- Publisher: Milestone S.r.l
- Release Date: Sep 27, 2021
- Also On: PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
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- Critic score
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- By date
- Unscored
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is how you make a toys-to-life video game. Milestone have taken some of the finest collectables and made them photo-realistic, unleashing them on racetracks that will blow your mind with the level of detail and craziness in equal measure. Exemplifying the “kart racer” genre, it is the natural progression of why we fall in love with this type of racing game over and over. This is a love letter to both Hot Wheels and arcade racing fans.
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Oct 6, 2021‘Hot Wheels Unleased’ is as close as you can get to a kid’s dream (or at least mine). There are some slightly clunky things like the track builder at first, but once you get past the learning curve you’re able to set sail and take the wheel. It handles like a dream.
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Sep 29, 2021The overall feeling of Hot Wheels Unleashed is that it is a huge win for nostalgia fans and racing fans alike. From the graphical detail of the world to the tracks to the cars everything is spot on with how you remember these cars looking. The control you have while racing puts Hot Wheels Unleashed right up there with some of the other AAA racing titles.
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Oct 14, 2021Milestone awakes our nostalgia for the beloved Hot Wheels from our childhood with this extremely well designed, addictive and beautiful game.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is one of the most entertaining racing games of the year and a love letter to fans of this franchise. Without a doubt, an unmissable entry.
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Sep 27, 2021Not only a blast of die-cast nostalgia, but a brilliant arcade racer to boot with superb customisation options.
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Sep 28, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed brings to consoles the same feeling that we had when we played with the toys in our childhood. The variety of vehicles is wide (even when there aren't many legendary ones), and both the cars and circuits work well. Overall, this is a great arcade racing game and a great surprise.
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Sep 27, 2021With more cars than you can shake a bit of plastic track at and a driving model that’s surprisingly good for an arcade racer, Hot Wheels Unleashed is an excellent racer that punches well above its weight.
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Sep 27, 2021A tavern full of toy cars to have fun with thanks to a fun and clean arcade driving model.
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Nov 30, 2021This is a surprisingly well done, fun racing game, full of thrill and fast toy cars. It’s highly addictive, the car designs are adequately crazy and there’s a robust editor to satisfy your creativity.
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Nov 5, 2021A fun arcade racer that provides added value for those willing to get their hands dirty. However, those who just want to race might find the experience a limited one. Buy into the whole creative side and it’ll make you feel like a kid again, especially if you’re the type that likes to collect.
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Oct 21, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed has everything it takes to become a cult hit: a fine driving experience, a story mode, a track builder and you can unlock and collect rare cars. More than that, it's the racing game we didn't know we needed this year.
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Oct 3, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is an excellent arcade racing game with some truly inventive and crazy tracks, wonderfully recreated Hot Wheels toys that drive beautifully and the visuals to back it all up. Unfortunately an imbalance of reasonably long to extremely long tracks and their many hazard risks make it too easy to get frustrated when struggling to reach top spot, and the track builder while very well detailed fails to make the user experience anything but pleasant.
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Oct 1, 2021In its best moments, Hot Wheels Unleashed feels like a rollercoaster, albeit with a greater ability to steer the action. These are the Hot Wheels tracks you dreamed of zipping through when you were a kid, ramping off buildings, or accelerating through your home’s air ducts. The breakneck speeds and delightfully silly tracks don’t make this incredibly sophisticated, but it’s one of the more amusing racers to hit the starting line in some time.
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Sep 28, 2021Despite some balancing issues and some issues with how cars are obtained, Hot Wheels Unleashed is still a ton of fun thanks to its breakneck-speed racing, a detailed track editor that would make your inner child jealous, awesome collectible cars, and packed single-player content. Add in the nostalgia for playing with Hot Wheels cars and tracks as a kid, and you might find it to be one of 2021’s hidden gems.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is a bit light on level and event type variety but still delivers a great racer worthy of the Hot Wheels name with plenty of speed, detailed customization, and a meaty roster of fun vehicles.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is a fantastic arcade racer at its core, but the overall product is hurt by the gacha mechanics. Thankfully, the quality of the core game is good enough to largely overcome that handicap, but it would be a far better experience with rebalancing in that regard down the line. The racing action is fast-paced and thrilling, with strong sound design that helps make up for a lackluster soundtrack. Hot Wheels Unleashed is a fantastic pickup for anyone who grew up wanting a fleet of Hot Wheels cars — and that aspect will get better as time goes on with content packs.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed marks the return of toy cars to consoles and PC, with a noteworthy title.
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Sep 27, 2021It may be based on a particular brand of die-cast toy cars aimed at kids, but Hot Wheels Unleashed is a fun arcade-style racer suitable for all ages and, for the most part, skill levels. Bursting with content, it’ll be a while before you’ve grown tired of its many tracks and unlocked all of the 60-plus cars that it offers. Throw in online and offline multiplayer, a track builder, and gameplay that’s easy to pick up but has some additional depth for more skilled players, and you have a package that’s easy to recommend.
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Nov 1, 2021The game is more like an arcade title than a full-featured racer. The game is clearly focused on collecting cars and expanding your collection rather than providing an extensive and full-featured racing game experience. The arcade racing is fun in short bursts, but the blind box system can make it feel like a grind while trying to obtain the cars that you want. If you pick this game up, do it for the car collecting. Otherwise, there are more enjoyable arcade racers with more variety out there for you to play.
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Sep 30, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is a fun arcade racer, with plenty of options and that old-school gameplay that feels great if you miss this type of game.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is a fast-paced racer that captures the frantic action of the miniature, diecast toys. The momentum-based gameplay helps to create intense races where anyone can win or lose. Even though the tracks are exciting and varied, the lack of environments is disappointing. Vehicles look incredible, making you want to collect each of them, however, the grindy blind box system may halt your progress. Overall, this is a solid racer that will knock you over with a nitro-boost of nostalgia.
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Jan 3, 2022Hot Wheels Unleashed is perhaps the best stand-alone game to use the license by far. It nails the feeling of racing with tiny die-cast cars and melds it with a presentation that looks far better than what you'd expect for a licensed title. The race variety is lacking, given the presence of only two race types, but the track variety greatly makes up for that shortcoming. It may have flown under everyone's radar, but Unleashed is worth everyone's attention.
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Oct 21, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is, at times, a dream come true. Milestone has managed to capture the essence of Mattel's toys with a complete title full of content, a fantastic editor —that will give a lot thanks to the community— and a complex driving system where drifting is fundamental. Despite some improvable physics and design decisions based on random content and gambling (loot boxes), the result is more than remarkable, satisfactory and, therefore, recommended for fans of the genre. In addition, the performance of its online mode has surprised us for the better.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is a super fun yet sometimes frustrating arcade racer that is hindered slightly by some design shortcomings.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot wheels Unleashed is, in some respects, a brilliant arcade driving video game. Simple, immediate, fun and just enough adrenaline, supported by an excellent technical department and which offers one of the best circuit editors that have been seen in recent years. However, it is not explained how such a well-made title can be inserted in such a cumbersome and counterintuitive menu system, in addition to the fact that in the face of an excellent interpretation of the Hot Wheels brand on an aesthetic level, it contradicts itself so evidently with the its management of the lootboxes, the underlying mechanics of the title that has influenced its internal balance in a way that is at least questionable.
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Power UnlimitedSep 30, 2021If you're a fan of arcade racers, Hot Wheel Unleashed is a fun game for a rainy weekend. However, the game has little to do with the basics of Hot Wheels. Collecting the coolest cars is also hell because of the available Blind Boxes.
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Oct 16, 2021For a first draft from Milestone on this license, this Hot Wheels Unleashed is doing with a positive result. This is mainly due to a well-studied drive and rather well-designed circuits that respect the spirit of small friction cars. Once the driving is mastered, it is fun to go from boost to boost, studying the best way to use nitro and optimize trajectories. We can hope that this constitutes an encouraging basis to make it a real must-have on a future version. There are unfortunately too many flaws that reveal an imperfect finish.
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Sep 29, 2021All-in-all, Hot Wheels Unleashed is an incredibly fun racer which will get its hooks in you and have you behind the die-cast wheel for hours on end. It includes a comprehensive track builder which you can use to let your imagination run wild and an extensive car collection which will keep your eyes firmly on the plastic orange track. It's the ultimate virtual Hot Wheels experience, whether you want to create your most fantastical Hot Wheels tracks, or just race long into the night playing split screen or multiplayer with a friend. There really is something for everyone here, and Hot Wheels Unleashed is a welcome addition to Mattel's long-running Hot Wheels video game franchise.
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Sep 28, 2021Honestly, I really didn’t expect much out of Hot Wheels Unleashed. I was expecting a throw-away licensed racing game. Perhaps, more cynically, a cash-grab targeting nostalgic aging gamers. What I ended up getting, though, was a surprisingly solid arcade racer by a team that obviously cares about the license they’re working with. It’s not without its quirks, unfortunately. The shocking aggressive AI racers created many moments of frustration, and I’m not a fan of the “gacha but not really” system going on here for obtaining new cars. But for fans of arcade racers, whether the Hot Wheels name strikes a chord or not, Hot Wheels Unleashed is a game worth a look.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed tries to bring back the memories of childhood with a fast and colored game. Unfortunately it does not succeed completely, resulting too simple and repetitive.
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Sep 27, 2021It 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.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is a rock solid arcade racing game that gets a lot of things right, but doesn't quite measure up in some areas. The drift-heavy handling and physics-based mayhem create super fun action on the track, and the cars themselves are as good to look at as they are to drive. While the tracks tend to feel a bit samey and the random nature of unlocks may lead to some frustration, the end result is a robust racing game that'll appeal to fans young and old.
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Oct 1, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is an okay racing game at best. If you want a much more enjoyable arcade-style racer with your favourite childhood toys then check out Beach Buggy Racing 2: Island Adventure which has its very own Hot Wheels Booster Pack DLC.
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Jan 20, 2022Despite the phenomenal graphics and details, sim-specialized authors from Milestone stumbled a little bit while trying to make their trip to the arcade genre fun enough.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is really nice to look at and sometimes fun to play, but I’m not sure who it’s for. The in-game currency model is unnecessarily convoluted and annoying most of the time. The difficulty is unbalanced to the point where I was forced to play on easy and swallow my gamer pride. The online multiplayer is where the most enjoyment is, but expect to invest hours trying to pull a car that can compete with some of the rarer racers. If Unleashed were a contender in a race, it would place 12th, like I did many times.
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Sep 27, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed delivers on what it promises, high octane toy car thrills, drifting and boosting around gravity defying tracks set in high definition great looking environments. It just lets itself down when it comes to the structure of the solo campaign and there aren’t enough unique hazards or variation in the tracks to keep you coming back for more. It would have been nice if they went a step further and thought outside of the box with the designs of the tracks themselves, but at least it delivers a boost of nostalgia for the kid inside all of us.
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Oct 4, 2021Even with an outstanding Hot Wheels license to work with, Hot Wheels Unleashed’s generic and uninspired execution coupled with lower presentation qualities makes it a below average racing title.
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Sep 28, 2021Hot Wheels Unleashed is initially a pretty fun arcade racer, with decent controls, as well as a nice connection between soundtrack and gameplay. After a while, the game starts to get tedious, though. Uninspired tracks, annoying enemy AI and a large amount of filler content ultimately prove Hot Wheels Unleashed's downfall.
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PLAYOct 17, 2021While everything is perfectly playable, for a game that absolutely nails the toy’s aesthetic it’s almost remarkable how removed the gameplay feels from the fiery, fast-paced action that has come to embody the brand. Never mind hot, these little wheels are lukewarm at best. [Issue#7, p.90]
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Sep 28, 2021Outside of its stunning visuals, Hot Wheels Unleashed is a toothless kart racer, relying too heavily on nostalgia goggles and the Hot Wheels brand to carry it instead of the solid ideas that end up hardly being implemented. What players get with Hot Wheels Unleashed is the same experience I had with many of my Hot Wheels as a child; I was entertained for a few hours, then grew bored and tossed it in a box. That’s not to say that I didn’t have fun with the game. Those few hours were full of spectacle, because it’s simply impossible to not get caught up in the game’s sights and sounds. Eventually, though, it’s going to take more than racing a hot dog car down a strip of vinyl track to keep me interested.
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| This publication has not posted a final review score yet. | |
| These unscored reviews do not factor into the Metascore calculation. | |
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Sep 30, 2021Hot Wheels: Unleashed is a good arcade racer, sometimes captivating for its good use of drifting, and sometimes too crazy for its chaotic random physics.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 48 out of 74
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Mixed: 12 out of 74
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Negative: 14 out of 74
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Aug 5, 2022
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Oct 2, 2021
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Sep 30, 2021