Hot Wheels Let’s Race is an animated Netflix show started in 2024, targeting a young pre-school audience. It follows six young racers at the Hot Wheels Ultimate Garage Racing Camp, trying to become the next racing stars. Sounds like a good premise for a kid-friendly racer, and we’re here to dive into it. This is the XboxEra review for Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed, tested on Xbox Series X!
Hot Wheels, let’s race!
The toy cars of the Hot Wheels brand have always had quite the videogame presence. In recent times, we had the Milestone’s lovely Hot Wheels Unleashed and its even better sequel. The sensational Forza Horizon 5 received a highly spectacular Hot Wheels-themed expansion pack. And, most relevantly for our review, publisher GameMill’s Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem, last year’s kid-friendly romp about spectacular big-wheelers. The publisher’s unchanged for Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed, though development duty goes to BamTang Games this time. You may most recently remember them for a quite solid Dreamworks-themed mascot kart racer.
On a surface level, the game is not entirely dissimilar from Milestone’s aforementioned Hot Wheels Unleashed titles. Players get to choose one of the many toy cars at their disposal, then drive across giant Hot Wheels tracks mid-air. Fast speeds, massive drifts, power-ups, even some pushing and shoving for some pure arcade bliss. The driving model is certainly quite weird at first. It feels incredibly snappy and reactive, to a flaw even. Slightly moving the stick one way sends your toy car to the opposite wall in an instant, though at least the wall collisions are generous in terms of time loss.
We’ve got the drive, we’re revvin’ up
First and foremost, Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed is a game for a younger audience. This means that, while the handling may feel off at first, it’s still quite easy to stay on road, with generous walls and minimal speed losses when crashing. Drifting efficiently not only makes cornering easier, but also gifts us boost, drastically improving our overall speed in the process. Tracks can feature boost areas, traps, but also areas where the car’s built-in power up can be recharged. Instead of tradiotional Mario Kart-esque power-ups, each car has its own skill. This can be a massive speed boost, an explosion around the car that smashes opponents or a giant self-driving wave.
The effective variety given by these power-ups isn’t too high, and in general, the difficulty too is extremely low. I’m aware this is a kid-oriented game, but even those racers often offer different options. Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed does feature various speed and AI difficulty settings, but I’ve found all of them extremely easy. Even when I crashed a lot at the higher speeds, I usually managed to beat the AI with like half a lap of gap in 3 lap races. Time trials had me beat the only par times by 30-40 seconds on the first try. Not a single challenge of the game required me more than a single try, with nothing to really make the game more difficult.
Eyes on the Prize
That isn’t to say that Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed is boring – quite the contrary. The driving is quite exhilarating at higher speeds, with a lot of challenging track parts. Massive loops, magnetic roads, tricky ramps, faster but more difficult optional routes. It’s a shame the game’s AI can not keep up with these speeds. At the very least, almost every game mode can be played up to 4 players locally, making for some excellent in-house rivalries. Too bad the game has no online play whatsoever, though it’s hard to imagine the game would have a lively multiplayer community either way.
In many races, the very design of the tracks can change based on player choices. Not only each player selects their favourite character from the show, a car, a power-up and so forth – they also get to pick an unlocked track part. The selected track then evolves based on each drivers’ choices, implementing whichever segment they all chose. Want to keep it easy? Just insert a simple corner. Want to give a challenge to your opponents? Throw in a gnarly loop, followed by a tough jump. The selection of pieces isn’t too high, but it increases the variety of tracks a little bit.
The Wrong Track
The creative options don’t quite end there, as players can even build their own tracks in Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed‘s editor. Well, sort of. The player is given a grid to play with, in which they can place any of the available track pieces – again, these include loops, jumps, and various twists and turns. The game then automatically fills in the rest of the circuit, connecting the various parts placed. It’s a rather limiting approach, but it’s still possible to create some pretty fun tracks, which then we can save for local play in up to 8 slots. To access this mode, the player first has to beat a couple tutorial-like challenges – once again, very easy stuff.
When playing through entire cups and other such events, players even encounter boss fights. These are quite simple in nature, and have the racers fight against giant creatures like the ones seen in the show. These are Professor Rearview‘s giant dragon, a similarly grand snake, and so forth. These challenges simply boil down to collecting items to throw at the boss and avoiding their attacks. Getting hit has, once again, minimal penalties, and even being to one to take down the boss is hardly too relevant, since it’s a team effort. The player who does most damage gets a short speed boost for the next race, but that’s about it.
Cruise Control
As is often the case with licensed videogames on a relatively tight budget, you can absolutely feel some of the corners cut. There are various cutscenes with the show’s characters, but many of them are short and barely even voiced. The handling is a bit janky, with physics not always reacting in the best ways. As said, the difficulty, too, is rather unbalanced, and certain vehicles and power-ups feel vastly superior to others. It is overall a fun, accessible racer for sure, but it’s hard to imagine it keeping even young players’ attention for more than a handful of hours. There’s just not enough content or variety for that. Oh, and before I forget: this is a Play Anywhere title, so ROG Xbox Ally owners can carry this one with themselves.
All in all, Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed is a fast-paced, yet accessible racer, based on Netflix’s show and the Hot Wheels toys. It certainly fails to live to some of its full potential due to a variety of reasons. These include an oddly twitchy handling, lack of online, a lack of real challenge and limited variety. Yet, the show’s infectious style, the speedy races and the editor should ensure a good time for younger players and fans of the show. Even I, as an adult, had a good time, speeding through these acrobatic Hot Wheels tracks, despite the game’s limitations.
Hot Wheels Let's Race: Ultimate Speed
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Quite exhilarating at high speeds
- Captures the show's vibes well
- Solid amount of content
- Fun track editor
CONS
- Strange handling
- Very low difficulty, even for a kid-friendly game
- No online modes
