izigame.me

Being a regular hot wheels enjoyer I've been yearning for a solid hot wheels game for quite a while and I haven't found anything I would like after the PS2 era of hot wheels games. I was reluctant to get the first Unleashed game having heard of all the fundamental flaws involved in that game, and decided to wait until Unleashed 2 when I heard about it. After having put some time into it, here are my thoughts:

CORE GAMEPLAY

It's very nice I gotta say. The overall handling model feels just right for controlling a bunch of toy cars, especially when it comes to the drifting aspect of it. You can pull off some long and satisfying drifts around corners. The addition of the lateral dash, jump opens up some fun possibilities on how you run the various tracks in the game, especially if you're one that enjoys speedrunning. It's also useful for getting you out of a tight spot during a race, like if you were about run off the track for example.
There's a good variety of tracks to play around on across the different locations featured in the game that provide some fun twists, turns, jumps and a decent assortment of obstacles to keep things interesting. Especially if you were to look at the community made tracks.
Tuning and upgrading your cars is a rather interesting part of the experience, there are three performance tiers for all cars that you can unlock to also unlock these perks which will give your cars a certain buff but also a certain debuff as a tradeoff. I don't quite agree with that system but you can still overall tune your car to fulfill a certain purpose if need be.
The A.i. opponents are manageable to deal with on a race by race basis across the 4 difficulties available in this game. The difficulty mainly affects the A.i.s car performance and aggression. As far as I can tell, there isn't any rubber banding non-sense like you'd see in other games. If there is, it's minor enough to be barely noticeable. One thing I particularly appreciate about how the game matches you up with a.i. opponents is that you don't absolutely have to have your car upgraded to the max in order to have a chance against them, especially on the hardest difficulty. You can go into a race with a stock performance car and the game with put you with a.i. that are also driving stock vehicles.
In terms of the actual vehicles themselves, there's plenty to choose from that handle accordingly based on their type. They are divided into 6 categories of vehicle types: Balanced (all purpose), Drifter, Rocket (high top speed), Heavy Duty (resistant to obstacles), Off-Road, and Swift (about the same as drift tbh). Some cars, however, are categorized in ways that don't make sense. For example, there's a car called "Hot Wired" which looks like a drag race kind of car but it's categorized as a "Drift" car even though it should more logically be a "Rocket" car.

Sound design and music

The engine sounds for the vehicles are fantastic. They're a lot better than I expected for an arcade racing game about playing around with a bunch of toy cars.
The overall soundtrack is pretty good. I wouldn't really say it's the sort of sound track one would likely go out of their way to listen to outside of the game. Maybe the menu music if anything as it does has a couple of songs that I can really vibe to.

Graphics

It goes without saying that it's definitely pretty on the eyes. A bunch of bright, vibrant colors as one may expect for a racing game like this. The attention to detail on the individual cars and environments are something to appreciate, especially with how the cars get visibly scratched and paint chipped during a race. The Menu UI is okay I guess. It's the same sort of square tile lay out you'd see in most other games nowadays.

Campaign mode

The overall story to "Creature Rampage" is really bare bones. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect a deep or profound narrative especially considering this is a game about racing toy cars but it's just plain forgettable since it just centers around a professor dude accidentally creating giant monsters and two drivers needing to utilize a shrinking device to fight the monsters with the help of a robot assistant, the two drivers would suggest that there would be a two player element to this mode but there isn't at all. It's strictly single player the entire way through. It would have been nice to see some additional characters that could be rivals to the driver characters to keep the story interesting. There's good amount of events in this mode to keep you occupied for a while, after you have completed all the main events you unlock additional events called "Extreme Events" which are mean to be extra challenging to really test your skill with certain restrictions that they often enforce like only being able to use a certain vehicle type for a race or drift event. Completing events in this mode will get you in-game money, XP, unlock tracks, and track pieces to use in track editor but not cars. You can only obtain cars by buying them in the in-game shop or unlocking them through completing certain "Unleashed Missions" which are just side goals you can complete that gets tracked as you play the game in general regardless of what mode you play on. The Boss battles are rather uninteresting if you ask me, all you really do in those boss battle is drive around a race track and ram into a bunch of targets to hurt the boss while trying to get to each one as fast as possible in order to prevent this meter from filling up all the way which slowly fills up faster as you ram into more targets. If that meter fills up all the way you lose the battle. That's it, really. I think there was a wasted opportunity to include special obstacles that would act as the bosses attacks to make it a lot more interesting.

DLC

The DLC for this adds some nice additional content for you to play around with.... but that's it really. It's just extra cars, environments and tracks for you to play with. The "Acceleracers", "Made in Italy", "Fast & Furious", and "Alien Encounters" expansions have their own tie in campaigns but there's no story to them at all, it just gives you extra events to complete for some more money and XP and thats it.

Multiplayer

It's a rather lack luster experience honestly, mainly because of there not being enough players to get the most out of it. Most of the time you'll be finding players in the lobby for normal race events but the time to get queued up for that drags out. On average it has taken me roughly 1 to 3 minutes to get put into a lobby. There's two multiplayer exclusive modes, one that has you only driving the monster trucks in an arena and ramming into each other to score points. The other has you running around in one of the environments picking up gears and cashing them in to score points. These modes are pretty fun but I was only able to to play them a couple to times due to the aforementioned reasons

Car customization and track editor

Beyond the performance aspect of the cars. The game lets you change the livery, boost sound and boost color of a car. Though the boost sounds in questions are just a bunch of horns so I don't understand that at all. The livery editor is comprehensive and offers some really nice flexibility with how you set up the visual look of your car. You're able to change the material of your car as well as the stickers you put on it. It gives you a 1000 layers limit to work with so that should be plenty for most people. You can even creator your own stickers. One big gripe I have though is that once you're done with your custom livery, you have to publish it in order to be able equip it onto your car, I don't understand that at all especially when it's not a requirement in any other racing game. The track editor provides a nice assortment of options for you to utilize in order to build your own track across the assorted environments available.