HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED™

Worth buying? What 300 Steam reviews say.Worth buying? Here’s what 300 Steam reviews actually say.

Very Positive · 82%Very Positive · 82%2021

$29.99

US Steam price, checked 2 h ago

The verdict

A good-looking, easy-to-pick-up arcade toy-car racer with great Hot Wheels fan service and split-screen. Skip it if you hate rubber-banding AI, hard time trials, loot boxes and heavy DLC.

Great for

Hot Wheels fans and families who want split-screen arcade racing, ideally bought on sale

Main risk

Rubber-banding AI, brutal time trials and loot-box/DLC monetization sour the fun

What players love

Runs well, great graphics, Steam Deck ok

Mentioned in ~1 in 5 positive reviews

“I'm playing on the Steam Deck. No need to change any settings, it plays perfectly straight out of the box.”
Steam review · 1.6 h played ↗

“Amazing quality and detail of both the little cars and the environments.”
Steam review · translated · 8.9 h played ↗

Nostalgic Hot Wheels fan service

Mentioned in ~1 in 5 positive reviews

“This is an absolute Nostalgia Rush!”
Steam review · 0.1 h played ↗

“been collecting hotwheels for years, now i can race with it and make my own custom decal is a dream come true!”
Steam review · 10.1 h played ↗

“It felt like I was taken back to my childhood, when I badly wanted to collect a big Hot Wheels collection.”
Steam review · translated · 12.1 h played ↗

Huge, detailed car roster and customization

Mentioned in ~1 in 6 positive reviews

“customization is insane. Car variety is insane.”
Steam review · 19.7 h played ↗

“Huge collection of beautifully detailed vehicles.”
Steam review · 46 h played ↗

Track builder and community content

Mentioned in ~1 in 10 positive reviews

“The track builder is also surprisingly good and I ended up spending way too much time making stupid tracks instead of actually racing.”
Steam review · 2.4 h played ↗

Great split-screen and family play

Mentioned in ~1 in 11 positive reviews

“its a fun game to play split screen with your kid/s”
Steam review · 4.6 h played ↗

“Great family game! We play with the kids and my wife, plus split screen for two.”
Steam review · translated · 16.9 h played ↗

Fun arcade drifting and boosting

Mentioned in ~1 in 13 positive reviews

“Handling is smooth, drifting is fun, feeling of speed is just great.”
Steam review · 35.8 h played ↗

“Once you get the hang between drifting and boosting you feel unstoppable.”
Steam review · 19.1 h played ↗

What players complain about

Excessive DLC and monetization

Mentioned in ~1 in 3 negative reviews

“Buy the DLC to Unlock the Rest of the Track”
Steam review · 0.5 h played ↗

“Downright a greedy cashgrab game. Everything costs extra.”
Steam review · 6.9 h played ↗

Loot boxes, grind and gacha car unlocks

Mentioned in ~1 in 5 negative reviews

“I've opened 15 boxes in a row to get a Duplicate car every single time and it's just so tiresome and sad.”
Steam review · 7.2 h played ↗

“It takes 714 blind boxes, or 255 hours, to unlock all 80 cars.”
Steam review · 12.2 h played ↗

Rubber-banding, cheating AI and bad difficulty

Mentioned in ~1 in 7 negative reviews

“The game has too much rubberbanding and your opponents produce more boost than you are able to.”
Steam review · 9.2 h played ↗

“It's either stupidly braindead on easy mode or too bullshit hard on medium, there's no in-between in terms of difficulty.”
Steam review · 6.6 h played ↗

“Throughout the game you get beaten by bots with boosted starts wearing a random car skin.”
Steam review · translated · 5.7 h played ↗

Crashes and Steam Deck fatal errors

Mentioned in ~1 in 8 negative reviews

“fatal error at 24-27% when loading a match or watching the collection”
Steam review · 1.9 h played ↗

“Game keeps crashing 50% way through.”
Steam review · 11.6 h played ↗

Brutal time trials

Mentioned in ~1 in 15 negative reviews

“the time trials are terrible. I am not a good player I admint but these are really hard.”
Steam review · 7.2 h played ↗

“it's marketed towards kids and the time trials are way too hard for them to ever beat.”
Steam review · 2.2 h played ↗

Missable FOMO season content

Mentioned in ~1 in 17 negative reviews

“The developers made the baffling decision to lock cars behind time‑limited battle passes.”
Steam review · 29.3 h played ↗

“24 "Racing Season" cars and collectibles were apparently FOMO battle pass DLC and are now lost forever”
Steam review · 14.5 h played ↗

System requirements

From the Steam store page

Steam Deck: Verified

Minimum

OSWindows 8.1 64-Bit or later

ProcessorIntel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX-6350

Memory8 GB RAM

GraphicsGeForce GTX 960 / GeForce GTX 1050

Storage22 GB available space

Recommended

OSWindows 8.1 64-Bit or later

ProcessorIntel Core i7-5820K / AMD Ryzen 5 2600

Memory16 GB RAM

GraphicsGeForce GTX 1060 / Radeon RX 580

Storage22 GB available space

OSWindows 8.1 64-Bit or later

ProcessorIntel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX-6350

Memory8 GB RAM

GraphicsGeForce GTX 960 / GeForce GTX 1050

Storage22 GB available space

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