

The game seems to be using its difficulty as a tool to encourage players to grow their collection of cars but the blatant rubber banding that slingshots opponent vehicles past you on the regular only encourages you to turn the game off. In my many hours with Hot Wheels Unleashed I unlocked a total of 21 cars, though only three of which could hope to compete with the AI vehicles even in the early races. Could your 1200 gold buy you a lightning fast race winner? Or will you blow it all on a hunk of junk that you’ll never use? Cars in the store can be bought for your hard earned gold though in a severe case of lunacy the stats for each vehicle are not revealed until after purchase. Lastly the game features a store which offers only a roster of five cars at a time that cycle every four real time hours. Blind boxes can also be bought for 500 gold each though again, there’s no guarantee that you won’t end up with a car already in your collection. It could also be a vehicle you already own, resulting in a need to sell it for gold or scrap it for gears. Said lootboxes but not can include a rare vehicle… but it could also contain a common one. Essentially, a blind box contains a random car. While most events reward you with gears for upgrades and small amounts of gold for buying new vehicles, some will also earn you a blind box which is almost as blatant as it sounds. Firstly via progression through the City Rumble campaign though this is slow and only offers opportunity to unlock a portion of the 66 cars available. There’s three ways to unlock new cars for your collection. But to get to this stage took hours, and earning cars actually capable of winning races is a massive grind. Then after unsatisfactorily completing a number of events in second or third place, which is all that’s needed to progress through the campaign, I unlocked some new cars with better stats and suddenly race wins were becoming a little more frequent, albeit still with reliance on a near-perfect run for all three laps of a race. At first I blamed myself in that driving in Hot Wheels feels quite sensitive and foreign when compared to the likes of Mario Kart or similar.
HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED PS4 REVIEW PRO
Played primarily on the medium difficulty, winning races is initially an impossibility in the early hours of the game with minor setbacks such as clipping a sidewall once, or failing to nail a drift as though you were a real life gymkhana pro consistently resulted in my opponents hurtling past me and off into the distance never to be seen again, thus making a podium finish a fantasy at most. Courses contain almost everything you would expect from the Hot Wheels brand with loops, spirals, obstacles and a few flashy set pieces such as giant spiders and volcanoes. Similar to the ever-addictive Trackmania (including a borrowed element or two), Hot Wheels Unleashed puts you in charge of one of sixty-six vehicles spanning real manufacturers and wacky Hot Wheels originals at launch across a generous serving tracks in six locations.ĭie-cast fanatics will be able to take part in three-lap circuit races, point to point events, time trials and bosses, the latter of which are just harder and longer versions of the above.
