Is this new Hot Wheels game Fast and Furious?
Drive the cars of your dreams! The coolest, the fastest, the most unique badass vans and jaw-dropping muscle cars are waiting for you. Take the wheel of tons of vehicles with their own personality and style, different traits, and levels of rarity. The very best of the Hot Wheels universe is here!
Hot Wheels Unleashed is an arcade style racer where you can drive as literally anything you can think of that has been a Hot Wheels car. Imagine racing a Formula 1 car against the DeLorean from Back to the Future and anything else in between is what you get here. Racing itself is fast and has plenty of twists and turns including track obstacles like spiders that can spit webs at you. It feels so fast at times I almost thought I was playing F-Zero which this is about as close as we’re likely to get to a new entry.
The game has a solid career mode full of secrets and requirements to beat and there’s online multiplayer that is highly addictive, plus you can also create your own tracks from scratch. Building tracks may take a while to get used to, but it pays off when you learn the basics and the only limitation is really your imagination.
The great thing about Hot Wheels Unleashed is that it’s like toy cars come to life in someone’s basement or out in the open world where the cars are tiny in comparison to their surroundings, kind of how you would imagine it from their perspective if they were real. The team at Milestone have captured this feeling perfectly while maintaining the classic arcade racer feeling that you would hope from this series.
The PS5 version supports the DualSense as you would expect and the haptic feedback plus the adaptive triggers come into play with boosting and drifting in a more impressive way than I was expecting. The game handles brilliantly too, more so than I could have predicted.
Visually, Hot Wheels Unleashed looks like toys come to life in the best way possible. The tracks and vehicles are nicely detailed and runs at a solid framerate throughout. Load times are short besides loading online tracks.
The Verdict
Hot Wheels Unleashed is the best entry in the series for years. It captivates the classic arcade racer design, while giving the illusion of toys-to-life in superb fashion. Milestone should be proud that they pulled this off and the PS5 features enhance the experience. This is one racing game not to be underestimated.