Races are organized on a world map that charmingly resembles those classic fabric play mats, and players can usually choose from two or three different races to play through at any given moment. This is where most players will want to start, as progressing through this mode is the main way to unlock courses to play in other modes and is the fastest way to unlock new cars and track pieces. The first mode I evaluated when booting up Hot Wheels Unleashed was City Rumble, a single-player mode that boats over eighty races across roughly forty different tracks. So, while my childhood memories certainly helped pique my interest in this game, I feel like I have had enough distance from the brand that I’m able to review this game based on its own merits. Not only can you collect, customize and race accurately reproduced models of some of the most iconic cars Mattel ever produced, you can finally design those insanely elaborate, sprawling racetracks in your basement that your parents never let you build as a kid! Now, I’m far from a Hot Wheels superfan – while I amassed quite the collection of toy vehicles as a kid, I never really got into building circuits like some of my friends did, and my only experience with Hot Wheels video games was playing Hot Wheels Velocity X on the family computer. Instead of being based on, say, some Cartoon Network TV show geared towards kids, Hot Wheels Unleashed instead promises the ultimate Hot Wheels fantasy. But does Hot Wheels Unleashed manage to be a good game underneath its many layers of die-cast nostalgia?

In fact, Hot Wheels Unleashed feels like a game built primarily for today’s adults who grew up with Hot Wheels years (decades?) ago rather than kids – a bold choice. So, I was pleasantly surprised not only that Milestone announced Hot Wheels Unleashed in 2021 as a major new release for the franchise, but also that the game had potential to be of higher quality and creativity than previous games. That’s not really the case today, as many of the smaller studios that previously produced those types of games have since shut down, been absorbed, or are now producing mobile games instead. There was a time when games based on popular toys were a dime a dozen it used to be impossible to walk into the video games section of your local supercenter without seeing shelves filled with licensed games, many of middling quality.

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