Superhot and Injustice 2 on PS4 round out the PS Plus Essential lineup for October 2022

If you didn't pick up Hot Wheels Unleashed at launch (and recent sales didn't tempt you), then October should be a good month for PlayStation Plus. Milestone's well-liked arcade racing game joins the lineup for PS Plus Essential subscribers alongside NetherRealm's superhero fighter Injustice 2 and the minimalist action-shooter classic Superhot.

You can fo?llow those links and cla??im the games starting on Tuesday, October 4.

Hot Wheels Unleashed has some cool locations, complete with nostalgic plastic orange tracks, and the cars look authentic, too. The main hangup is the way they're unlocked (through loads of DLC and loot boxes), and while those complaints still stand, getting access to the base game with your Pla??yStation Plus subscription eases the tension a bit.

I'm not sure where you're at with general superhero fatigue in 2022, and Injustice 2 feels like a short lifetime ago, but it's the kind of broad-appeal fighter that ma?kes sense for the PS Plus audience. (There's a story mode.) Been there, do??ne that? I feel you.

[caption id="attachment_346186" align="alignnone" width="1920"] _{Superhot is super replayable. You can always fight better.}
[/caption]

As for Superhot, it's a game about looking cool with a novel time-moves-when-you-do mechanic powering cinematic shootouts and other crazed action scenes. A classic FPS, t?hough I'm sure ple?nty of you would've preferred getting the VR edition instead.

Obligatory reminder in case it slipped your mind: you have until October 3 to claim Need for Speed Heat, Granblue Fantasy: Versus, and Toem. If you're a completionist �or could be, under the right circumstances �then I'd also suggest snagging the free Keys to the Map for Need for Speed Heat while you're at? it. It'll fill?? in the collectible locations.

According to Sony, the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium game additions for October will be shared "later this month." More classics this time, please! Like, a lot more.

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To the Batmobile!

Hot Wheels was never really my thing as a child. I had a few of the toys, like the ones that feigned damage when they crashed, (such is my destructive nature), but I never had what you could call a "collection." I have to admit, however, the new DC Comics DLC headed to recent racer Hot Wheels Unleashed looks fab?, and almost gets me antsy for the real thing.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iaKmvNJfXA

As revealed by developer Milestone, the two incoming DLC packs celebrate the heroes and villains of the DC universe �in particular those pertaining to The Dark Knight himself, Batman. The fun begins on November 11, when Hot Wheels Unleashed kicks off its "DC Super-Villains Racing Season." The season will feature six all-new?? vehicles representing a wicked Rogues' Gallery of Cheetah, Black Manta, Deathstroke, Bane, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn. The season will also see new items added to the title's Basement and Customization modes as well as "plenty of coins for everyone."

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRz3dn4jAus

On December 2, the Batman Expansion DLC will add a Gotham City-themed racetrack, along with a slick Batcave environment and a slew of Bats-related customization items. Five new vehicles will also arrive as part of the expansion, stylized after classic characters The Penguin, The Joker, and Robin, along with two new vehicles patterned after Batman himself. A troublesome hazard known as The Joker's Funhouse Split will also be made available for the Track Builder. The Batman Expansion is included in Hot Wheels Pass 1, or can be purchased sepa??rately on launch day.

Neat-looking vehicles. I lo??ve Harley's roadster. I can easily see how people become Hot Wheels collectors in the real world �stacking cabinets with dinky, polished vehicles.? To be honest, the last thing I really need is yet another compulsive collecting hobby, so maybe I'll just keep my How Wheels hoarding restricted to the digital realm for the time being.

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Die-cast carnage

For those of you who aren’t aware, Hot Wheels are a line of rail-launched ballistic weapons. Typically, they’re employed aga??i??nst cats, but they are also effective on younger siblings and antique furniture.

Historically, games ba?sed on these die-cast death dealers have been middling at best and terrible almost always. Micro Machines have been more consistent in their video game deliveries, but that makes sense since they were the better product. I won’t accept diverging opinions.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is Milestone’s attempt at doing the license justice, which is a bit worrying, because they’re best known for middling racing games. So, at the very least, we can expect something in the upper ?tier of Hot Wheels games.

Hot Wheels Unleashed (Nintendo Switch, PC [Reviewed], PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S)
Developer: Milestone
Publisher: Milestone
Released: September 30, 2021
MSRP: $49.99

After a few races of Hot Wheels Unleashed, I had a couple of persistent worries. First, you unlock cars primarily through opening blind boxes bought with in-game currency, "Gears". Immediately, tha??t gave me the suspicion that we’d be buying coins with real money for the chance to be repeatedly disappointed.

The second concern I had was that I was going to be looking at a lot of orange plast?ic track. Sure, that orange plastic could be twisted into all kinds of configurations, but the fear was that it was always going to blur together.

While my first doubt hasn’t been completely quashed �there’s no way to buy currency right now, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be one day �my second fear went away at about the time I saw tracks tying themselves into kno?ts like roller coasters designed by sadists.

The amount of content in Hot Wheels Unleashed is simply staggering, enabled by some smart design decisions. There are 66 cars ready to be unlocked. They’re separated into four categories based on rarity. There are a mere five attributes making each one unique, which isn’t a lot. You can also spend Gears to upgrade common cars up to? le??gendary status. Largely, this means there’s not a whole lot of tangible variation between vehicles; enough that you might have different cars for different occasions, but not so much that you can’t just drive the one that looks most appealing and still be successful.

The main campaign mode is Hot Wheels City Rumble, which follows the classic world map system to provide various challenges. The number of levels is dizzyingly high, which isn’t too strange for a racing game, but even if you just strip it down to the number of tracks, there’s?? about 40 of varying difficulty. This is no doubt helped simply because it’s all b?uilt in a track editor.

Don’t think the game is going to be easy because it’s based on a line of toys. I’m pretty sure the Hot Wheels target market is split between kids and adult collectors these days, anyway. Tracks start gettin??g pretty complicated in the later game, and while you can change the AI difficulty, that’s not going to help you on the time trials. It starts becoming a game of precision driving and track memorization. There are bumps that, if you hit them too fast, will send you off course, or curves that if you take too loosely will knock you over. It can take a few att??empts to clear a mission, as mistakes happen.

There’s also rubber-band AI, and while I could write an essay on how much I hate this method of adaptive difficulty, this isn’t the place. While I generally found it to not be terribly disruptive, the fact that a single mistake late in a track after a perfect performance can lose you the race is always annoying. It also makes the first two laps feel cheap. I thought it was hilarious when I found an exploitable shortcut on one track, which caused such an a??dvantage that the other drivers had to catch up at ludicrous speed. Ev?idently, there isn't a cap on how quickly your rival is supposed to catch up to you.

The amount of detail in Hot Wheels Unleashed is pretty phenomenal. The environments were all set up in ways that the tracks can make use of their nooks and crannies. Some make you go through vents or drift around a couch. One of my favorites has you drive a??cross a narrow strut that only has enough room for single file traffic.

It also incorporates playsets for additional obs?tacles. The spider playset can piss right off into orbit, especially on time trials. The volcano is the most stressful, however, as it requires careful navigation up a corkscrew. Otherwise, you might find yourself at the bottom again.

There’s a lot of white knuckle moments on offer, and while some of them come from the fact that, by design, you will always, always have another driver glued to your tail, a lot of it is just from how insanely the tracks are designed. On your first?? time around a track, there's an awful lot there to surprise you.

Honestly, most of the problems I had with Hot Wheels Unleashed were my own fault. Hitting a lip too hard and flipping my car, slamming into a barrier, boosting too hard and flying off the gravity tracks; I cussed a few times. The driving itself is surprisingly solid, with physics that donâ€??™t feel too outlandi??sh. The worst feeling is when you miss a jump, hit the return to track button, and get placed way back at the start of the jump. That doesn't always feel fair.

If you think you can do better than the developer, the track editor is reasonably robust and intuitive. I didn’t dig into it too far, because if I felt like I could design worthwhile tracks, I’d be creating games instead of just?? criticizing them from a safe distance. The ability to download other people’s tracks and custom liveries is appreciated, however. It will definitely help extend the game’s already considerable content.

There’s also the ability to customize the basement environment that you can build tracks in, which is very arbitrary to me. My best guess is that the developer just wants? to remind me that there are basements magnitudes nicer than my apartment.

I could gripe about how I never got the Batmobile in a blind box, but I actually found myself pretty enamored by Hot Wheels Unleashed. It takes a lot to get me to actually complete a racing g?ame’s career mode, but somehow it carried me past the 20-hour mark and to the credits. Then I dove back in for more, but I probably won’t get all the Unleashed objectives, because those spider playsets can kiss my butt.

Hot Wheels Unleashed impressed me on basically every marker. It looks terrific, it feels great, and the track design is extremely well done. I kind of hate the blind box approach of unlocking cars, but that’s a small complaint when ge??tting my wheels on the trac??k is always a delight.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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Hot Wheels originals meet some famous and manufactured wheels

Hot Wheels Unleashed arri??ves in September to pit the tiny cars against each other in high-speed diecast races. Today, Mattel and developer Milestone announced more cars that are coming to the racing game, including some well-known pop culture rides.

Among the lineup for Hot Wheels Unleashed will be a number of cars from various entertainment franchises, bringing them onto the race track. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' Party Wagon, a Snoopy car, K.I.T.T. from NBC's Knight Rider, the Batmobile, and the time machine DeLorean from Back to the Future will all be in Unleashed.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=efKWpOzF8jc

Several more original manufacture cars are also coming to the Hot Wheels game, like the '69 Dodge Charger Daytona, Audi R8 Spyder, '71 El Camino, and 2020 Koenigsegg Jesko.? Check out a full list of all the cars confirmed today:

• TMNT Party Wagon (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)
• Snoopy (Peanuts)
• K.I.T.T. (Knight Rider)
• Time Machine (Back to the Future)
• Batmobile (Batman)
• Audi R8 Spyder
• Audi Sport Quattro
• '55 Chevy
• Copo Camaro
• '71 El Camino
• '69 Dodge Charger Daytona
• RAM 1500 Rebel
• FIAT 500
• '32 Ford
• 1956 Ford Truck
• 2018 Ford Mustang GT
• Humvee®
• Honda S2000
• 2020 Koenigsegg Jesko
• Mini Cooper S Challenge

Dang, that's a lot of nostalgia all packed into one list. I'm pretty sure that I had that Peanuts car in my Hot Wheel???s collection at some point when I was younger.

We recently got a chance to get some hands-on impressions of this Hot Wheels Unleashed, and Jordan came away impressed by its offering. Its boost-hea??vy, fast and punchy, and has a custom Track Editor, so you can build those massive looping Hot Wheels tracks of your drea??ms if you want.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is currently slated to arrive on PlayStation ??4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam on Sept. 30, 2021.

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Hands-on with the boost-heavy arcade racer

There's a simple pleasure to arcade racing games, and I've had my eye on Hot Wheels Unleashed as someone who owned a mess of orange plastic tracks as a kid. Even if I don't have a current connection to the individual cars �I could rattle off few if any names from memory �I still appreciate their outlandish designs. Who wouldn't want a shark car?

After going hands-on with a preview build of the PC version, I'm feeling good about Hot Wheels Unleashed, at least as far as the winding tracks and zippy driving a??re concerned.

It's too early to tell how the pace of unlocks and stat upgrades will go (there will be an in-game currency, but no microtransactions), and I would've liked to dip into that side of the game. For today though, I had access to a couple dozen cars �like Dragon Blaster and Sharkruiser �and nine tracks spread across four "environments," including a skate park.

_{The sheen on the cars is appropriately toy-like.}

The Steam achievements reference blind boxes, which might scare off some players, but for me, it comes down to how much of ??a grind it'll be to get quote-unquote good cars. The variability comes down to Speed, Braking Power, Acceleration, and Handling. Boost is another big one �some cars have a traditional boost meter (that can be spent whenever), while other vehicles have boost nodes that need to be fully accumulated before they're used. I much prefer the latter type; they feel gr??eat in conjunction with drifts.

Altho??ugh I only had access to Quick Race and the cars were pre-unlocked, so I couldn'??t spend my coins on anything, I understand there's a car-dismantling system used to gain gears in exchange for dupes, and it's possible to raise your favorite cars to higher rarity tiers. There are also Super Treasure Hunt variants that are "discovered in a different way."

?We'll see how the progression goes in the final version, but I did try a handful of cars in the preview, some of which were lowly Common tier, and some of which were top of the line.

_{It was worth botching the race to get this screenshot.}

The actual racing is about as uncomplicated as you'd expect given this style, which I dig. It's fast and punchy, and the toy cars in Hot Wheels Unleashed can go flying off-track if you hit a ramp at a funny angle or get blown off by fan obstacles. (There's slight mid-air turning to get yourself lined up before landing, but it can't work miracles.) You'll also sometimes need to dodge breakable barricades or a web-launching spi?der trap.

If you go out of bounds or otherwise need to reset, you can hold the respawn button for a se??cond and you'll be placed back at a checkpoint �albeit without your saved-up boost. Othe??rwise, your main priority is going to be avoiding getting stuck behind the grouped-up pack and veering as needed to drive over speed pads. Every little mistake adds up.

I primarily played on Medium difficulty, and I won?? about as often as I lost. The one Easy run-t??hrough I tried was a laid-back bloodbath; it's kid-friendly. There's also a Hard AI setting, but I wasn't ready to take that on even with the high-stat vehicles as a crutch.

The handling varies quite a bit from car to car, particularly with all the sharp turns you'll go up against, and some cars are dangerously lightweight in the air. The drifting is a bit weightier than I would've expected. It's still an arcade racer �and the cars still largely feel like toys �but it took me a while to adjust. That said, I love the way the boost rockets you forward and the fact that you're able to constantly refuel it and use it. I started relying on boosts to sort of course-correct myself mid-drift, and t??he end result felt really fun.

_{Note: the full game will have 40+ tracks set in six environments, two of which are unknown.}

It's worth stressing that the full game will have a Hot Wheels City Rumble career mode, a Track and Livery editor, and a customizable home base area. In terms of multiplayer, ??we're looking at a two-player split-screen mode and up to 12-player online bouts.

I'm curious how wild people will be able to get with the Track editor, as there's potential to make some crazy levels if creators?? can go all-out with tracks that let you ditch the plastic roads. Some of the official levels have portions that extend out onto the "real-world" surfaces, like a shortcut through a vent, but they're usually short stretches.

I like what I've played so far, basically. If there's a supportive track-building community and the progression hooks are motivating without being a total slog, I could see Hot Wheels Unleashed really taking off. Definitely keep ta??bs if you??'re in the arcade mood.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is coming to Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and? Nintendo Switch on September 30, 2021. A crowded window, I know!

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The first gameplay makes a good impression

Whether or not you have strong ties to the Hot Wheels brand in 2021, I'd say that based on the first gameplay trailer for Hot Wheels Unleashed, Milestone's upcoming arcade racer could easily still click.

The cars look suitably cool, the winding plastic? tracks l?ook fun to drift across, and that surprising leap-of-faith shortcut at 1:27 helped establish depth beyond the pick-up-and-play exterior.

Depending on how varied the stages and hazards are (I like the web-shooting spider obstacle that can stick players to the course, but I'm less into the warehouse vibe in general), Hot Wheels Unleashed could end up being one of the fondly-remembered video game tie-ins. Did you ever play Hot Wheels Turbo Racing on PS1 or N64? I?? never rented it, but refreshing myself now, I'm starting to wish I had.

In terms of cars, the currently-known roster includes Night Shifter, Dragon Blaster, Sharkruiser, Rodger Dodger, Twin Mill, Bone Shaker, and Rip Rod, b??ut there will be more t??han 60 cars at launch on September 30, to say nothing of alternate skins. That whole side of the game could get out of hand with DLC. There's also going to be a livery editor, a track editor, and – heck yeah – two-player split-screen.

We'll keep an eye out and see how the game progresses from here. This was just a surface-level look today – a chance to figure out if Hot Wheels Turbo Racing is worth following at all. I think it will be.

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