Geek Review – Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged

Mattel’s road to bringing its toys to life is revving up, and no, it’s not all about Barbie. Realising every car fanatic’s childhood fantasy, Milestone‘s Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged pits the iconic die-cast cars against each other, swerving, bumping and zipping through larger-than-life racing tracks, homes, basketballs and table legs with reckless abandon.

A step up from its 2021 predecessor, this sequel preserves its stunning lighting and graphics amid an absurd level of detail, bolstering it with an even greater variety of vehicles and race tracks, but like a rookie behind the wheel, the game is not pristine – much like noticing a scratch on your mini toy racer after a whole afternoon of gruelling play.

Milestone shook the racing game world back in 2021 with Hot Wheels Unleashed as the publisher’s fastest-selling title ever to date, bringing equal parts goofiness and exhilaration to an already saturated racing sim market, throwing realism out the window in favour of our beloved toy cars. The sequel improves on its formula, boasting some 130 distinct vehicles at launch. It’s the old-fashioned wackiness of a ‘Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ scenario, of racing across everyday locations but enlarged, paired with nail-biting wheel-to-wheel action.

Undeniably, the standout of this game would be the amount of detail put into the vehicles themselves. An unflinchingly accurate, almost photorealistic recreation of the Hot Wheels catalogue, don’t be surprised if you pause the game just to go into photo mode and marvel at these mini automobiles.

Everything from the way light reflects differently off the metal chassis of a bonnet, to the textured rubber of the tires, the studio has left no stone unturned in finessing the details of each miniature marvel. You’ll even notice the engraving beneath your vehicle of choice, with its model name and production details and there’s much satisfaction in noticing the aesthetic minutiae of everything being shown fastidious love and attention.

The imperfections that these toys carry after a long, gruelling day of smashing into walls, screeching against intense hairpins and bends, are also very apparent. It’s a pleasant surprise, to notice the paint chip off the corners of bumpers, and fingerprints all over the windscreen, much like when you put your Hot Wheels cars through their paces as they veer off your dining table before smashing on the tiled floors of your home.

But looks mean nothing if there isn’t any substance and Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged does not disappoint. It’s your prototypical arcade racer that’s drift-heavy, easily accessible but hard to master, leaving your hands with cramps from gripping the controller too tight after just one race. This time around, it’s been bolstered with new gameplay mechanics, including a double-jump and a lateral dash – which could come in handy in sticky situations, and leave you with a sly grin on your face as you ‘accidentally’ bump others off track.

Cars have also been sorted into six categories: Balanced, Drifter, Swift, Rocket, Off-Road, and Heavy Duty, each with its pros and cons. For example, a Rocket would be great on a track with plenty of straight roads, whereas you might be better off selecting a Heavy-Duty monster truck if you’re taking golf balls head-on while sliding on the carpet grass of a mini-golf course. However, the differences between Balanced and Drifter, Swift and Rocket, Off-Road and Heavy Duty are not the most apparent, and it often feels like choosing among three classes rather than six.

A further distinction can be made to your vehicles via a newly introduced upgrade system, where you allocate perks to your vehicle, tweaking their attributes to suit your fancy. Likewise, more work needs to be done to make these attribute changes feel more pronounced. It was hard to notice a difference with or without “Improved Dash”, and due to the limited amount of combinations possible, you might end up with perks that are often perplexing and counter-intuitive, just to receive other additional bonuses.

There is also variety in the environments, even though the five landscapes don’t seem like a lot to choose from. The various obstacles and contrast of each environment always make it feel like you’re racing on it for the first time and you could be in an old-school arcade racing atop 8-bit machines and flying by boldly-lit neon signs, to being in a museum in the next moment, hearing the shrills of Pterodactyls fill the air as you pirouette on the ceramic floors around the fossil of a Velociraptor.

The full strengths of these environments in Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged can be seen with new ways to play, with fresh game modes like Checkpoint challenging players to go from one highlighted circle to the other, forcing you to be creative in the ways you utilise all the tools at your disposal. It does take a good number of restarts to get used to the differences in traction, especially when crossing from the plastic of the track to the smooth ceramic of a floor tile mid-drift.

However, the new mode Drift Master is a hassle. It involves you trying to score as many points by chaining drifts together while trying to avoid hitting the track’s side bars to get a multiplier going. It’s feasible in theory but excruciating in practice as it’s hardly fun spending an hour stuck in the story mode, trying to rack up an unnecessarily high point total – on a track that was filled with straights and barely had any turns. It would’ve been much more enjoyable if players were rewarded for going fast, or for doing tricks like a barrel roll in mid-air as well.

The new story mode, comprising animated comic-book cutscenes of forgettable characters sharing repetitive dialogue, merely does a generic job of weaving the various event types together, and setting various vehicle requirements to encourage players to expand and utilise their entire garage of fancy wheels. Even though you might glean towards stronger, stat-wise, vehicles such as the Fast X Dodge Charger, you will find yourself paying closer attention to the track details, swapping out to other vehicles that might be more suitable to take on said conditions.

However, not all challenges are a walk in the park. In order to access another part of the story mode’s map, you have to complete a Drift Master event, using a Heavy Duty car. Getting 500,000 points with a monster truck? No thanks.

Another irritation would be the diminishing level of fulfilment you get from completing each stage. Getting experience points and coins for the umpteenth time eventually made the reward scaling stale and monotonous, and will prompt you to spam the skip button. The same can be said about the boss stages. Maybe getting a unique car would be nice, Milestone! Instead, you just get showered with more coins and experience points, and tougher bonus stages after defeating the final boss.

With these new ultimate stages, it seems like Milestone has also forgotten about its target audience for Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged, as they can get insanely difficult and too challenging. Even after a near-flawless time trial run, with a fully pimped-out and upgraded Bugatti, you’ll still find yourself a full 10 seconds off the target time. One can only imagine how infuriating this would be for a child.

Regardless, it’s the sheer variety and authenticity that made me want to keep playing. The excitement from purchasing new Hot Wheels from the car sales showroom, and waiting just 45 minutes instead of four hours of play in the first Hot Wheels Unleashed, was a welcome addition. Moreover, you can easily refresh the lineup by paying a small amount of coins, the rough equivalent of what you would get for completing one event.

There are hundreds of cars to choose from, all in their original packaging. It appeals to both the casual racer looking to pick up the fastest car available, to a car aficionado wanting to add to their collection. It makes you feel like a kid again, running to the aisle of a toy store to check if there are any new models for the month. However, it must be stressed that the current vehicle library mainly comprises newer models, and we can only hope that they’ll add more classics in time to come.

Finally, the track builder is an excellent sandbox for those who find a greater need to exercise their creativity. Daunting at first, it’s a nifty tool to recreate iconic circuits, come up with physics-defying anti-gravity jumps and racing on the ceiling via magnetic tracks – or just to mess around and see how far you can launch your collectable Snoopy from one end of the map to the other. With an active community uploading new circuits online, it guarantees that multiplayer races are kept dynamic and entertaining.

Overall, if you’ve been on the hunt for a casual arcade racer to put your time into, you’re looking at the right place. Best enjoyed with a friend on split-screen, Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged is a blast, capable of bringing out anyone’s inner child. Plenty of ‘last races’, and blisters on your thumbs guaranteed.

Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged is available on the PSN Store for S$68.54.