I found that the graphic design, while not excessive or complex, was interesting and creative. You start off with three cars that come out of blind boxes. In fact most of the cars come out of blind boxes whether they were unlocked in game or not. We’ll talk more about that in a minute, but suffice to say that I was disappointed (about the blind boxes).

Then you are put immediately into a tutorial race to show you the basics. The game controls similarly to what you would expect from an arcade racer. Right trigger for acceleration and left trigger primarily for drifting/breaking/driving in reverse. There’s a nitro system that applies to each car slightly differently to add variety. The cars all feel heavy enough to control well, but still light enough to be small toys. The ability to spin and flip the cars when they’re airborne is a nice touch. I was reminded of little-me’s own way of pretending the toys were doing tricks in slow motion while I spun them in my hand.

Gameplay-wise it’s clear that other than the toys themselves, the developers drew heavy inspiration from the TrackMania series from Ubisoft and the classic toy car racers like the MicroMachines games. Controls and track design more the former, visual and the environmental sensibility more the latter.

That being said, it’ll please serious fans to know that most of the game’s look and feel is derived from the Hot Wheel toys directly while borrowing elements from proven successes like the two games previously mentioned. The cars are all modeled on real toys and so are the track pieces. Spiders shooting web-balls to stop you for a second, scorpions filling the course with puddles of green goo that make you slow down, it’s a well done adaptation of the toys in a way that makes sense in a fantastical sort of way.

Little Green Lights

The developer — Milestone — has been doing racing games, mostly simulations, for more than two decades; and while this is a true-blue arcade racer, that expertise shines through. I’m going to come out and say it here: the racing in Hot Wheels Unleashed is really good. It shouldn’t shock anyone considering the pedigree of the team that made this game. It’s fun, plain and simple. There aren’t any weapons or guns like a kart racer (not that there’s anything wrong with those.), nor is there some added gimmick to make it more than it needs to be. The gameplay feels confident and focused. The action feels frantic and exciting, but not confusing. The music is fun and surprisingly good. The courses they designed are mostly fantastic with one or two frustrating exceptions. However, they all feel unique despite the consistent Hot Wheels aesthetic.

Being that we are MP1st, let’s talk about multiplayer. My wife and I had an absolute blast racing split-screen. Rarely did anyone get so far out front that it felt one sided. In my time with the game I found that every race was a contest right to the end. You start off only able to access a handful of premade tracks from split screen but you end up unlocking 50 or so more by playing through the single-player.

I had difficulty getting into online games given that the lobbies pre-release were hard to populate, but I have no concern given that Milestone has made good net code for both the MXGP, and the Monster Energy Supercross games. If you are planning on getting this to play split-screen with your spouse, significant other, roommate, or child, I’ll tell you that you should go for it. Even if you are wanting to play the single-player mode exclusively I’d say you should. If you are wanting to explore the customization and Track Building modes, that’s more of a mixed quality experience.

The Good, The Bad, And the Ugly.

There is a huge amount of customization options in HWU. The design of individual cars’ paint and stickers and even the “Basement” environment that you can build and race tracks in are customizable. In such a way that I have no doubt we’ll eventually see further customization options for sale as DLC. The other four environments are interesting in their own right, they just aren’t customizable like the Basement is. My one critique of this Basement editor is that at launch there aren’t all that many options. Again, DLC should likely change that.

The same goes for the Track Builder. You can build a track completely from scratch in any of the main environments and an additional empty room with no furniture or decorations. Think of “Sandbox” from Halo 3. The problem I struggled with is that the console controls for these are all varying degrees of infuriating. The Basement least so, it’s mostly just a series of menus, though I did find it much less engaging than I would have liked. The Track Builder, on the other handm was the most frustrating to navigate effectively with a controller. 

When you start the Track Builder for the first time there is a decent tutorial on the most bare bones aspects of what a track requires to be published and used. However the actual controls of building a track felt like a poorly designed puzzle game in their own right and I gave up several times trying to understand what to do. This could be seen as a good or a bad thing I suppose. The whole process can feel extremely technical and imprecise. So for people who understand it and/or are playing on a mouse and keyboard, I imagine they could design some really interesting complex stuff. But for those of us playing on a console, it’s going to be a much more difficult process to put anything cool together. It’s a little bit of a shame as the TrackMania influence is obvious, and it feels like the restrictions of a gamepad are going to hold this aspect back for most players.

The Livery editor, their term for the car editor, is in the middle on ease of inputs, but I was able to get used to it enough to create some car skins that I thought were cool. It’s very similar to the body shop in the Midnight Club games from Rockstar. (Another great racing series that seems to have been woefully forgotten.) A wide range of color and material options for the paint job that you then can put up to a ridiculous number of stickers on. The stickers range from the expected Hot Wheels logos and animal drawings to various shapes and English letters in both capital and lowercase formats. I’m excited to see what the really creative players do with it. It has precision issues like the Track Builder but I found it much more forgiving.

Light My Nitro

All in all I would say that Hot Wheels Unleashed isn’t all it wants to be, but it’s a fantastic arcade racer if that’s your primary interest. The fact that it uses Blind Boxes as your main way of getting new cars is a downside in that you can, and I have, gotten duplicates. Thankfully though, they allow you to sell or break down the duplicates for one of the game’s two currencies to use elsewhere. And they also have a rotating “featured” list of cars you can buy outright, but there’s only a handful available at a time and most are going for more than twice the gold coins a blind box costs.  It all feels like a way to compromise between the desire to sell microtransactions without making the game feel like it just has its hand out all the time, and these days I guess that’s the best you can ask for. It should be noted that I found earning currency and unlocking blind boxes in the single-player effective enough to build a decent collection of cars without spending any additional money.

I’m giving Hot Wheels Unleashed a 8.5 out of 10. If all you care about is the racing itself it might be a little higher, but the issues with the controls in the Track Builder and a few other small issues here and there make the score for the whole product a solid 8.5. Hopefully people are able to see past or even embrace the less than stellar parts because ultimately I think this game is worth playing and I think that for fans of arcade racing, it’s a must-play. I’m pleased that it lived up to my expectations on that front. Hopefully we’ll see a resurgence in arcade racing on this generation of consoles but whether or not that happens I’m glad we have this to either kick it off or hold us over. Maybe Milestone could talk with Rockstar about doing the next Midnight Club game before they make another one of these. Now wouldn’t that be something.

Score: 8.5/10

Pros:

• The Racing Itself
• Hot Wheels Aesthetic Done Well
• Livery Customization
• Great Music

Cons:

• Control Frustrations in the Track Builder and Livery Editor
• Blind Boxes (even if you do earn them by playing single player)
• Unable to Unlock Premade Tracks through Multiplayer