

You start Hot Wheels Unleashed with three of the game's 66 vehicles. Speaking of progression, this is where Milestone sacrificed too much in the sacred name of player retention. Hot Wheels Unleashed's Track Editor is robust, and has all the tools you need, but creating the track of your dreams will require patience as the track-building tools aren't as intuitive as they should be and you will need to grind the game to unlock all of the special pieces that you will inevitably want to use. You can step into the shoes of a 9-year-old construction manager and build the tracks you created in your imagination as a child, or at least you can in theory. While every element of Hot Wheels Unleashed's gameplay may not impress your nostalgia, what will is the game's Track Editor. You can't relive this in Hot Wheels Unleashed. Every child who grew up on Hot Wheels and raced them would inevitably crash and clash them together.

In just about every racing game, this is going to be a major negative, but it's especially disappointing when you're playing a Hot Wheels game.

There's little impact to any of it, which in turn means the consequence is negligible. Whether you're smashing into the wall, ramming into another vehicle, or landing after a period of being airborne, it isn't satisfying. Undermining this blend of strategy, input mastery, and relatively fluid driving mechanics is a second-rate physics and collision system.
