If you’ve been playing any amount of Hot Wheels Unleashed, you should know by now that the real stars of the game are its environments. Developer Milestone has not only crafted a super enjoyable arcade racer, but they’ve put together some of the best worlds to race around that I think I’ve ever seen. sure, Forza Horizon 5 looks incredible, but this game takes the Hot Wheels IP, turns it into a fully realised world, and then puts you in the driving seat so you can appreciate it all as you throw tiny cars around it.
Unlike many of the past attempts to make a Hot Wheels racing game, Hot Wheels Unleashed keeps the size of the cars to scale. You’re racing around tracks that have been made out of the official Hot Wheels track pieces within huge environments that are, in reality, rooms that we’d never look twice at otherwise. However, the shift in perspective to being a tiny car and throwing yourself around these tracks is what makes the environments shine, because you can see all sorts of gorgeous details and really appreciate the level that someone went to when making the track.
The whole idea behind Hot Wheels is that you build amazing tracks to race your cars around. Those tracks can have hazards, but most of the time they’re just extravagant stretches of fake road for small cars to drive around that look brilliant once they’re all put together. I love how much effort the developers have put into making each track, because while there are only six environments, there are dozens of tracks used across each one. Every race feels different because of this, and the environments make them look visually astounding. The one environment I keep coming back to is Skyscraper. It’s a building site at the top of a skyscraper that you drive out of the window of, leaving you with that dangerous feeling that you might lose your car, but pulling in enough adrenaline to help you boost around and win the race. The world that has been carefully crafted suits Hot Wheels down to the ground, and I’m so pleased to be able to say that it looks incredible.