Things on Wheels Review

A lot of little flaws suck most of the fun out of this take on radio-controlled car racing.

Taking the fun out of racing radio-controlled cars around a rich guy's mansion is a tough job, but Things on Wheels is up to the task. Indie developer Load Inc. (best known for Mad Tracks) comes up short in its Xbox Live tribute to the memorable RC car-racing game Re-Volt. While that beloved golden oldie might have just blown out 10 candles on its birthday cake, it still towers over this latter-day homage when it comes to playability, track design, and racer AI. These flaws all but wreck the racing fun even at the reasonable price of just 800 points, though you can pull off a few passing thrills from a great sense of speed, cool car design, and atmospheric racetracks.

The indoor tracks are the best and worst aspects of Things on Wheels.
The indoor tracks are the best and worst aspects of Things on Wheels.

Basic gameplay comes from the generic arcade racer playbook. A brief background story where you visit your uncle's mansion and get into races with his Things on Wheels RC car company adds color (you even get to read the character's blog entries), but otherwise this is all familiar stuff. You steer with the left stick, accelerate or brake with the triggers, and punch the X button to activate the freeze, shield, static shocker, or speed boost power-ups (four wimpy powers that barely give you enough oomph to pass rivals in close circumstances). Online support for up to four players is kind of a lost cause, with virtually nobody playing over Live, so you're stuck with the solo and split-screen local multiplayer modes, along with a sandbox option you can use to learn tracks. The main single-player mode of play is Championship, which sees you working your way through four race circuits focusing on the game's car types. A good variety of vehicles are featured, from funky modern versions of '40s and '50s roadsters to Ferrari-ish takes on euro supercars. All of the cars look great, with stylish swooping lines, even if they lack imagination when it comes to their monochrome paint schemes. Cars also come with stats for things like speed, weight, and handling, which are noticeable when you get out onto the tracks. Rides are uniformly speedy, giving that great sense of video game velocity that makes you white knuckle your gamepad.

But the tracks are also where Things on Wheels starts to rust. Track design here is both boon and bane. Good news first. Races take place in and around your uncle's sunny mansion, with loops running through the living room, kitchen, and backyard. There are some cool settings here due to the miniaturized cars. Everything is Lilliputian in scale, so common household items like refrigerators, couches, tables, and even books or toys loom as massive obstacles. Weird accent items can even be found spread around the tracks, like curling rocks. Backdrops also accentuate the sense of speed, with all of these looming structures adding to the zany, zippy looping around the track circuits. Now for the bad news. All of these nifty-looking impediments have punishing collision detection that sees you come to a complete halt if you even scratch the side of a table leg or the corner of a wall. There are also lots of irritating little traps where you can get stuck or even fall off a balcony into a no-man's land that forces you to reset to a safe position way at the back of the pack. Many sections of the maps are also shadowy and murky, obscuring the sudden-stop furniture just enough to cause you to plow into it on a regular basis, as well as hide some of the traps.

Curling stones make up some of the many eccentric racetrack obstacles found here.
Curling stones make up some of the many eccentric racetrack obstacles found here.

As you might expect, these issues really get in the way of enjoying Things on Wheels. This is clearly supposed to be a pell-mell racer where you just let 'er rip, but the full-stop collisions and traps force you to proceed with caution. Supernatural enemy driver skill makes you take things even slower because the AI rarely makes mistakes even on the default easy difficulty. If you get into a jam even for a few seconds, you've likely lost the race. If you fall into a trap and have to hit reset, your goose is definitely cooked. Rival cars also have no compunctions about plowing into you on curves and near traps, taking you out of the running just long enough to make sure that you won't be seeing any checkered flags. Aggressive driving would be fine, of course, if the margin for error wasn't so low that one of these minicar crack-ups often costs you a race. You're constantly taken down right in the opening curve or, even worse, near the end of a race that you're leading.

With a few tweaks, Things on Wheels might have been up to seizing the mantle from Re-Volt. Stylish cars, creative tracks that loop through a mansion's every nook and cranny, and a sense of speed powerful enough to make your head spin are certainly great building blocks that could have been used as the foundation for an exciting arcade racer. But there are just too many nuisances with track design and the driver AI, which just lead to much more frustration than fun.

The Good

  • Exciting sense of speed
  • Inventive indoor courses give the game a great RC-car atmosphere
  • Funky car designs, especially the classic models

The Bad

  • Some seriously annoying quirks and traps in track layouts
  • Supernaturally skilled AI drivers make races extremely tough
  • Dark visuals often obscure track hazards

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