Hot Wheels Velocity X
Score: 60% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: THQ Developer: Saffire Media: Cart/1 Players: 1 Genre: Racing
Graphics & Sound: Remember playing with Hot Wheels toy cars and ramp sets when you were a kid? I don't. Nevertheless, I had plenty of friends who collected them, and they were actually pretty darn fun 12 years ago. These days I probably wouldn't be caught dead playing with anything remotely related to the product line, though -- unless, of course, I had to review a Hot Wheels video game! Being a Game Boy Advance title, Hot Wheels Velocity X sports miniscule, isometric-view graphics of the popular tiny cars in action. For all gameplay purposes, the viewpoint works fine and the tracks are nicely detailed with little environmental touches (trees, snow, signs... stuff like that). The coolest visual aspect of the game comes when you hit a corkscrew or spiral ramp; the screen moves at a blinding pace while the car careens through the turns in 3-D, and then it's back to racing as usual. Other than that, you'll never see anything groundbreaking in this one. There's nothing to write home about in the audio department, either. None of the tunes are memorable, and while the engine and brake noises are pretty well-crafted, it's all just a bit too repetitive to leave turned up for hours at a time. Sometimes the cars will produce a revving sound when simply entering a corner or driving in a different direction, when there's no change in speed or letting off the gas. It's very strange and slightly annoying after a while, but, oh well.
Gameplay: Hot Wheels Velocity X seems a bit like the legendary racers of old, like RC Pro Am or Rock N' Roll Racing, only far less cool. As Gear Head, the best racing robot in Hot Wheels history, you'll have access to over 30 authentic cars based on the toy line. Thankfully, it's not all racing -- in fact, players get to blow up, freeze, zap, and burn enemy cars in Battle missions, or pick up special items to achieve some sort of goal to progress in the game. With the addition of a card collecting aspect thrown in, there's also an impressive amount of features here for a game aimed at a younger demographic. Players can earn cards describing characters, cars, items, and tricks as they complete each challenge. Sure, the cards themselves don't serve any purpose essential to the way the game is played, but they're still nice to flip through every so often. So, when you are racing (and even when you aren't), you'll come across chances to build up your 'Gadget Meter', which allows for the utilization of weapons and turbo boosts necessary to win the tougher matches. To do this, you only need to pick up an item (which gives you a full meter), drive into a corkscrew/loop/spiral (adding a small amount) or performing a trick from a ramp. You'll gain more meter with cooler stunts, but here's the thing: you only need to press more buttons at once to do better moves. There's no combination of D-pad arrows and trigger buttons, just different pairings of A, B, L, and R. So if you want the biggest chunk of meter boost coming up on a ramp, just mash your fingers on all four buttons and you've done it. Boring!
Difficulty: While some of the missions might seem too tough for a kid's game, the silly control scheme takes the cake for challenge here. The default setting (Beginner) guides your car in the direction being pressed on the D-pad, rather than having Left and Right primarily turn the vehicle around curves. The latter can be specified in the Options menu, but since Hot Wheels Velocity X has no battery save, you'll have to change the settings every time you turn the GBA on.
Game Mechanics: That's right, no battery save! Where do developers get the nerve these days to continue producing games with password features instead of automatic (or even manual) saves? Anytime you want to continue your game after completing even one particularly nasty mission, you'll have to keep a pen and paper ready unless you feel like dealing with it all over again. This really sucks, but maybe the folks at Saffire assumed that kids just love keeping passwords for everything. That's the only explanation I can come up with. And why couldn't there be some multiplayer modes thrown in? Four-player Tag and Battle arenas would be loads of fun if implemented properly, but this one's strictly a solo affair. Such a shame, too -- because simple though it may be, I do find Hot Wheels Velocity X to be a fairly entertaining distraction when I feel like playing almost anything for a few minutes at a time. I had no problem playing it for three hours straight in the first sitting, and I could probably still have fun with it months from now. But, as a total package, too many negatives keep Velocity X from achieving the merit it might have reached with a few tweaks in certain spots.
-Ben Monkey, GameVortex Communications AKA Ben Lewis
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