One downside of building a career around playing video games is that I'm no longer easily impressed by anything. Playing and critiquing as many games as I do will make you a bit cold and clinical about them. It's hard to get swept away when it feels like every game is made using the same old market-tested formula and every developer is an exploited worker. The same thing happened to movies when I was a camera operator, perhaps for my next gig I'll become an ice cream taster or professional dog petter and ruin all the other fun things in my life.
Hot Wheels: Rift Rally is different. The hours I've spent zipping around my garage with the Chameleon RC car has been the most joyful gaming experience I've had in recent memory. Building new tracks out of junk lying around my house and seeing all the different ways it can transform on the screen is pure magic, and it gives me the same feelings I got from building blanket forts on snow days as a kid. It has its limitations and it's occasionally frustrating, but Rift Rally is nothing short of mind-blowing, and an important next step in the evolution of AR.
Mario Kart Live maker Velan Studios (and also Knockout City, RIP) returns with another augmented reality r🔯acing game, packed with fresh, creative ideas. The star of the show is the Ch♒ameleon, a seven inch remote controlled car that can transform - physically and digitally - into more than 100 new and classic Hot Wheels cars. You then build a track with the included gates, and playing on either PlayStation or iOS, play through dozens of races and challenges on virtual race tracks overlaying the real, physical space.
Setup is simple, and the in-game tutorial does a great job walking you through the steps of connecting the car to your network, assembling and laying out the racing gates, and building the virtual track, but one thing it won't tell you - and something that should have been clearly labeled on the box - is that you need to have the right space to play in. Your apartment or house might not be fit for Rift Rally.
The Chameleon is light-weight and sits low to the ground, so it doesn't perform well on any kind of carpet. It may look fine in real life, but in-game the camera will bounce so much that it looks more like off-roading than rally racing, which can be nauseating.
That said, all carpet is better than some carpet. The Chameleon makes adjustments to whatever surface you're on, and transitioning from carpet to hardwood or tile causes a lot of problems. The car will temporarily lose momentum while it adjusts, and the virtual track will shift around wildly to try to reposition correctly, which is also vomit inducing. I initially tried playing in my living room, which is half wood and half carpet, and found it to be completely unplayable.
I then moved to the basement, a full floor down from my PS5 and two flights down from my router, and to my surprise I was able to maintain a near flawless con𝔍nection. Other than some occasional pixelation and screen jitters, driving felt great. The c🧸oncrete floor made for a perfect surface to drive on, and I was finally able to start racing.
The only problem then was running up and down stairs to make adjustments. The gates are just plastic and cardboard, and running into the edges will cause them to move, which ruins your track. The Chameleon is also perfectly flat on the sides, so you can get stuck simply by getting too close to a wall. I had to pause the game and go downstairs to fix things pretty frequently betwee🎀n races, and it seems like these problems could have been a⛎voided with sturdier parts and minor design changes.
If you can solve for the real-world limitations of Rift Rally, the game itself is remarkable. Every unlockable car has its own set of stats - speed, acceleration, braking, boost, and energy, and the Chameleon changes both visually and mechanically to match whatever car you're driving. As you progress through the game and earn XP, you can further adjust each car by increasing the stats and creating custom paint jobs, and the Chameleon will perform to your exact specifications. Because the car is so small, you can really feel the difference in speed classes. It may not look like it's going that fast in real life, but on screen, it's flying.
Augmented Reality is all about transforming the physical world with virtual elements, and Velan Studios flexes its experience and creativity in Rift Rally. The track overlays completely transport your car into a different world and make each race feel like it's on a new track, even if you never move the gates. There are three themed worlds that each have their own narrative and mechanics, and within each are dozens of unique challenges to discover. One of my favorites is a challenge called Porcupine that takes place in a blizzard where your goal is to catch flaming arrows raining down from the sky. I'm also fond of the Scrapdragon, a robotic Chinese dragon that can be awoken by driving into bells, that then interrupts the race by flying around and breathing fire onto the track. The excitement of power sliding around my own basement furniture while being chased by a dragon is practically indescribable.
Outside of the challenges, Rift Rally also has a Freeplay stunt mode where you can practice different techniques, like wheelies and spins. The stunts you can pull off get quite involved, requiring long button combos and careful steering. Space is a factor, but when you finally pull off a drift into a kickflip into balancing on one wheel, it's so satisfying. Whether you're doing donuts, hitting ramps, or drifting around tight corners, the Chameleon does an incredible job of matching speed and trajectory without ever letting on that your little RC car isn't actually doing all those stunts. I don't want to overuse the sentiment, but this is the kind of magical realism AR has been building towards for years.
You can play through the campaign with up to four players, though you'll all be sharing the same car. It's better than it sounds. Each player picks their own car, then as one player races another will start to feel a rumble in their controller as the Chameleon slowly transforms and the next player takes control. You can do actual multiplayer races with multiple cars, but at $130 a pop it's a pretty steep investment. You can complete every mission in an afternoon (and on a single charge, impressively) but there's infinite replayability so long as you can keep coming up with new ways to design your tracks - provided you have the space to do it.
It disappoints me that not everyone can play Rift Rally. It's an expensive toy that has specific flooring and space requirements. But if you have the right place for it, I can't recommend Rift Rally enough. It's the first full-fledged AR experience that doesn't feel like an experimental tech-demo, and it inspires so many more possibilities for the future. Velan Studios understands the appeal and nostalgia of Hot Wheels, and has filled this game with so much variety and so many great ideas. I haven't been this impressed by a game in a long time, and it fills my jaded gamer heart with hope.
Hot Whe꧃els: Rift Rally is an AR racer from Mario Kart Live developer Velan Studios, following a similar format of transforming you🍬r environment into a racetrack, using a remote controlled car.
