One of the downsides of trying to review all of the games in a bundle is that inevitably there’s going to be games that you just aren’t interested in playing. For me, the usual ones to avoid are the horror games, simulators, and point-and-click adventures games, all of which regularly appear as options in the Humble Choice, and all of which generally languish unpicked, or at least largely abandoned in the depths of my Steam Library, never to be heard from again.
Racers aren't quite on that list. I'm not in any way a car guy - my car gets me places and if I'm asked about I normally say something along the lines of “it's red”, and while I don't think being an enthusiast in real life is a prerequisite to enjoying the glorification of the motorcar in digital form, I certainly think it helps.
But I’ve have good experiences with arcade racers over the years. I grew up on a steady diet of Need for Speed, I played the pants off of Re-Volt when I should have been studying for my matriculation exams, and I'm still not sick of MarioKart 8 despite the exhaustion of my mad scramble to unlock all the karts on four consoles in the short window between release and the tourney at AVCon 2014 . I also have many hundreds of hours and happy childhood memories invested in the making of real-life Hot Wheels™ tracks, races and demolition derbies. So playing this game should hold no fears for me.
Judging by price, clocking in at a substantial $70 AUD, a price in a similar range to that of pretty decent racers like Dirt 5, Hot Wheels Unleashed™ ought to be a highlight, one of the two flagship games of this month's bundle, along with A Plague Tale: Innocence. So why were my Blaugustine compatriots and I reluctant to touch this with a ten-foot pole?
Perhaps it's because we've all been trained by long experience that games from licensed properties that insist on the ™ in their title, especially ones based on child-focused brands, are so often underwhelming money grabs with uninspired game play, and since the dreaded rise of online play and the microtransaction, also tend to be rife with overpriced downloadable content. These are games that leave you feeling used and dirty when you play them, but honestly, who expects better from corporations who make their money hocking plastic junk?
So with those reservations in mind, I opened this game for the first time while I was on holidays last weekend, and apart from the very first introduction to the game being opening a loot box, which nearly caused me to quit then and there, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, the loot boxes were annoying, and every landing screen wanted me to buy more matchbox cars, but it was all for in-game currency, not a microtransaction in sight.
I was surprised to find that there's actually a lot of stuff packed in here. Apart from the campaign mode where I could earn in-game currency rewards for winning races, there's time attack, local split-screen and online multiplayer, vehicle customisation and a racecourse editor. And of course, there's a huge range of toy cars from across the Hot Wheels™ range to be unlocked, from the DeLorean from Back to the Future, to classic race cars, to school busses, to giant hotdogs with wheels, all with their own strengths and weaknesses on the racetrack.
And the gameplay is… fine. Not one to appeal to the driving game aficionado, but perfectly respectable. The cars have a decent weight to them so the racing is pretty satisfying, and there are loops, jumps and sections where you leave the track and interact with the environments, various actual-size locations which warrant exploring in their own right. The racing revolves around a cycle of performing power slides on the turns to build up a boost meter that you can then fire, which is a little one-note for my taste, but the whole package all feels fast and cool and very Hot Wheels™, so there's a big tick there for all that.
But I do find myself wondering who this game is for. That main campaign? There's a lot of stuff, 90-odd races in all, but it only lets you progress to play 7 races on 6 different tracks before you're gated behind time trials. With the AI vehicles set to the default easy mode, winning these races to progress is very doable provided that you just stay on the track, and all together will net you about enough coins to buy just one of the basic cars you had your eye on from the store. But the time-trials don't scale with difficulty, and you have to be at least half-way competent at racing to unlock and progress past them to the rest of the campaign. I wouldn't flatter myself by saying I'm all that good at racing games, but I like to think that I could easily beat most of the ten-year old gamer set, and most of these trials took me a number of attempts to successfully pass. Lots of kids are never seeing past those few races. And if you never pass those races then you can never unlock more interesting tracks to race on than the basic starting out ones1. So if it's not for kids, and it's not for car guys, and it's not for the average gaming blogger, who is it for?
That finally became clear when I came home from holidays and booted the game again inside the loving embrace of a WiFi connection. Suddenly, there were ads everywhere. When I loaded the campaign, moving in 3 out the 4 directions from the starting point immediately tried to sell me different expansion packs. There are 3 ‘season passes’ that have a few cross-promotional cars, tracks and accessories (Batman, Looney Toons, etc) that will set you back $44.95 each2, and after every race the game shows you the rewards you would have been earning if you'd just shelled out for the current one. It’s unclear to me what happens if you buy the past ones, but reviews suggest that if you haven’t unlocked the content during the season it largely remains unavailable, so it’s hard to see what that $44.95 is buying. You can also buy individual cars for about three quarters of the cost of the actual physical matchbox car at your local toy store. If you wanted to buy all the DLC for this game that has only been out just over ten months, it will cost you a little over $320 AUD, and that’s after buying the full-priced base game. This game is for the suckers, for the whales, for those few people willing or ignorant to shell out hundreds of bucks to have all the cosmetic kit in a video game that no-one else cares about. And I hope some folks at Mattel and at developer Milestone S. r. l. feel bad sometimes for having the audacity to make a game like this dressed up as a children's game.
It's hard to work out the popularity of a game on steam, but even with the Humble Choice bump it’s only getting 100 concurrent players, which is not enough to sustain the online multiplayer, and the third season pass has been out since the start of June and still only has 5 steam reviews. Very few people are falling for this, and you have to wonder how long it's going to be supported and how long the servers are going to stay up. And when they go down, all the car and track customisation, flawed as they are already3, will go away completely and all that will be left is a lifeless husk of a game, if that.
It’s not all bad, but I couldn’t in good conscience recommend playing Hot Wheels Unleashed™ even if you got it for free, and I certainly wouldn’t count it as a positive addition to the Humble Choice for the month. In fact, the fact that they included it at all makes me less likely to want the rest of the bundle, which is a shame because there’s actually some good looking stuff in there.
If you desperately want a video game that lets you race toy cars, just download Re-Volt, it’s free and it’s just as good as it was 20 years ago.
Unless you pay for them, of course.
Which rather pushes the definition of the word 'microtrasactions’.
I didn’t find the space to get into them in this review, but suffice it to so that after my initial enthusiasm I was not very impressed. You can’t even use your own cars and tracks without uploading and redownloading them from the official servers if you manage to even find them again, that is, and even if you do they can only be used in very limited circumstances.