For those holding out on purchasing the expansion, here is my 1 day review. I have completed the campaign, dabbled with online racing and rivals and explored most parts of the map and biomes. Feel free to write your own review below.
The good:
It looks amazing. It really does. 10/10
Price. The price of the HW expansion IMO is fairly reasonable. It’s roughly $27 NZ/AU ($18 US) if you have game pass or an additional $2/$3 without.
The average:
The campaign is ok. Takes a few hours but fairly simple.
The bad:
Wall riding - It’s surprisingly easy to win every race on unbeatable if you wall ride.
No need to steer - Most of the time it feels like I’m driving in a straight line despite all the loops and turns. There are very few sharp turns or reasons to slow down. The hot wheels tracks are designed to drive fast with continual momentum. Ultimately this will favor cars with a high end top speed and will require very little driving skill / ability.
Ghosting - Online racing has ghosting enabled. This comes with obvious pros/cons. I will touch on 2 main cons. Firstly ghosting favors RWD power builds as they no longer have to work their way from the back to pass everyone. Secondly this is not racing, this is merely a variation of rivals where all players race at once. A better solution would be allow users to choose whether they wish to race against all players with ghosting on or off. An even better solution would be to re/introduce lobbies.
Lack of end game content - Outside of a new map (which is cool), there is no new end game content. Rather there’s just a new set of tracks to race on either through online racing or rivals.
Do I recommend the expansion? Yes and no. It looks amazing, it’s obviously new content and it’s reasonably cheap IMO. Will it fill the voids present in FH5? No. FH5 still suffers from the same problem which is a lack of engaging and rewarding end game content which doesn’t change with this expansion.
There’s a new setting called Hot Wheels assisted stunt steering or something like that. I’d turn that off for a more challenging experience.
I think they took the complaints about FH3 HW handling physics and track design seriously. In that expansion the tracks were much more slippery and seemed narrower and had much tighter corners so boost pads would end up throwing you against the walls and even off the track.
I think I prefer what they’ve done but I can understand if players think the tracks are a bit too easy to navigate.
My biggest complaint is that eventlab just has access to the basic track pieces. I was really looking forward to messing around with magnetic, ice, etc. track pieces but that doesn’t seem to be available at this point.
Hopefully it’s something they add later.
It’s all ice cream sundaes. No meat, potatoes, or veggies to be found.
I like ice cream sundaes, but I don’t want to make a meal out of them.
I like the spectacle of the expansion, but it is not a legitimate piece of content. Actual depth has been replaced with wow factor, as opposed to being enhanced by it.
PGGs has really, really, really lost the plot. They’re on another planet at this point.
I pretty much go along with what’s been said. It’s a lot of fun and looks amazing but many of the races it’s just hold the throttle wide open almost from start to finish. What I did find a lot more engaging was the offroad type events on both track and offroad.
Got all of the billboards and air balloon smashables. Getting some of these took a bit of thought. I’ve got the achievement for discovering all roads yet I have 1 more to find.
Bizarrely I’ve been given all of the new car perks a second time. This means heaps of wheelspins, XP Points, credits and a few cars. Also some of the new Hot Wheels cars came with skill points already applied even though I had never been in them. Yet another weird one is I’ve gone from about level 200 in open racing to level 400.
I’ve turned off the roll thing in the middle of the screen. I don’t need it. When you’re inverted it’s just a matter of staying in the middle of the track.
Only had time to just reach S1 and get my desired 962.
So, only brief first impressions.
The world looks great, I give them that.
The HW track pieces are cool and mostly work as intended. Only had some minor issues through loops in soft suspension cars.
The wider and more grippy HW roads provide a far better driving experience than H3 HW did.
The higher grip brings me to the less positive things. In B700 and A800 it was entirely full throttle. Handling cars are completely useless, power, Power, POWER - I despise it.
Thus, I can’t see myself playing online races or Rivals here. Just a powerbuild show, boring as hell.
On top of that I miss some normal roads and especially offroad ones through the beautiful biomes. Maybe the tracks later on will cover that but so far the biomes seem just like scenery. Everything happens on the HW tracks.
Like a rollercoaster.
Out of the cars the Baja BS and Deora feel fine. Not overpowered, not bad. Both have ways to downgrade and change the build fundamentally. I like that.
Hadn’t much time with the Schuppan and haven’t finished the build yet but PG’ decision to deny it the Racing V12 will probably cost it meta status. The stock engine has typical late 80s supercar turbo lag and the only swap is the GT 2 RS with which I can’t curse the car.
Brutal handling values though and certainly a very good car. Just not right there with the XJR-15.
Yes,the first race was fantastic and really got my hopes up.Unfortunately that hope didn’t last long as i did a track only race straight after it To me the track races feels like just another cog in the long ongoing quest to take any form of skill or ability of a player out of the equation.
The ability to floor it for the majority of a race is poor. The lack of in race collisions… huh?
I loved how the previous Hotwheels DLC played. That was good racing where you had to respect the racing line and not just hug walls. Put plenty of hours into that version, can’t see that with the current implementation.
Normally this type of arcade racer (dont need to care about entry speed, easy to play) come with extra mechanism. (boost, jump aimming, air contorl, obstacle)
So there are still lots of challenge/task to do and enough to see who is “better” in PVP/Races
This is hotwheels unleashed I have to control drift angle. There are FAN blowing me off track. I need to run on the boost pad. I need to keep boost for uphill/loop/. Stop boosting and slow down in some section.
Some track even have to air contorl to get faster. (nose up to fly faster/ rotate to aim)
It is better than lego DLC since atleast the driving style are way different
And this DLC show you “what if the main game has more highway and less check point”
It feel good and less stressful.
Pretty much completely stepped away from the FH5 nonsense weeks ago & have no desire to return, even though I apparently already have this new content. Thought I’d take a quick look at the comments for the great HW expansion & all as expected. Have to say the visual of the breakdown (“The Good” , “The Average” *, “The Bad”******************), immediately cracked me up
And in case people haven’t spotted it note also that there is a special HW steering option which is automatically set to on. Seems to auto steer and brake you at times.
Cheers ,didn’t know that.Hopefully it is that that is making it a pain with a wheel on some of the loops/corkscrews, and fingers crossed, turning it off fixes it
I wonder if this is somewhat intentional - they make a point to talk about how the driving factor for Hotwheels was “FAST” …the story missions make that abundantly clear - speed and style are what HW is all about.
Probably not, right. But still, it does sorta follow the theme. At the end of the day, I agree with your statement, power builds aren’t my cup of tea now… HW seems to thrive on them. I figured that online would be constant ghosting - seeing people say exactly that… well.
To me the track races feels like just another cog in the long ongoing quest to take any form of skill or ability of a player out of the equation.
