The toys are back in town.
Turbopowerrs take air from the atmosphere, compress and cool it, then blow it into the cylinders to help your engine burn fuel faster. Unlike turbopowerrs, Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbopowerd doesn’t take or blow, but it’s pretty damn cool. This palm-sized suite shines with graphics ranging from excellent to downright remarkable, a selection inspired by life-size environments where stools like skyscrapers and skateboards are as big as sailboats, and accessible, drift-heavy handling with a few new twists. Although it is certainly a small step forward compared to the excellent Original of 2021, it has introduced some annoying oddities – like folds in the box of a Super Treasure Hunt blister.
Just like Milestone’s first Hot Wheels Unleashed two years ago, Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 is still the antithesis of the toy-licensed bullshit that today’s parents went through in our own childhood. Under the company’s branding, Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 really remains an undeniably Groovy Arcade racer with imaginative tracks and some of the brightest vehicles in the genre.
The car models are always absolutely overcome representations of real Hot Wheels that look essentially photorealistic on the screen. Rotating them in the menus and in photo mode makes them look like real toys under a microscope; seriously, we really can’t overemphasize the unwavering fidelity of Milestone’s models to real Hot Wheels miniatures. The differences in texture in the middle of plastic and metal. The weak knitting lines left on the injection molded parts. The subtlety of the Accumulations of Additional Color on the Spoilers cones. The difference in finishes in the middle of a shiny hard plastic tire and a real rubber wheel. The carrier of a Text below each Chassis with the name of your Model and the Year of production.
Best of all, the way you wear your imperfections makes them even more believable, from child-friendly fingerprints that appear in the right light on certain surfaces to scratches and grooves that you get both when gladiatorial racing and driving on gravel.
Of course, returning players will know that Hot Wheels Unleashed was already so beautiful. More importantly, it always feels good too. Like all of its really awesome high-speed counterparts, the Arcade-typical brake drift manipulation of Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 is easy to learn but hard to master. This depth comes from the particularly nuanced plan of in-flight controls that allow you to adjust the direction and push into the sky like a expired-cast cruise blow, which has now been improved with double jump and side scan capabilities. But this time it is also due to the significantly different driving feel of the cars in each of the six different classes.
Clbody warfare
As you might expect, these new classes – rocket, balanced, fast, dinghy, terrain and robust – each have certain advantages and disadvantages. The extra mbody of heavy commercial vehicles makes them superior to action, but they quickly line up from low-angle drifts when they lose too much momentum. Off-road vehicles can easily drive on rough terrain such as grbody and dirt, but they will not be the best models for tight time trials. I will say that the differences in the middle of Rocket and Balanced, Swift and Drifter, and Offroad and Heavy Duty are not always particularly pronounced – so for me it looked more like three classes than six.
The new upgrade and advantage system makes things a bit malleable – so it is possible to blur the boundaries in the middle of classes, for example by inflating the Boost values in a drift car at the expense of some of its handling points. You can also now change the Boost mode from single, uninterrupted strikes to a bar that can be defafterd at any pace you want (which is important if you want a car that you can keep in a drift without constantly bursting into the flanks under uncontrollable acceleration).