Arriving on the back of a home console release late last year, Firebrand Games’ Hot Wheels: World’s Best Driver is now available on mobile devices courtesy of publisher Chillingo.
When I was asked to review a mobile game and I was told it was a Hot Wheels game, I was thrilled. My imagination threw me straight back to being a kid again, playing with those magical little cars. I was running them around the edges of sofas at breakneck speed, performing death-defying jumps between tables and chairs and then stealing a last minute victory in the big living room Grand Prix. I downloaded Hot Wheels: World’s Best Driver from the App Store immediately and was full of hope and excitement, ready to relive those glory days.
It’s possible that I was full of just a little too much childlike wonder because when I sat down to play the game, it really was not what I was expecting. At least not at first. I was expecting to be driving around in the little toys I remembered and I thought the tracks would be just like those rooms I raced around. Instead however, what I was given was arguably better than that. What World’s Best Driver gives you is what you saw in your head when you were small: incredible machines doing outlandish things. Instead of racing around the inside of your mum’s best fruit bowl and imagining it was a wall of death, you actually get to drive around the pit of physical near-impossibility that you saw in your mind’s eye.
The game gives you four separate color-coded teams to play as: red, yellow, green and blue. Each with its own unique set of vehicles and challenges. The green team are speed demons, giving you sharp, pointed, aerodynamically designed vehicles to compete in drag races and time trials. The blue team are technical wizards, offering up high performance drift cars to drive near sideways around (and sometimes straight up) courses. The yellow team are the big behemoths, delivering monster trucks to smash your way to victory. Finally the red team are thrill seekers, all about pushing themselves to the limits as much as the vehicles and performing motocross style tricks on bikes and snowmobiles on the way.
It’s important to note here though that while there are four teams to choose from you won’t compete with one against the other. You can’t race a monster truck against a bike for example. Instead, think of each team as a chapter of the game: you get a series of levels per chapter but there’s no cross over. Each team has six stages of three challenges to take on. For instance, with the blue team you must first complete a drift challenge up a wall, the next challenge is a test to see if you can use a parachute break to stop as near to the end of the track as possible without hitting it and the third challenge involves getting around a flat course using as much drift as possible. Get enough medals (bronze, silver or gold depending on how well you completed the task) over the three challenges and you unlock the next three events for that team.
Despite being a driving game, very few of the challenge types across the teams involve races but the variety is very impressive nonetheless. This diversity gives the game an impressive shelf-life as it’s not easy to get through those challenges on the first attempt. Some will take a while to get right and then take even longer to perfect.
One of the reasons it will take a while for you to get those challenges right though, is the controls. The game operates by auto-accelerating constantly and giving you turn and brake controls. I found that the auto-accelerate caused me a lot of problems, particularly with the blue (drift) and red (stunts) teams. Every now and again, you’ll need to do a bit of precision manoeuvring and not being able to control your speed all that well makes that difficult. As anyone who’s done a lot of driving either in video games or real life can tell you, braking is a lot different to just easing off the accelerator. It gives a different sort of slowing which changes how you approach corners. This mechanic is something that takes some getting used to and can be a little aggravating at times.
Graphically the game is well above average for an iPad title. Things can occasionally look a little too blocky, particularly at high speeds when racing as the green team, but on the whole the presentation is impressive. The audio work is also good, with different engine sounds per vehicle and a unique navigator per team who helps explain each challenge to you. This range of audio means that the annoyances you can get in some games from the same sound-bites being played over and over don’t come into play too quickly.
One thing that this game unfortunately lacks though is a multiplayer mode. It may be that something so graphically intense is pushing the iPad’s hardware to its limits and preventing a multiplayer mode from being possible, but it really would have added a whole new dimension to the fun. It’s a shame it’s not there, but it’s not the end of the world.
Overall I was satisfied with my experience of playing Hot Wheels World’s Best Driver. It clearly presents itself as being a genuinely big game to put time into; it’s not the sort of game you’d play if you’ve got a minute or two to kill sitting on a train. You’ll need to sit and give this game time as you replay a level time and time again, trying to reach for that gold medal. Whether the control scheme will have you climbing the podium or tearing your hair out though, is down to you.
