The first trailer for this game was so amazing; I was so hyped. The cars, those fucking orange tracks; everything was beautiful. After seeing some gameplay, I began to feel that the environments that the tracks are built in are kind of boring and lack any sort of "liveliness". Now that I have played the game, that is exactly the problem.

I will reiterate, the Cars looks so so so so good. These are REAL Hotwheels driving around in my screen; meticulous work went into them. The track pieces look so good too. The problem, however, is that the game is just fundamentally boring to me. The racing itself feels fine, but I think the deadness of the world really sucks this game right down the chute. Stunt Track Driver is my favourite Hot Wheels experience, and that is because the levels are real. They are that fantasy of building cool tracks in your house, on objects that you live with; with real alive/moving things interacting as you race. On that first level when you hit the cat's tail, or the dog barks at the car. Jumping over stairs and fish bowls, ultimately crashing into that TV; that is a REAL environment.

The way these tracks are built just do not tap into that same feeling, adding on to the empty environments. The tracks are pretty much all nonsense logic defying floating in the air. I cannot tell what I am seeing around me most of the time, so the only visuals I have is the monotonous HotWheels tracks.

I played a little of the campaign, and it reuses the same tracks way too much. I pretty much HATE reused content in racing games. I race against easy AI for numerous reasons:
1.) I don't trust driving game AI's not to be bullshit some way or another
2.) I usually hate wasting my time losing in a lot of arcade type games, and that is even more stronger in racing games.
This style I have leads me to enjoy scenery and seeing whats next in tracks over the actually mechanics of driving better than opponents. So when I have no real scenery to look at PLUS that non-scenery is reused constantly, I go into a death state. I also don't like Laps for this same reason, and most of the races are laps. I only like laps in one games, Sonic All Star Racing Transformed, cause the maps actually fucking change each lap.

The Gacha system for new Hotwheels is kind of annoying and dumb.

Finally, the track creator is kind of cool. I tried making a more realistic track that might be created IRL (or at least Stunt Track Driver logic). However, when you pick what start you want, you can pick from Circuit or Point A-B race starters. You can edit individual pieces of the tracks once you have placed them down. You CANNOT swap between which type of race you picked without deleted all the way back to the beginning. This is extremely heinous and made me instantly hate building tracks.

The music is also fucking boring ass corporate E-sports EDM/Techno, whatever. BLand as hell.

SO yeah, this is the best HotWheels game at portraying the visuals of the cars, but kind of lacks in any personality.

Reviewed on Jun 04, 2023


1 Comment


9 months ago

@curse it is