When it comes to racing games, I’m always keeping an eye out for the next game to play with friends. So when Hot Wheels Unleashed was first announced, I watched the teaser trailer and became more excited. Fast forward since the announcement and we have gotten to see more trailers leading up to the game’s launch on September 30th, 2021. Even with new details coming out, the idea of creating your own track in-game pulled me in further. The company Milestone is a well-known developer with a focus on racing games; it is interesting to see how Milestone took its years of racing game experience and put it into Hot Wheels Unleashed.
Hot Wheels Unleashed takes no shortcuts on all the iconic cars, and themes, many of us played with growing up. These range from the orange tracks, crazy tricked-out vehicles, to the idea of creating a crazy track to race on. I’ll get to that last part later on! Just firing up the game, brought a lot of nostalgia to playing with Hot Wheels while growing up. The one thing going through my head is what memories will be coming back to me as I play or see cars from years past.
Main Game
Hot Wheels Unleashed contains a map that allows for exploration. This city-like map isn’t exactly fully open. It should be more comparable to a giant board game with levels. Do you remember growing up with those city carpets? Playing with Hot Wheels cars and driving all over the place using your imagination? I’d like you to picture that, but your movement throughout the world will be limited to beating the tracks or figuring out what’s needed to unlock some tracks as well such as having a certain vehicle in-game.
During your time playing, you’ll select the track highlighted from the direction you decide to go. The track’s challenges vary; from beating set times, to even coming in first with other bonus rewards for doing so. Some bonus rewards can be an in-game currency, to upgrade your Hot Wheels cars, to even blind boxes to obtain new cars as well as cosmetic items for your user profile. While you may beat a track, doing so may unlock other areas of the world for you to race. An example is a car’s name, which may mean you must have that car and race with it and after doing so will unlock that race or time trial.
At the time of writing, I’m 72% of the way into this part of the game and some tracks are longer, yet take time to complete the main game. While I’m someone that likes to work on fully completing an area such as this, I still have more to do and times to beat. With the open-world aspect of the game, you’ll have quite a few hours of gameplay ahead of you; battle in one of the five boss races as well as work on unlocking all the tracks in-game.
Track Creation
As I played through Hot Wheels Unleashed, I noticed there was an option to create your own track. This alone had me think up crazy ideas, as I played through the main game. How crazy could a track become? It’s to the point, if you have an idea you can most likely create it. In-game you’ll have the option of a few in-game locations to build your track within. The game itself has many options of track you can place, ranging from the iconic orange track, the loops, and more.
One thing I enjoyed doing while creating one of my tracks was to have it turn magnetic and have it go all over the area being upside down, sideways, and at times to the point, you’re not sure if you’re driving upside down or right side up. While a few other press members and I played tracks from the game in multiplayer, there were user-created tracks featured.
With the track creation itself, the world is your canvas and what I mean by that is. Let’s say you decide to build your track in the basement. You’ll be able to go all over the place, bend the tracks to your whim, even convert to the magnetic road so you can drive sideways, upside down. Looking to split your track to go two ways, it’s there, changes a loop into a big tornado or a track going down the shelf you can do that.
Track Creation Difficulty and Growth
At first, the track creation will take time to get used to, as it took me a few hours to really get used to the controls of placing the track, movement, and deciding on the best track part to use. My advice for now, if new to the track creation, is to use the open space so you can be used to the options as well as allowing your mind to go wild as you build it.
Other areas include a skate park, an open space garage, as well as a few other locations that you’ll get to race while playing the game. I’m hoping for future content such as DLC of crazy locations to build new tracks in as well. It’ll be a nice refresh to see what creations happen in-game in those areas.
However, I do wish there was a way to download the other players’ tracks. I did look over the game to see if that was an option, but at this time I have only seen that liveries were the only means of creations you can save.
Online Multiplayer
The multiplayer in Hot Wheels Unleashed is quite simple. In this area of the game, you’ll have the option of quick play, which finds you a random online lobby to join. You’ll be able to play along with 11 other players from around the world. There is also the option to set up a private lobby for your friends to join. Personally, I did enjoy having up to 11people join me, while I was randomly searching for a match.
The matches alone get quite crazy! What I mean by that is that the entire online portion is set up through a voting system. Players have the option to vote on a short track, a slightly longer, or a much longer track (Short, Medium, Long). These will be the first three out of five options you can select. I do like that the game pulls random user-created tracks as the last two tracks to choose from. During our pre-release time, there were quite a few player-created tracks I enjoyed.
Local Multiplayer & Races?
Hot Wheels Unleashed also has the option for split-screen, which is mainly for local use. I did get the chance to race through a few tracks with Erin. From a visual standpoint, not much changed and I noticed no issues with framerate. As with any game that has a split-screen mode, it was a nice touch to include local multiplayer in case you do have multiple people in the house or guests and want to battle each other for the top spot.
While time trials are not really a multiplayer game mode, to me, but could be for some others. There is the option to race some tracks from the game and set some times for you to beat and others to do so as well. This mode includes ghost cars, which lets you try to beat other player’s time online. Most of the times I set pre-release have beat obliterated. This will add some competition between you and your friends locally and to those you meet online.
Graphics/Music
As for the graphics of the game, Milestone has done a solid job on the recreation of many if not all of the vehicles you can play as in-game. With a few of them, I did take the time to look at a few I’ve unlocked to see what they look like if I had owned them. To me it feels as if they worked quite well on obtaining the models and fully rendering them with no flaws. The locations in-game provide a whole other layer, ranging from its lighting in some tracks to the usage of the maps from both developer-created tracks and player-created tracks.
The music in-game is very upbeat without being too much for you. During some races, the music will change, and that provides different atmospheres minding which location you are racing within. I never really considered the in-game music to be annoying, but was nice to not have crazy songs playing that would be a bit too much for a game such as this.
Closing Thoughts
Overall, Milestone has done a great job with Hot Wheels Unleashed. It’ll be one game that I continue coming back to, for online matches with friends, randoms online racers, and to see the future track creations. The price of Hot Wheels Unleashed is only $50 USD. That price alone is very reasonable and worth picking up at this point in time. I can’t wait to see the future DLC, new items to use within track creations, as well as the massive amount of vehicles from many different brands.
Milestone was already known for their racing games, but they were spot on with Hot Wheels Unleashed. Hot Wheels Unleashed is the perfect game for kids and adults! It will have players quite busy, racing through the main game as well as the online multiplayer.
A review code for Hot Wheels Unleashed was provided for review purposes.
