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It won’t challenge Need for Speed, but it’s not so bad. As expected, Hot Wheels: Beat That! has you racing around in tiny Hot Wheels cars. It isn’t the most in-depth gaming experience available but Beat That! is aimed squared at kids. And based on personal experience, kids will find it a passable and sometimes enjoyable game.
There is nothing complicated about Hot Wheels. The game’s singleplayer mode begins with an Easy difficulty setting and one zone (a themed race area with four tracks). As you play, you’ll obviously unlock additional difficulty settings (medium and hard), as well as new zones to race in. The game includes just four game types: quick race, eliminator (the last place racer is eliminated every third seconds), rampage (defeat a certain number of cars with rockets), and tournament (where you’ll play through the zone’s tracks consecutively).
The actual races are fairly standard stuff. There are a variety of vehicles, although they’re all quite similar to each other. The race tracks in the same zone are also comparable, with just enough of a difference to make sure you know you aren’t playing on the same track over and over again. There are a number of weapons (such as the aforementioned rockets) to spice things up just a touch.
Hot Wheels: Beat That! includes split-screen multiplayer. The multiplayer mode works fine, but it does limit you to the tracks that you’ve already unlocked, which is a bit of a bummer in a kid’s game.
The game’s presentation is okay. The various little cars look like real Hot Wheels, although they are not vastly different from one another. The same can be said for the tracks, which share the same simple architecture and low poly counts of the vehicles. The Wii version runs a little smoother than the PS2 version, and the Xbox 360 version boasts slightly better lighting, but all in all the games are comparable in terms of graphics. The game’s audio is decent. The soundtrack isn’t too bad although a bit too repetitive for our tastes. The sound effects were solid.
Hot Wheels: Beat That! would have made a solid gift for a 6-8 year old kid looking for a new racing game if the game was valued-priced. At full retail price, though, it’s near impossible to recommend the game for purchase. It’s not that anything is inherently broken but it is incredibly uninspired. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Oct 15, 2007
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