Perhaps best described as a head-on collision between an itty-bitty Burnout and a tiny Trackmania Turbo, Hot Wheels Unleashed is an endearing arcade stunt racer that feels great and looks absolutely remarkable. With tracks creatively weaved through lavishly detailed, life-sized environments, and brimming with a catalogue of cars spilled straight out of the toy bucket, developer Milestone’s decision to double down on a brand of racing 64 times smaller than usual has been a consummate success.
Highly accessible yet full of advanced techniques, devilish shortcuts, and creative tools to master, Hot Wheels Unleashed is one of the best, most customisable, and most imaginative arcade racers I’ve played in at least a decade.
Hot Wheels Unleashed recreates the world’s most popular die-cast cars in their authentic scale, and in environments where they’re dwarfed by barn-sized basketballs and boom boxes as big as buildings. This makes Hot Wheels Unleashed more in line with pint-sized peers like 1998’s Hot Wheels Stunt Track Driver or 2007’s Hot Wheels Beat That! as opposed to styleless duds like Hot Wheels Turbo Racing or Hot Wheels World’s Best Driver, which simply super-sized the toys to race them like regular cars.
Staying tiny was a terrific choice, and not simply because the atmosphere is endlessly more charming at toy scale; the 1:1 recreations of Hot Wheels cars here are regularly nothing short of stunning.
