Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem – Monster smash!

While it lacks anything in terms of depth, Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem is a fun little points rush game that will likely entertain younger gamers.

Hot Wheels has done rather well in the video game space recently, with the Forza Horizon expansions and even their own racing series in the form of Hot Wheels Unleashed. Now it’s the bigger cousins’ turn to burn some rubber with Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem, which certainly isn’t as impressive as the arcade racing of Unleashed, but has enough fun and spectacle to keep youngsters entertained.

There’s no plot, which is fine as this is a game about monster trucks doing monster tricks. You’ll get to drive a variety of the popular Hot Wheels Monster Trucks vehicles as you travel around seven environments, completing objectives to earn fans and ultimately claim the trophy. 

Whilst none of the trucks seem to handle differently, they’re all visually distinct. Scratch Attack has a full on cat motif and Demo Derby looks like a giant stock car. They look nicely detailed and all have their own unique special move you can pull off in stages, as well as skins you can unlock by playing certain stages. The only downside here was Battitude, which looks like an awesome giant bat, but has wings on top of it that get stuck in some of the tunnels. It would be nice if they had different stats, but for a budget game for kids this is solid enough.

Strangely for a car game, there are no races in Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem as everything is based around smashing stuff and doing tricks, which I suppose makes sense. On a stage you’ll get a set of objectives called Wheels, which could be score thresholds, destroying a certain percentage of the scenery, or finding hidden items to smash. Completing these earns you fans, which are something of an arbitrary progression counter, as well as new trucks to play as. Actually progressing from event to event requires nothing more than finishing the previous one, regardless of how many Wheels you complete, so you can get from area to area at a reasonable clip if you don’t care about completing your list of tasks.

Each stage has a time limit, so I found myself focusing on a set of objectives each time, going for the high scores once, and destruction another time. The scores were easy enough to reach thanks to there being lots of easy ways to accrue points and multipliers. Each unique trick in a combo increases your multiplier as well as your score, and the time limit between each move before your combo cashes in is generous enough for you to keep racking up the points. If you land upside down and can’t move, you’ll lose your multiplier of course, so you need to take some care at least. Most of your tricks are flips and rolls completed using the left and right sticks whilst in the air, but there are more skill-based ones like wheelies that take more focus. It’s a fun system and easy enough for smaller hands to manage too, although the twitchy physics can make landing tricks a bit harder than a younger player might like.

The destruction objectives are a bit more annoying as you need to smash a certain percentage of objects in the environment. This is easy enough in principle, but it can be difficult to find all of them in a larger arena within the time limit. You need to set yourself up an optimal route which doesn’t necessarily play into what a youngster might want to do. Then there are boss stages where you need to destroy key objects to unlock a special ramp which is themed around real world Hot Wheels sets such as a slime monster or a volcano. These are fun spectacles at least, especially once you trigger one of the more impressive looking pieces.

Whilst there are seven different themed areas to mess around in, you need to do quite a lot of events within the same environment before moving on. The issue here is that each event is almost exactly the same but with a few ramps and tunnels moved into different places. Hot Wheels Unleashed gets away with this as each course in a biome is substantially different, but here things are pretty samey. I’d have much rather the environments were mixed up rather than being stuck in the same one for an extended period before you unlock the next.

The visuals are solid, although each event starts with that notorious Unreal Engine texture pop-in. Each truck looks good in action, and their super moves are designed to fit around their theme even if they’re mechanically the same. The sound was less impressive though, with the same music tracks being played ad nauseam and a crowd that doesn’t seem to react to anything you do. The announcer is fine, but they only have a few voice lines that you’ll hear in an event so it doesn’t take long before they repeat. I don’t think I’ve heard an NPC say “Barrel roll” this many times since Starfox.

With that said, Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem is a solid monster truck game in an era when such things are rare enough. Youngsters who are into Hot Wheels and especially the monster truck variants will probably have quite a good time with it, especially playing as their favourite trucks. The fact that this is a budget release at £35 makes it a hard deal to argue with too. Adults won’t find much in the way of challenge, mind, but this isn’t really for them.

Hot Wheels Monster Trucks: Stunt Mayhem is available now on Xbox, Playstation, PC, and Nintendo Switch.