Some of my most treasured multiplayer gaming moments have come from games about racing little cars around ridiculous tracks with friends. From Micro Machines to Mashed, the miniaturised car racing category is always reliable for a quick burst of fun. Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged from Milestone continues this tradition of scale-model mayhem by building on the features of it–s predecessor with new modes, driving abilities and a story-led campaign, but doesn’t quite hold up when played outside those quick bursts.
What caught my eye immediately upon jumping into a race in Unleashed 2 was the sheer attention to detail in the cars themselves. Tiny details like the moulding lines from their manufacturing process and realistic-looking materials for painted plastic and metallic surfaces make it look Milestone just ripped a toy car from its packaging and threw it onto my screen.
They even damage realistically – cars at the end of a race have little chips and paint wear that looks exactly like most of my little toy cars did when I was a kid, after they’d been smashed together a bunch. There’s a great variety of vehicles on offer too from iconic original Hot Wheels designs to models of real life cars, including everything from sedans to tanks.
The environments and track on offer are also worthy of note. Tracks can be set in one of five environments and each lends a particular personality to the race. Racing out in the backyard might be the most nostalgic setting for me, as someone who whiled away countless hours flinging little die cast cars along the patio. Other settings like a dinosaur museum and 80s style pizzeria/arcade are great fun too. Full of appropriate hazards and landmarks, the racing environments in Unleashed 2 are a treat.
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Unfortunately, the positive presentation party ends when it comes to what’s being pumped from your speakers. While engines sound wonderful, varied and appropriate to the car being driven, I found the choice of music for the game pretty grating. Uninspired and repetitive, the music in Unleashed 2 had me reaching for the Spotify app on my PlayStation. Using the turbo boost while driving emits a high pitched whine that is unpleasant too, unfortunate given how essential boosting is to victory here.
Boosting is just one of the useful abilities you’ll have at your disposal to deal with the competition in Unleashed 2. New to this game are the jump and strafe abilities which can be used to reach new paths in races as well as to smash your opponents around a bit. The strafe can be especially fun – similar to the side swipe attack in F-Zero, your car suddenly shunts to the left or right and knocks anyone next to you aside. It can be particularly fun to use a larger, heavier vehicle to absolutely slam a small bike into the oblivion of the backyard garden. Each of these abilities uses your boost meter, which can be built up by drifting around corners, slipstreaming behind other cars and doing general Cool Stuff.
These abilities combined with the design of the tracks available give some great freedom in how you approach a race. As long as you pass through certain checkpoints in order, it doesn’t matter the precise path you take between them – and Unleashed 2 gives you plenty of opportunities to leave the beaten track. Whether you enjoy this will be down to personal preference, but I found this level of freedom mostly frustrating rather than rewarding. Not noticing a gap in the track ahead and falling off rather than jumping to the next section is annoying, even if respawning is reasonably quick. For a game designed with kids in mind, it gives a lot of opportunity to irreparably ruin your place in a race by missing a jump or drifting off-course.
Your solo experience of these races will likely begin in the campaign mode. Here, you traverse a top-down map view to select from available events. Each has a minimum requirement to pass, and an extra requirement for further rewards. There’s also a story happening throughout, though outside of the motion-comic style character scenes you’d be hard pressed to notice. Aside from boss levels, events have very little relation to the animated storyline. Boss battles were my least favourite events in the campaign, simply involving racing around a track solo trying to hit a series of targets. Miss one, and you basically have to start again.
Despite the story being barely relevant, the campaign is at least a decent way to explore the different race types available and earn currency to buy and customise your cars. A store is available with a constantly rotating selection of cars to purchase – with rarer ones appearing for sale less regularly. It’s definitely a friendlier way to build up a collection than the loot boxes of the previous game, but it’s a bit boring. I’d much prefer a more classic style of unlocking vehicles with challenges or milestones rather than just checking a store every 40 minutes to see if a rare car is available. Thankfully none of the currencies in the game require real money. Everything can be unlocked simply by playing the game a whole lot.
Multiplayer is the other major portion of Turbocharged, and there’s plenty to play with here. Heaps of quick race modes give plenty of different ways to play with friends as well as work your way through the global leaderboard ranks. Cross-platform play should make finding a match way easier, though it’s an (understandable) shame that Switch is left out of the cross-platform party here. I struggled to find many matches during my review time with the game, though given not many people have the game yet that’s probably to be expected. Local play is limited to two player split screen which is a bit of a shame given how much fun racers like this can be with a group.
I’d be remiss not to mention the in-depth track and livery editors. I found both tools a bit intimidating at first, but the sheer variety of pieces and customisations available is impressive. You’ll even unlock more as you play the game. Liveries and tracks can be shared with the online community too. It’ll be very cool to see some no doubt impressive user-created stuff emerge in the coming months.
