I grew up with my brother’s hand-me-down Matchbox cars, and when I was young, my dad would take me to car boot sales, and I’d beg him to buy me Matchbox cars from giant paint buckets full of the metallic things. I’d use them to stage my own races, and to be fair, now I’m in my 40’s, not much has changed! Matchbox hasn’t really done video games, which is why I was interested in the low-budget but high-potential Matchbox Driving Adventures. Unfortunately, this game feels like two very separate ideas that have been smashed together.
The main single player adventure mode is the big selling point. It takes place on an island, with interconnected roads for players race on for very dull traffic dodging time trials. Once at a location, you’ll be asked to complete a variety of driving challenges. There are circuit races, time trials, chases to ram an escapee, collectathons, point-to-point races, and hazard survival races, with each challenge or location usually favouring certain Matchbox cars that you unlock through career progression. Each challenge has a bronze, silver, and gold standard, and meeting bronze is good enough to proceed. Whilst the game is clearly aimed at kids, some of the gold requirements are quite tough, especially when they involve trying to damage and take down rivals.
Matchbox: Driving Adventures has a lot of variation on the surface, but the actual gameplay mechanics are some of the most generic I’ve ever played. The car handling is fairly responsive and grippy, but it also feels quite slow in the context of the environments you race on. The snow levels have ponderous uphill sections. The volcano area has lava bombs, so telegraphed its difficult to be hit by them. Some other areas, like the beach, are vastly wide, and the cars feel a bit lost. On the flipside, it’s clear there’s also care and passion hidden inside the game, too. The city has a cute airport with planes attempting to land, which will abandon the landing if you are on the runway collecting pick-ups in point-to-point races. There are rescue missions that sound great, as you avoid a swarm of bees chasing the car down, but they feel identical to a time trial in all but one graphical addition. A lot of the charm gets muted because things feel functional rather than stylised.
Outside of the single player mode is a 1-4 player racing mode that contains the race track variants from the adventure games’ six locations and 14 original tracks, and turns it into a split-screen arcade racer. Gone are all the time trials, point-to-points, or goal variations. It is purely circuit racing, and there is no combat racing whatsoever. Clearly, Matchbox does not want missiles and bombs being thrown from their cars, but that does make the multiplayer racing feel quite one-note. The game needed some kind of driving physics flair (beyond a very wooden skid to build a boost meter mechanic) or nuance to make racing feel distinctive enough to stand alone, but it isn’t… so it doesn’t. In fact, the two sides of the game don’t cross over in the slightest aside from the locations (they are semi-open environments that have different layouts to race through). I feel like they were either developed independently of each other, or were two game ideas that were smashed together to create a whole. It’s quite jarring.
The adventure mode will take 2-3 hours to complete. The multiplayer racing has several cups of 4 races to clear, but ultimately doesn’t have the staying power against so many other racers out there. I can’t see players wanting to stick with this beyond its initial curiosity draw. At least on a technical level, the 4-player splitscreen mode runs smoothly, and if you’ve got young kids, auto-steer and auto-accelerate options are available. It’s a shame because the Matchbox licence could be used so well, as we’ve seen with the Hot Wheels Unleashed series. Instead, this game will be forgotten as quickly as it arrived. If this gets a sequel, I hope for more style, flair, and mode integration in the future.
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