Late 2021 I actually suffered a crisis in confidence playing a newly released game that I ended up not touching that game for more than an entire year. The game? Hot Wheels Unleashed, and I bought it on day one for the PS5. For the uninitiated, Hot Wheels Unleashed is an arcade racing game featuring tracks that are both made out of Hot Wheels parts featuring quite a number of Hot Wheels cars.
These cars that can be unlocked through purchasing blind boxes using in-game currency which are earned by doing well in races. Yup, it’s basically like 200-cc Mario Kart with Hot Wheels vehicles. For the life of me I was losing every single race that I started, more often than not finishing in last place. I would like to think that I would be better at arcade racing games so I ended up moth-balling the game until now.
It wasn’t until a couple of days ago that I purchased the same game, but for the PC. The main reason was to fill a niche on my Steam Deck for a proper racing game, and it was available for a very deep discount on Steam. The odd thing was, upon playing the game, I ended up winning race after race after race. At first I thought perhaps being closer to the action allowed me to be a better racer, but then I decided to boot up the PS5 for a comparison.
Well, I started losing races again so I did something that I should’ve done way earlier: check the difficulty settings. Turns out that I’ve accidentally set the difficulty level for the PS5 version as “Extreme”. This might have been a slip when I first started the game back in 2021.
In any case, the beauty of Hot Wheels Unleashed is that it is the closest thing to a flashy Speed Racer (for those who’ve seen the live-action movie Blu-Ray, you get what I mean) game on modern day consoles. The game runs very well on the Steam Deck with some slow-downs here and there compared to the PS5 or the PC version of the game. Do check it out!
