There's nothing explicitly wrong with Hot Wheels: Track Attack as a game. A child friendly kart-style racer, in the vein of Mario Kart, it certainly ticks all the boxes. Outlandish track - check. Wide range of interestingly patterned cars that you can customise yourself - check. Four-player split-screen mode - check.
But somehow, it feels like Hot Wheels Track Attack is something of a Jack of all trades, and master of none. While it ticks all the boxes, there's nothing it does spectacularly right, and there's little flair or fun to keep you coming back.
Some of the tracks look pretty crazy - they're just not enough fun.
Based on the popular toy cars, Hot Wheels Track Attack is game based around two concepts. The first, is obviously, the cars. Like the real world selection, there's a huge range of Hot Wheels cars to choose from, and, unlike cars in many more realistic racing games, they actually look different. Genuinely different. I can't put a serious racing game into my console and race in a crocodile with wheels, and that's where Hot Wheels earns some plus points.
Strangely, however, rather than retain the "toy sized" theme, as many other Hot Wheels games have done, in Track Attack, you'll be racing around normally sized circuits, where either your car's been blown up to the size of a real one, or the rest of the world's been shrunk to suit. You're not racing around kitchen tables and under sinks, instead speeding around a "lost world" style island that just happens to have pieces of Hot Wheels track interspersed with the course, letting you loop the loop, and generally making the races a lot more interesting.
However, try as it might, Hot Wheels Track Attack never manages to feel all that interesting, and at times, dare we say it, even feels dull. Though you're racing round outlandish environments in weirdly designed cars, it never feels as exciting as it really should. In single player, you'll be racing around a variety of tracks, looping the loop, and dodging dinosaurs and tarantulas that scuttle across the track, but it never really gets the heart racing like it should. It's possibly the fact there are so few tracks in the game - the single player's mostly made out of simply repeating the same track in different guises - a normal race, and elimination race, where the person in last place gets eliminated, and a time trial, where you have to get to the end as quick as possible - that it all gets pretty boring pretty fast.
There's that dinosaur we mentioned - look out!
Even the multiplayer, usually a surefire hit for games like this, fails to really get the pulse racing - if anything, it just makes the problems more obvious. Colliding with pieces of the scenery and getting stuck, only to finally free yourself, without getting enough speed up to clear the next jump is something that happens with too much frequency for a game like this.
The track builder, too, has been well put together, letting you construct your own track with relative ease, but again, there aren't enough options for building the track, and then once it's built, it's still not all that much fun to play it.
And that's a shame, as Hot Wheels Track Attack clearly has all the components to be a fun racer, with a budget price to boot. The only problem is, it's all been put together with such a lack of any real cohesion that it becomes just another average racer, and a bit of a disappointment.
Format Reviewed: Nintendo Wii
