Hot Wheels Unleashed

Hot Wheels Unleashed is an instant classic, a licensed game with AAA production values that never stops delivering thrills. With enough content and features to satisfy the most demanding audience, Hot Wheels focus on razor sharp arcade racing delivers exactly what fans want – tons of cool cars, wild tracks, and collectable, customizable fun. Our highest recommendation.

The simple, pick-up-and-play racing action keeps things tame so anyone can pick one of the several rides and zoom down the masterfully crafted tracks without any fuss and little learning curve. With only a few misgivings to work on as of this review, Hot Wheels Unleashed has first place already in the bag, and I’m eager to see it continue succeeding down the line.

I enjoyed Hot Wheels Unleashed a lot more than I expected to, and it'll likely be my go-to pick-up-and-play racer for the foreseeable future. The game plays well, looks great, and has enough customization options to keep things fresh.

Quotation forthcoming.

Hot Wheels Unleashed impressed me on basically every marker. It looks terrific, it feels great, and the track design is extremely well done. I kind of hate the blind box approach of unlocking cars, but that’s a small complaint when getting my wheels on the track is always a delight.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is an enjoyable arcade racer with deep customization and great presentation, let down by a lack of modes to play.

Despite some aspects of the game feel more improvable than others, Hot Wheels Unleashed is without a doubt the best game ever made about the toy cars made by Mattel.

Although driving is super fun, the design of the career mode feels boring and samey after the first hour. Hopefully the multiplayer will be able to lend the game some more longevity.

Pure arcade racing fun that properly captures the charm of the Hot Wheels brand. Track editor shortcomings and an expensive Day-One DLC are however bothersome.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is a competent enough racer, but lacks anything to make it unique compared to previous games. It’s generally very bland, relies on loot boxes, and the AI rubber bands constantly.

With Hot Wheels Unleashed, the Mattel brand succeeds in its return to video games with a dynamic title, easy to handle, fluid and really fun. Everything breathes the Hot Wheels spirit and that's good. Despite a feeling of repetitiveness linked to the use of only 5 environments, it contains a lot of good ideas and often gives you a good feeling, especially during the boss races. We would have liked a less redundant soundtrack and a more advanced story mode, but it still manages to do well. As for the collectors, they will be delighted to chase the rare pearl, even if the surprise box option and its random dimension are highly debatable.

Hot Wheels Unleashed could have been such a great game, but wasted his potential. Basically, it’s a fun arcade racer with an interesting setting which it barely uses in interesting ways. Also, the multiplayer is broken. Nevertheless, despite its flaws, Hot Wheels Unleashed is a fun racing game. Just don’t expect anything extraordinary.

The track editor is brilliant, enabling people to go delirious with imagination, though sadly, sharing these creations is hindered by the poor UI and filtering options. I also dislike the concept behind blind boxes, it is just not a good way to unlock more cars, too many dupes for it to be anything other than frustrating. Apart from those cons, I have good words for Hot Wheels Unleashed. This is a solid recommendation for anyone who enjoys arcade racers, especially ones that go more for skill and speed over the randomness of power-ups.

It remains an effective game, quite enjoyable and is without doubt the one that most faithfully respects the spirit of the famous brand, with that same nostalgic and passionate vision that we could have had ourselves, a few years earlier.

Hot Wheels Unleashed has a lot of good concepts and ideas that are sullied by awkward execution and weird design choices. Its physics could use some more fine-tuning, and its AI needs to be rebalanced, along with a revamped track builder. Yet, there's still some glimmer to its toy car shine.