Recent reviews by Ash Wednesday Valentine

This is not a review. It's a warning.

The assets are beautiful. The cars, the tracks, the sets, the props, everything looks great. If like me you have some weird fascination with miniature scale perspectives, you'll love that aspect.

And every single other thing about this game is an AVGN level WHAT WERE THEY THINKING unmitigated disaster. Look at the play times from the other reviews. They reflect this, even if the review copy does not. People buy it, like the way it looks, mess around with it, and never touch it again.

There are reasons for this.

I will list a few. Then, because there is something wrong with me and I will play it more, I will come back and list the rest. What is wrong with me is I grew up playing games that were difficult because they were terrible. They don't really make games like that anymore. As gaming has developed, discoveries have been made, conventions established, wisdom accumulated. All of which was utterly lost on the developers of this hateful trap. This was created as though no game ever existed prior, no Mario Kart, no F-Zero, and don't get me wrong, I don't mean they were playing Forza or Dirt or whatever. No. I picture the people in charge of design here being the same engineers responsible for programming the machining tools in the Hot Wheels assembly plant, tasked by management to make a game, and with the zest and inspiration for which engineers are known, they did as instructed to delay being let go for one more year.

One would assume, given the branding, that the target audience is young people. In so assuming, one has already put more thought into the end-user experience than the makers of Hot Wheels Unleashed. At first, everything looks good, polished, normal, then right from the start, the cracks start to show. The tutorial is delivered by jarring blocks of incongruously primitive text. This is even lampshaded, something like "wow, these popups sure are annoying!" This may be intentional: those initial seizures can give the impression that their interruptions are what is causing you to careen back and forth across the track like a drunk on ice. Surely you'll regain control once they cease. But no. I have been playing games since they appeared in green monochrome. I have been playing games since rounds cost quarters of value commensurate with modern dollars.

I finished the introductory race in twelfth place.

I cannot adequately describe the controls. I know with the sickening certainty of one who has already been convicted in court but has not yet begun their sentence that I will spend several more hours trying to figure out what's wrong with them. An obstacle is coming. It is several seconds out, plenty of time to make a small adjustment. Far enough away, there's time for a verbal countdown. Three. Just a nudge to the right. Two. To the right. I've got the thumbstick pushed right. I want to veer right! One. WTF right right right right collision. Yet somehow this can coexist with oversteering directly into the wall happening with the regularity of lightning strikes on the floor of Pavlov's laboratory. You are the labrador in Pavlov's laboratory. You are the lab lab.

If the controls were not an issue, the tracks would still not be fun. Obstacles don't land as challenges, but as inconveniences. There's no flow, no breathing room, no chance to just race, just drive, just focus on the contours of the turns and the presence of other racers, no no. Every few seconds there's some obnoxious sandtrap breaking the flow. These are not dynamic surprises (i.e. a bouncing turtle shell) but endemic and recurring. Given the difficulty avoiding them, the severity of the punishment for hitting them, and the fact that the game you'd rather be playing wouldn't even have them, there's no feeling of "oh no!" but of "oh no." It's not an MMA fight, it's daddy coming home drunk.

After each error, you will sit, waiting, for a very long time, watching every other car zoom by, appearing to have all the fun that you are not. This is unavoidable, no matter how well you were doing: they have a fixed maximum distance they can fall behind. There is no opposite mechanic. They can lap you. You will discover this because every track is riddled with jumps that must be approached from a perfect angle, lest you fail them in any of innumerable ways. You often will not know that you have failed: no magic cloud turtle will appear to set you back on course. Take a moment to contemplate that: this is a racing game where it is often unclear where you are meant to go.

I'm hungry and tired of writing and not half done, so I'll skip to my summation. The core design rewards driving CAREFULLY, not driving fast. Wait. Let me rephrase that. The core design punishes incautious driving with all the mercy of a North Korean kangaroo court, and for all the lootboxes and currencies the game spews at you, nothing is rewarding. You'll be blind when these rewards appear, crying as you are with relief from frustration. There's a very specific feeling only experienced by children, a feeling of petty, helpless injustice; it really WAS the dog that wet your bed. When something comparable recurs in adulthood, it's at least bearing mortal gravitas: cancer diagnoses, house fires, IRS audits leading to prosecutions for clerical errors you didn't even know were crimes. But if you're top-tier lucky in birth, before all that you get a few years where the last thing that emotionally prepared you for the ironies of a feckless universe were being stuck for the weekend with a rental game that's super duper real bad.

That's the only reason to play this: if you're yearning for a time when the bitterest parts of life were things that didn't matter. If you see my playtime go up, that's why. It's the S&M version of nostalgia for childhood.

Maybe it's a stealth Gen X masterpiece.

Absolutely worth five bucks in its current state and I can't wait to see where they take it.

Join your ancestors in hell you despicable pimp. 10/10