Honestly milestone should just make an acceleracers game at this point

Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 - Turbocharged is definitely an improvement over the original. It adds a few unique elements and fixes some of the things the previous game had problems in. This looks like it could be a pretty fun and enjoyable game for the future and I'm looking forward to what this game has for it's upcoming DLC.

While a lot of people say that this game is 'too similar' to the first, it's not exactly the same. If you think that way, then... apparently you guys don't understand how much of a big improvement this game is over the first. Do your research before writing it off, please. The first game's coding wasn't made with the Jump and Lateral Dash mechanics in mind.

-There are now vehicle classes. Drifters are vehicles that specialize in Handling, Balanced cars which are what it says on the tin can, Rocket cars are great for straight line speeds, Heavy Duty cars can blow through obstacles, Off-Road vehicles can handle rougher surfaces, and Swift vehicles specialize in acceleration.

-You're now able to jump over stuff and dash into other racers, likely pushing them off the track when the opportunity arises which is always fun to do.

-The Rarity system now only affects the chances of cars appearing in the Shop. It no longer has any impact on vehicle performance. You can also apply Skills (or Perks, if you will) on vehicles to either make them function better at the cost of boost (Handling), make their boost better at the cost of functionality (Boost), and give them immunities to obstacles and modules (Obstacles).

-While the livery system is the same, you can now alter the sound your car makes when boosting as well as changing the boost flame color. You can also make your own stickers and download others to use for your own liveries.

-The Shop system is much better. You now are able to force a Shop refresh at the cost of a small Coin fee. This means you no longer have to simply wait around for the next assortment. This also adds a bit of a selection on what you want: do you want to go ahead and refresh the shop, or you wanna wait until you have some more Coins first?

-Gears are gone, but now there's three more currencies in the game: Skill Points, Upgrade Kits, and Spin Tokens. Skill Points are used to purchase Skills for your currently selected car. Upgrade Kits are a much more convenient way to upgrade the performance of your cars to Powered and Ultimate, and Spin Tokens which can only be used for the Hot Wheels Spin. Coins are self-explanatory.

-Speaking of the Hot Wheels Spin, Blind Boxes are gone for good in this game. The Hot Wheels Spin will not only have cars that you could win, but now there's currency to be won. Microtransactions don't exist in this game, too.

-There's more game modes. You got the usual Quick Race, Time Attack, and Split-Screen like before. But now, you have Elimination which is a take on Burnout Revenge's Eliminator events - don't get caught in last place when the timer hits 0. Drift Master where you need to score as much as possible while drifting in corners, and Waypoints which is just you driving around the different environments from Point A to Point B as fast as possible.

-Monster Trucks are now more stable. Before, they were a nightmare and had very twitchy reactions to collisions and landings which made them very risky to use. Now in this game, they're much more stable and are actually driveable!

-There's now a leveling system for players, as well as Unleashed Missions. Every time you level up and complete those missions, you mostly gain currency and a few customization items, respectively. This gives more replay value for completionists like me, so expect me to come back to this game a lot for those!

-Cross-platform support is now a thing for Xbox, PlayStation, and PC players! You can also party up with players on other consoles as well, so that's a very welcome addition! The game does run on Epic Games services, so you're gonna have to make an account on Epic for cross-platform parties, or connect your current account to Epic Games.

-No Racing Seasons this time around. Just DLC released periodically and no fear of missing out on content. There's now only two Season Passes instead of three, and the Legendary Edition includes all the content, with the exception of the pre-order bonuses (those were included for free so that people who pre-ordered the game prior to release would have them early).


-Most of the vehicle lineup are returning cars from the first game. Why is Tricera-Truck still here? That car was terrible back then! While I know for a fact that Character Cars aren't in the game anymore, there's still some questionable choices here, as well as cuts that would've been nice like the Skull Crusher for instance. We could've had one or both of the McLarens from the first game! I mean, did Mattel really need to remind us that Bone Shaker is the star vehicle of Hot Wheels? I think we all know that by now. Gee, thanks guys...

-To be as honest as I can here, the story isn't the most enticing aspect of the game's Creature Rampage mode. In all seriousness, it is fun to shrink actual human beings to drive toy cars, but the characters themselves are just 'bleh' to me.

-As much as I don't care about the Track Builder mode, the amount you can put in each environment is a big disappointment. You can't put as much as you can anymore, so everyone's creations are likely going to be not as entertaining nor exciting as the first game.

-While public online multiplayer lobbies are still 12 players, private lobbies now only support up to 10 players. Milestone, I know you've said that it was because of engine limitations, but how hard is it really to get a lobby of 12 people for those who don't want to race with randoms? Start upgrading to a better engine that has more flexibility.

-Nintendo Switch players STILL get the boot on cross-platform multiplayer due to hardware limitations. It's a fair bit disappointing too, since Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered even had cross-platform support. I wonder how EA did this better than Milestone...

-Grab the Gears is like a scavenger game mode while Clash Derby is like a demolition derby. The reason why this is a negative is the fact that they're ONLINE-ONLY game modes. Did they seriously have to take that route for these two modes? I want to experience these on my own offline, but I can't because randoms will likely be part of both, and I don't really like playing with randoms online.

-The new public lobby system is what's driving players away. Nowadays as of the time of this review's update, there's so little people playing this online, almost like it's abandoned... those guys are missing out.

-No story cutscenes in the expansions, so don't expect unique stories in each one of them. Though this will vary if you're like immersed into the story.


Even with all that, I still am pretty proud of this game. Aside from the high cost that people will likely complain about for what it's worth, this is definitely a much needed improvement over the original. Definitely get this on sale whenever possible, you'll like this better than the first game.

I really want to like this game. I really, really do. But I can't recommend it to anyone.

The game looks exactly the same as the first HWU. AND YET, for some reason, you need a GeForce RTX 2070 Super, when for the first game, you only needed a GTX 1060. Which means, the game drops frames WAY more for something that looks identical to the first game.

The first game had terrible online services. You could barely find anyone online, and you couldn't even set it up so there is A.I. to fill in the empty slots, so there would be times where you would only find about 4 other people.

Somehow, it's even WORSE in this game. You could have 17 people playing it, go into match making and STILL only find about 2 other people in a lobby. And of course, with no A.I., the races just feel empty.

The base game only comes with 5 environments, but has a staggering 130 cars. In order to unlock more, you have to buy the season passes, which cost $29.99 USD EACH. Each of the two passes comes with 2 environments, meaning you have to spend $59.98 for 4 environments and 33 additional cars. Meaning Milestone expects you to pay more then what you originally spent on the game for less content than the base game came with.

To make this a little more clear...
$49.99 USD = 5 Environments, 130 cars.
$59.98 USD = 4 Environments, 33 cars.
Total = $109.97 USD

The upgrade system feels a bit shallow. I do like the fact that they were trying to make it easier to balance all the cars a bit more so you could race with whatever you want. But in the end, it really doesn't matter when you just need to fully upgrade a Rocket, Drift or Swift car, making a lot of the other cars types (off-road, heavy duty) not that good. You can get away with the Balanced type, but your best bets are Rocket, Drift or Swift cars. It's a real shame. I liked that they made the Monster Trucks fun in this and actually do what they are supposed to do: bully smaller cars. But what's the point if everyone else (the all of 3 people you will find playing online) are using much better cars and just leave you in the dust while you are stuck with a car that isn't that fast and doesn't handle that well?

Is it a fun game? Yes. Is it worth your money? Not even close.
Just buy the first Hot Wheels Unleashed. It's $39.99, or $79.99 if you want to get the Game of the Year edition, which comes with Season Pass Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3(that's 3 environments, 33 cars, and 9 track builder modules), and 6 additional cars on top of that.

Don't take my word for it. Just look at the average player base for the last 30 days:

Hot Wheels Unleashed = 120 Average Players.
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged: 15 Average Players.

Save yourself some money and get the first game. Or don't get either. Just don't even consider buying Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged unless it AND all of it's DLC get STEEPLY discounted.

TL;DR: A quaint game that's a liiiiiiiiiiiiiitle too pricey to justify buying full price but on a slight discount will likely be worth your while.

Very intuitive physics once you figure out the basic controls. Tapping your brake key causes a strong turn-in response on the car, therefore making it much easier to initiate a drift, jump over gaps, obstacles, or even the edges of the track (there are some pretty large shortcuts if you look hard enough!) If nothing else, Unleashed 2 really nails arcade driving physics well, having a system that's pretty approachable yet also has enough depth to make true mastery a long journey indeed.

A slight critique, and this is something I mostly discovered when running into the sudden difficulty spike that are drift master events. There is nothing to teach you how boosting and drifting interact with each other and quite often it's disincentivized outside of drift master events. While the technique is inherently a more advanced one it's a necessary one to learn for doing drift master on harder difficulties. I also found the interactions with tapping brake or throttle while drifting rather finicky and quite twitchy at times which contradicts the generally smooth handling present elsewhere.

Lots. A decent selection between Hot Wheels and manufacturer designs (with a few licensed ones thrown in too.) Can't comment on how desirable the cars in the game are as I've been pretty out of the loop when it comes to Hot Wheels for years now but you got your Twin Mill(s) and Bone Shaker(s,) got some Acceleracers and Highway 35 cars, even a couple oldies.

The five vehicle classes feel quite distinct and at the very least I couldn't immediately seeing any particular class being far superior to all the others, though I suspect that certain cars in the Balanced class might be better than most of the others.

Oh yeah you also have some other vehicle types too, mainly in the form of ATV's, monster trucks, and motorcycles. ATV's didn't feel particularly special, but I suppose they are four-wheeled vehicles that aren't on gigantic wheels. Monster trucks are surprisingly intriguing thanks to their innate resistances to certain obstacles, very fast-recharging boost, extreme weight, and just in general large size. Motorcycles however... well, you know, one of the great things about four-wheeled vehicles is that they are usually pretty stable, two-wheeled ones are rather prone to falling over and just in general far more at the whims of the laws of physics (or physics jank...)

A nice feature is that cars can be upgraded, with three main upgrade groups, handling, boost, and obstacles (resistances.) The upgrades have tradeoffs and certain ones can actually have a notable impact on your car. One of the biggest things however is that you can change the boost type of your car. At least from what I've observed charged boost is stronger in races while free boost is borderline mandatory in drift master and highly desirable in waypoint. This upgrade allows you to freely swap between 'race' and 'stunt' modes as I like to call them which is a blessing if you really like a particular car.

Car collecting is pretty straightforward, often as you go through the campaign or log in, you'll get a shop refresh and can peruse what new cars are present (or buy duplicates of your favorites.) The shop is pretty nice, allowing you to preview the statistics of the vehicle and for a very cheap fee, be rerolled for new stock. If the cheap shop reset wasn't there trying to collect the Super Treasure Hunt cars would be quite the painful process.

Wheelspins serve as an additional method, while it's not bad in terms of how rewards work, I do find it kind of painful that there is no way to skip over the animation and get the reward immediately. At one point I had over 30 spins hoarded and it took far longer than desired to go through all of them. Maybe I'm spoiled by Forza Horizon's system where if you don't want to bother, you can just skip to the final results.

The campaign is... serviceable, I can appreciate that it's an actual campaign. The story is... perhaps a bit too childish for my liking but it's nice to have. I can also appreciate that all but extreme events have scaling difficulty with your difficulty setting. Are you really struggling with an event? Lower the difficulty.

For the most part, the campaign can be done at will with many events being optional should you just wish to skip straight to the boss races. Said boss races aren't... bad, essentially a time attack mode, the intensity of the music changing as you come closer to defeating the boss or running out of time are nice.

Ultimately I found myself enjoying the extreme events over the regular campaign as they enforce car and upgrade restrictions, while also presenting some rather severe challenges. Sans the race/elimination events that are still affected by your difficulty level, very "extreme" event doing a race against easy AI.

The livery editor is... alright. I found it a be intuitive but a bit limited. Haven't dabbled with making stickers but it seems like it's an ordeal if you want to make anything seriously detailed, not that that's stopped some people. Something that utterly baffles me however, is that in order to use the liveries you created, you must upload the livery first and then download your livery. My initial reaction to learning this was not very child-friendly. It's beyond me why files that are on your own save data must first be uploaded then downloaded separately to be usable, is there no way to access local livery files within a save?

Meanwhile the track editor is quite impressive. From what I've heard from some friends who owned Unleashed 1, the track editor was good in that game, and it seems like it's even better here. I initially found the track-making process arcane, and there are some quirks about it that are frustrating (though I'm not sure if the lack of an undo feature is due to my inability to find it or is indeed bad design.) Despite these... transgressions the ability to use whatever environment you want, and build however you want can be fun and allow for some crazy tracks that put developer-made ones to shame. Oooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrr you happen upon some cursed obstacle course purposefully designed to be as obtuse as possible and frustrate you into quitting. I do somewhat despise that custom tracks take up 3 of the 5 options to vote on when playing online as there's a very good chance that you get a track that's hardly worthy of being referred to as a "racetrack."

There isn't much for me to complain about in regards to monetization at the time of writing though I would say that the car packs might be a bit too expensive for what they are. Nothing to really write home about other than it being nice to see an actually complete game not trying to pretend like you didn't just pay a fair chunk of change to purchase it.

In regards to the expansions... kind of disappointing but at the same time I can't feel particularly strong about it either. They add small little challenge sets to run around in to the campaign mode, and offer up some additional tracks in new environments that you can also build in. They feel somewhat hollow in the sense that they ultimately kind of just feel like they're... there, really gives that feeling of budget constraints. Nothing really wrong, just a lot of untapped potential.

A good game that is criminally overlooked. While it has some rough edges and certain aspects that feel "cheap," there are plenty of parts that are very fun and for a slightly reduced price, make this game a worthwhile purchase. (Wish online had more players though...)

This game has Steam Deck verification, but is completely broken. Single player cutscenes do not play resulting in a black screen that can't be skipped, and forces the player to force close the game. This stops all progression being made on Steam Deck. This game is a lot of fun, but with it being Steam Deck verified and broken I can't recommend this title. What makes it worse is the developer seems to be ignoring this issue. If this ever gets resolved I will gladly update this review.

Update: The developers have updated the game to play properly on the Steam Deck.

A little bit of background: I've stuck around with Hot Wheels Unleashed and Milestone for a good chunk of time. I played the 3 days of early access from pre-ordering the first game and I have 2500 hours in that game. These hours range from making liveries, building tracks, and racing with the best racers in that game in the beautiful community we've put together. The first game is lightning in a bottle, something that was accidentally so good that it kept bringing me back for more. It's not at all a perfect game and has a good chunk of issues that can easily be fixed in the sequel: Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged. Well, here we are now after 800 hours of gameplay of this game and I come to give my honest thoughts about this game.

The best way I can say it is that Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged is the monkey's paw of games for me. Below I will list how.

In the first game: The car roster was very lacking. We had a few bones thrown our way with cars like Power Rocket, RD-02, and Sharkruiser. However almost half of the roster of cars were made up of non-paintable character cars. In a game that promotes the players to express themselves with customization, this decision was very odd and it has upset a majority of the community. This issue while still persisting has been made better with the use of mods that unlock customization for these cars, however the preference still would have been for more hot wheels original cars,

In the second game: The car roster has been signifigantly improved. A lot of hot wheels originals have been added with the character cars not making a return. Nearly every car is paintable with the only cars being non-paintable being media cars like the Knight Rider KITT and the Back To The Future Deloreon Time Machine. In addition to these, the fast and furious DLC cars are non-paintable. This however is pretty upsetting as these cars are just manufactured cars and are no different from the manufactured cars that we are allowed to paint. This is mostly forgiven due to the fact that unlike the first game, these cars make a very small minority of the cast.

In the first game: The balance was not great, but acceptable. There are only a few cars that are universally considered over powered. Though with this, a decent chunk of the roster are very weak and undesirable by most. The boost bar system alone drives players away from certain cars, while cars with the boost pip system are objectively better and are chosen. Boost type isn't everything though as your handling and your boost power matters as well. While the top cars are very defined, there is also a good amount of cars that are still able to compete with these cars even if they can't outclass them in more situations than not. This made playing the cars feel rewarding. Each car also has their own unique personality and playstyle. One race car handling type car won't be the exact same as another and so on for the other classes. Discussion about the cars is also always fun because more performence can be squeezed out of them and you will almost always have people debating how good or bad a car is. Overall there's a lot of depth to how the cars drive.

In the second game: The balance is awful. Every car and class performence is a lot more objective this time around. The amount of overpowered cars has tripled if not more than that. ATVs, and Bikes are king with them leaving most of the cast in the dust with little problem. ATVs, and Bikes aside, if you're going with cars only (which is the etiquette with the community most of the time), then Swifts are king. The passive regeneration of the swift class is absurd compared to the rest of the cars. They have above average speed, Great cornering ability, 2nd best boost power out of the cars, and crazy fast regeneration. This class of car has very little if any weaknesses which makes racing against them as other classes frustrating. The next in line are Rockets and only sometimes. Rockets can keep up with and sometimes beat swifts when the track is right for them, however they are in my opinion very unfun to play. Your boost regeneration is the slowest in the game, while you do have one of the best boost powers, the trade off isn't worth it and brings the fun factor of this class way down, especially if you are a casual player racing against really strong opponents. The gap between the S tier vs the A tier of cars is way too big which makes playing classes aside from swift and certain rocket cars almost not an option unless you are playing on a gimmick track. On the topic of the top cars, the Swift class primarily consists of manufactured cars with very few hot wheels originals in there, which sours the mood a bit since when you're playing a hot wheels game, seeing a stock honda civic leaving your fighter jet in the dust effortlessly is very sad to see. The personality of the cars in the second game has almost been erased. Almost every car in their respective class feel way too similar to one another, with the deciding factor of which is better is which cars have more speed and more boost. Milestone has made the decision to give the already high speed cars the most amount of boost in the game, vs the slower speed cars being given the least amount of boost which makes justifying playing them hard. I was just talking about how the game's car roster is amazing, but it's a shame that you can't play as many of the cooler and more unique cars without handicapping yourself in performence.

In the first game: The track builder was very good, but also very flawed. The track would sometimes get softlocked, the limits to how much you can make with a track were pretty low with interactables and modules costing almost a third of your budget while the budget is already small as is. This didn't stop the community as they have developed a way to make it so that budget isn't a problem anymore with mods.

In the second game: The community have asked the developer Milestone to increase the limit so players can be more expressive with their tracks. What we recieved however is a punch to the gut. The track budget has been decreased from the first game, which means all tracks will on average be much shorter as well as well as not being able to make the track look more visually appealing with decorations which also cost points. Milestone has also increased to cost to certain objects in the builder from the first game as well.

In the first game: The multiplayer while not being amazing was serviceable. You would be placed into a random lobby with up to 11 other players and put into a spectator if they are in the middle of a race. From here you are able to invite your friends who can instantly join the lobby if there is enough room for them. Unfortunately the game does not have crossplay with console. The game has a lot of desync, but that is part of the game and collisions are optional in private lobbies. In private lobbies however, there is a bug that Milestone has refused to fix in which the lobby breaks after waiting too long to select a track after the first race in the session is completed. After the private lobby breaks, a new one will have to be created. It is not the worst thing in the world, but it is very inconvenient. In addition, another bug that Milestone has refused to fix is that the Join/Leave icon for when players enter or exit a lobby is broken. Now it displays the icon for a player entering a lobby for whether they join, or leave a lobby. This makes it confusing to keep track of players though it's mainly just annoying.

In the second game: The multiplayer lobbies have been signifigantly downgraded. The maximum amount of players any online game can hold has been downsized from 12 to 10 players. There is crossplay in this game which is a very good thing. Instead of being able to join a lobby mid race, players must be partied up together to join. They have also gotten rid of the spectator mode.

(continued in the comments)

The game itself is fine. Pretty standard Hot Wheels game. NGL I really only got this for the AcceleRacers content. Matel if you ever read these please release more AcceleRacers stuff.

Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged was an attempt to cash in on the success of the first entry. It didn't sell well.

Outside from the game releasing and the planned expansions, the game received no critical bugfixes with many bugs even present from the first game. The devs and community managers also never communicated well with the little playerbase they had, and rather focused on putting in as little amount of effort to save money.

DO NOT BUY FOR STEAMDECK! GAME DOES NOT WORK. Game crashes on third level.

Internal video player is broken for quite some time making career mode unplayable for many, especially on Steam Deck.