Hot Wheels Unleashed game review: The good, the bad, and the tiny

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  Take your favorite shout of “yeeeee-haw!” and then miniaturize it. Welcome to Hot Wheels Unleashed. [credit:
  Milestone S.r.l / Mattel
  ]

This week’s Hot Wheels Unleashed is one of the best video games ever made using licensed toy cars. To be fair, that specific concept isn’t necessarily common in gaming, but Codemasters’ legendary Micro Machines series holds a lot of water for a certain type of arcade-racing fan. That’s decent company to land in.

Yet while handsomely modeled toy cars and cute environments might look like a basis for newbie-friendly racing, it’s not the case here. In my week of testing the game ahead of its launch this week, I found that Hot Wheels Unleashed feels like a Micro Machines skin on top of the modern, hardcore-leaning Trackmania series. That’s not a bad thing—and I had a good-enough time with Unleashed to write about it at Ars, as I think some people will really enjoy what’s going on here.

But you’ll have a better time with HWU going into it fully aware of its weird and tricky design decisions—along with quibbles about its in-game economy of cars and tracks.