A depressingly overlooked, fun racing game. 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. Physics 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. The Cars 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 Collection 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. Singleplayer Campaign 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. Custom Content 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." DLC Expansions/Monetization 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. In Conclusion 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...)
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