It's more Forza Horizon than Ridge Racer or Mario Kart. 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. Boost through meaty, plastic straightawaysĮvery racetrack in Unleashed combines a prebuilt room and a series of recognizable, plastic Hot Wheels tracks, usually bright orange or blue. 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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