Tap the brakes in the middle of a high-speed turn, and you'll go into a drift that feels arcade-y but not entirely unrealistic. Instead of picking up weapons, bananas, or random items, drivers are expected to accumulate and spend a nitro-boost meter-which grows primarily when you drift. The devs at Milestone, longtime makers of the MotoGP series, have stripped pretty much all Mario Kart-ness out of this colorful affair.

Imagine going into someone's garage, then routing a nearly infinite budget of plastic straightaways, curves, loop-the-loops, and more throughout the space-while also occasionally using that world's geometry (a table, a countertop) as part of a given racing line. (Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)Įvery racetrack in Unleashed combines a prebuilt room and a series of recognizable, plastic Hot Wheels tracks, usually bright orange or blue. With every campaign level you beat, you unlock 'coins' (which can be spent on new cars) and 'gears' (which can upgrade existing cars). You start with three randomly selected toy cars, which are split between Hot Wheels facsimiles of real-life cars and the company's own toys the latter pool ranges from sedans to race cars to Kitt from Knight Rider to dinosaurs with wheels. HWU throws back to an older arcade-racing era by opening with very few racetracks to select from-and a campaign that you must play through to unlock many of the game's contents. Boost through meaty, plastic straightaways That's not a bad thing-and I had a good-enough time with Unleashed to write about it at Ars, as I think some people will really enjoy what's going on here.īut you'll have a better time with HWU going into it fully aware of its weird and tricky design decisions-along with quibbles about its in-game economy of cars and tracks. In my week of testing the game ahead of its launch this week, I found that Hot Wheels Unleashed feels like a Micro Machines skin on top of the modern, hardcore-leaning Trackmania series. Yet while handsomely modeled toy cars and cute environments might look like a basis for newbie-friendly racing, it's not the case here. To be fair, that specific concept isn't necessarily common in gaming, but Codemasters' legendary Micro Machines series holds a lot of water for a certain type of arcade-racing fan. This week's Hot Wheels Unleashed is one of the best video games ever made using licensed toy cars. Links: Amazon | PlayStation Store | Xbox | Nintendo eShop | Steam | Official site Platform: PC (tested), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, Switch

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