Developer: Milestone
Publisher: Milestone
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xb ox One, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PS5
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged – Review
Even now, there seems to be an endless supply of Mario Kart clones on the market. These titles often lack in quality or just try to emulate what made Nintendo’s wacky racing series appealing. We have seen Nickelodeon try their hand at the genre, and even The Smurfs tried to create their own cute Mario Kart clone. This makes it rather interesting when big brands such as Mattel lend their IP to unique racing experiences as well. The first Hot Wheels Unleashed proved to be a success, but we didn’t immediately expect it to spawn a sequel any time soon. Now, however, Milestone released Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged, right on time for the holiday season.
Story
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged’s story is somewhat of a curveball. Instead of it being around racing, it’s actually all about stopping a monster rampage. Huge Kaiju-like creatures are wreaking havoc, and only Professor Tanabe, Darla, and Robert can stop the monsters in their tracks. Professor Tanabe is trying to shrink these massive creatures to toy-sized critters, and then Darla and Robert will take them on in a speed duel.
While the story will not win any awards any time soon, and it also doesn’t make that much sense most of the time, it’s still a cute and fun narrative for kids. The cartoon-like visuals would fit right at home in ’90s or early ’00s Saturday morning cartoons. The overall presentation is quite nice, and it suits the theme of the game.
Graphics
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged is a very good-looking title. While the game does have a lot of similar-looking tracks, we loved the lifelike toy cars and their wacky designs. We felt like kids again when playing through the game, as it was simply fun to uncover new designs and to see how they performed on the tracks. The purchase screen for the cars is also designed as if you’re browsing through the different Hot Wheels boxes in an actual store. The cars also show some wear and tear if you are a bit rough during the races.
The tracks themselves all have that authentic plastic-y feel. The tracks are connected by brightly colored connectors, and the hazards are iconic Hot Wheels obstacles from play sets. There are also a few off-road tracks, and the environments look rather nice, even though everything does feel a bit static in the game. You won’t see that many movable objects, and after a while the overall appeal gets toned down a bit due to a lack of asset variety.
Sound
The sound design of Unleashed 2 isn’t bad, but it will not blow you away either. The soundtrack is decent, but it’s also a bit bland and generic, and after a while, you’ll probably not pay attention to the background tunes anyway. The vehicles have realistic engine sounds, and there’s some variety to be found when picking different rides. The story also has voice acting fitting of a cartoon-esque story.
Gameplay
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged is a racing game in which you’ll be racing with the iconic Hot Wheels toys. You’ll play through fairly short tracks in different disciplines, such as normal quick races, drifting challenges, elimination races, and so on. The offset is extremely simple, and before you know it, you’re raking in the cash to buy yourself more and more toy vehicles. You’ll have to play through the game’s campaign mode in order to unlock new tracks, and of course, to earn more money and experience. Local multiplayer will also net you experience and cash. Online multiplayer only rewards the top spots.
The controls are responsive, and you can clearly notice the difference between different types of vehicles. You’ll notice that motorcycles are a bit better for taking corners, but a monster truck might be more useful if you wish to bash your opponents. Upgrades are also available as you progress through the game, and like many other race titles out there, you’ll have different vehicle classes. These classes are Stock, Powered, and Ultimate. As the names may imply, these always indicate more upgraded versions of your vehicles. Upgrading your rides to Powered and/or Ultimate will improve their stats, and it will also allow you to pick other passive upgrades. Keep in mind, however, that almost every passive upgrade also comes with a negative trait. For example, you can gain more handling when drifting, but your boost meter will fill up slower when choosing this upgrade. This system is fun to mess around with, and as you play through the campaign, you’ll get more than enough upgrade materials.
Collecting cars is all fine and dandy, but you’ll have your work cut out for you, and the ‘gacha’ mechanics of how to get new cars isn’t always that amazing. As you buy new vehicles from the shop, you’ll have to wait for the stock to refresh or pay some coins for a new offering of cars. Sadly, you’ll still get a lot of rides on offer that you might already own. This means there is a luck factor involved in terms of vehicle rotation. Your mileage may vary here, and we did love the amount of vehicles available in the game, but the entire luck factor didn’t feel that fun to us. Nonetheless, the game has more than enough cars for you to collect, you can also win so-called spins to win even more prizes, and so on. There’s also some paid DLC available, which again gives you more vehicles.
Online play can be quite fun for a game such as this, especially with the online leaderboards in play. Sadly, it does take a while to get a full party together, and sometimes we weren’t even able to find any players online. It’s a shame, as a game like this truly becomes a lot of fun to play online after you’ve unlocked most content offline. We hope some events are added for online play, hopefully drawing in a crowd.
Conclusion
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged is a fun little racing game with quite a bit of content to plow through. Even though the race mechanics are a bit basic at times, it’s enjoyable to keep collecting new Hot Wheels vehicles, and the cute story mode motivates you to keep pressing on. We do hope the game will pick up some steam in the future as the online community seems to be fairly dead, but even as an offline experience, this one is very entertaining.
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