I understand that this is a paid ad to sell children's toys, but i still expected it to be a racing game. Instead it is built around the carting sub-genre - skidding builds up booster charge and boosting turns you into a rocket, instead of making your wheels spin faster.
So using a super steady car and cleanly clearing every turn means you extremely underperform. Having a superfast super unhinged car skidding even in the straights fills the booster very fast and then coming out of turns on the rocket power corrects the course. Combine that with terrible physics which don't glue your car to the floor but still are trying to over-correct you, and any car higher than the lowest ones will start spazzing in turns and be catapulted from walls. With wonky aerial controls the game is at the point where people instead of racing just fly around.
If you play the campaign on easy the bots won't even catch up. Playing that way is, like, meaningless. Meanwhile on medium you won't catch up. The AI is cheating mercilessly, even if you see half of the bots wipe in the first second they still will travel as a tight blob. There are no leaders and losers, only the blob. To keep that up they ride faster than their cars can and use more booster. So on easy the blob is just slower. It first "easy" bothered me and i've spent many races trying to beat the "medium" AI on the early maps until i win. But then i noticed that they recycle the same maps, and no matter the AI you will still have to beat "medium" times in solo just to progress, and "hard" times if you want the achievement. The early maps are more or less sensible, but their complexity and randomness grows to the point where you will wipe several times per map and even "easy" AI blob will catch up to you, especially if you don't use the best cars.
Despite the bigger number of races, most players will spend way much more time doing the repetitive and much harder time trials. So the campaign isn't even a carting game, it's just a sad lonely race against the clock. On the same maps.
Because it's the same maps anyway in the end, i just beat all the races on "easy" and concentrated on doing the time trials. I tried to beat most of them properly, i used shortcuts only on some of the tracks that have too many random elements on them. The worst of all are spiders. After perfectly going for a half of the race you can discover that the whole track is covered in webs with no way to avoid them. But sometimes the track is clear. Snapping jaws and volcano finishers are pretty bad too.
Besides the weird jumps and gravity flips with these wonky physics, some tracks just go off the rails. Comparing the toy cars to real objects is a staple and a selling point in the micro machines style, but all these sections take place in some industrial and dark environments so you don't get the scale anyway. And without being properly marked you just can lose your way, especially when there are a lot of these "off roads" intersecting.
There are also "boss" races, but unlike the other carting games, these are just the same tracks with the same random selection of opponents and an environmental hazard gimmick.
There are 45 tracks by the most generous count, yet there are 89 nodes on the city map. And some of the tracks are repeated more than once. After the last boss i had to beat the same map in three different nodes in one hour. Two of which are right there together at the end.
The best thing about the time trials is that if it's a lap course, by reaching the finish it just starts again until you beat the target time. So you can just train in circles until you succeed. But also on the non-looped tracks it means that you will have to wait for the menus every time.
Hot for Wheels: 24 Ours Unleashed
The game covers all four staples of Hot Wheels brand - there are their own fantasy cool cars, the licensed real cars, their joke cars, like wheeled toilets, and the cross-promotional brand-realism. Your main way to get the rides is to open lootboxes and melt the duplicates for coins and gears. The gears are used to upgrade the rarity of cars boosting the specs. And some common cars at max level are just better than STH, legendaries or secret cars. And 24 Ours is probably better than anything in the game - the stats are almost maxed, it's very low, it has more than one boost tank and it's of common rarity so everyone will have it. There's also a coin-store featuring five rides that refreshes after some in-game time.
And then there are at least 22 cars that no one will ever get. From what i gather in this paid ad there were paid seasons so you could pay while you pay to get some limited cross-brand-promotional cars like Jurassic or Spongebong. Bots still pick them and they are usable in PvP. Something-something pay to win. Something-something games are not art, ban all games on the legislative level, burn all games in piles.
In real life these toys come with different paint-jobs in different years, but many of the cars in this game come with very ugly colours. For that there's the livery editor, so at least you can pick some basic colours and shaders to simulate materials. But if you want to break your mind and study the terrible editing controls for gamepads you can create... something. My best creation is realistic rule-compliant lights for 24 Ours with same basic classy white on black decor. The most advanced things i saw are an off-brand Miku Hatsune or re-creations of real-life sports liveries including ads for tobacco, alcohol and oil-spilling companies. Sharing is caring. But still there isn't much choice. Imagine this sharing functionality in CoD games where people waste weeks to create full arts or the most realistic johnson pictures imaginable from basic shapes and colours.
There's the track editing but it's a thousand times worse than even the gamepad livery editor. I just couldn't figure it out.
And there's the customization of your basement. The only use for it is that several tracks happen in it and i think you can see the changes. This is the first time when i saw some of the official skins to be school-kid with paintbrush.exe tier terrible. So i just made something acceptable and never bothered with it again.
The game looks pretty enough. I would add more FoV, though, but this is playable. It runs alright, i think. But then again, i'm on 10900k 3080Ti. Most of the achievements are progression-trackers or functionality checks. Then there's the one asking you to finish all the hard time-trials. And even after you do that you still have three locked - 100000 coins, 100 wins, 25000 gears. I reckon i now have half, half and half. So to get these i will have to just replay the first short race again and again, buy lootboxes and melt duplicates. Wow, such gameplay, much fun, very wow.
Not a racing. Not the best carting game. Better than a kick in the shaft.
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