After all, I know the track better than anyone. With Smurf the dog now watching on from the race track in the sky, now is my best chance for a spot on the podium. I reckon he’s caught wind of the fact I’ve just crafted a belter of a customised circuit in Unleashed’s Track Builder, and he’s too scared to race me. My 35-year-old mate even claims he’s outgrown Hot Wheels, but I don’t believe him. It’s been some time since I sent miniature cars swimming in my cereal, and while I’m pleased to say I’m still mates with the host of the Muirskeith Road Grand Prix that kicked off over 26 years ago, the tour has been inactive for some time.

Which, like the tracks I’ve been crafting behind the scenes in Hot Wheels Unleashed, brings me back full-circle.

When its Track Builder can provide so much entertainment, though, I’m not sure that I need to. This is what makes Unleashed for me, because, while the game’s pre-built offering is good fun, I’ve been so enamoured with its building suite and its scope for creative freedom, that I’ve hardly scratched the surface of its standardised races and settings. With this in mind, Hot Wheels Unleashed lets players share and play one another’s creations online, and a handy ‘Validation’ feature prevents unfinished, and thus incomplete, tracks from being uploaded. Add all of this to the suite’s ‘Interactive Objects’, which include momentum-propelling speedstrips, and turbo-recharging checkpoints, and your scope for creativity, and, inevitably, chaos, is huge. You can also tinker with the color schemes of your racetracks, and can raise and lower barrier heights to suit each twist and turn as you see fit. In doing so, you’ll bend and stretch, and mix and match basic tiles with animated and ‘special’ ones, which range from high-powered fans that prevent your cars from breaching the barrier and spilling out of bounds, to web-spewing spiders that limit your speed. From the Basement to the Skatepark, the College Campus, the Garage, the Skyscraper, and the purpose-built Track Room, you’ll fill every nook and cranny with obstacles, boost pads, ramps, hills, and oh-so-many loops in your bid to build the best, most convoluted, and least restricted, race bowl. Anyone familiar with rival racing series TrackMania’s customised track-building will feel at home here, as you're tasked with snapping each track tile together, just as you would with real-life Hot Wheels.

You’re given all the tools the devs used in building the game’s pre-set routes, meaning nothing is off limits. The Hot Wheels series of video games has dabbled in track construction before, but Unleashed’s take feels like its most accomplished. 'I'm transported back to a time when my automobile-related concerns were not about fuel shortages or getting my old Golf through its next MOT, but were simply about making miniature cars go really, really fast in the most mundane of household settings.'

Hot wheels game