Hot Wheels: World’s Best Driver

Genre: Racing / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Hot Wheels: World’s Best Driver, released on PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U in 2013, with a version of the game coming to Nintendo 3DS in 2013 and to mobile devices in 2014, is a Racing game… sort of. Players don’t actually race other cars in this game, nor is the goal generally to beat times on a track. Rather, this game is about completing a series of specific challenges within a time limit. For someone interested in a Hot Wheels game for fun, Arcadey racing, this is undoubtedly a disappointment… and that’s before you even play the thing.

The Nintendo 3DS version of this game is pretty much a straight port of the console version. In some ways the handheld version of the game fares better than the console counterparts, in others worse. But in the end, the core experience is largely the same.

For the “good”, the Nintendo 3DS version of the game doesn’t suffer from the horrible input lag problems of the Wii U version of the game. The controls here are actually pretty responsive, though they’re not fantastic – drifting feels odd, for one thing.

While the controls are better, the game still has issues with its overall structure. Namely, the game’s challenges are not particularly fun. This feels more like some sort of tutorial for a bigger game that never materialized, like they were planning on making an actual racing game but once they finished with a collection of boring challenges they decided to just call it a day and sell this as a game.

The game can’t even be bothered to try to make it seem exciting – the game’s announcer sounds like the most boring, straight-laced, dull announcer to ever voice a videogame… and this is a Hot Wheels game, where you’d expect an announcer to be over-the-top! And one area where this game is decidedly worse than the console version is the visuals, which mostly still look good, but the framerates suffer. At least the tracks are visually interesting, and mostly everything seems polished. Dull, but polished.

I can absolutely say that the Nintendo 3DS version of Hot Wheels: World’s Best Driver is superior to the Wii U version of the game, but that’s only because the Wii U version was so atrociously bad. Thanks to better controls, this version of the game gets upgraded from “atrociously bad” to “sub-par”. This is still a mediocre game that feels more like a disappointing side-mode cut off from an actual Racing game, so I can’t recommend it, though at least it’s playable on this platform.

tl;dr – Hot Wheels: World’s Best Driver is a dull, disappointing affair that only just barely qualifies as a “Racing” game, instead being more about uninteresting challenges. The controls here are better than in the nearly-unplayable Wii U version, but the core gameplay is still severely lacking. You have multiple better options on Nintendo 3DS.

Grade: C-

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