The experience, zooming through your real world and floor-level obstacles as if you've been shrunken down to toy size, feels like a car-based version of drone racing. Once that's done, augmented reality effects sprout up all around, along with virtual race car opponents, to make a race experience that's in your actual home. These can get dropped anywhere, and then the car drives through them and anywhere else to 'paint' a track. Much like Mario Kart Live, the camera-equipped car works along with four included gates that form marker waypoints for your real-world race track. Rift Rally works on iOS with or without a controller: We played with an iPhone that had a Backbone snapped on. Even though the physical car drives around your home the same way, in-game you see a different car appear, along with different driving physics and speeds. The twist with Rift Rally is that the car itself, a sort of futuristic compact race car called the 'Chameleon Car,' can transform in-game into 140 different Hot Wheels cars. From there, you drive the car and see the real world augmented with all sorts of video game special effects and a glowing race track. The concept is similar to Mario Kart Live: A camera-enabled RC car streams its point of view to your TV or Apple device.

I played with the Rift Rally for about an hour in New York. Hot Wheels Rift Rally is an RC car video game with a camera built in to stream racing to your phone or TV, with mixed-reality effects. It can cross-play between them, either locally or with others online. You need a Nintendo Switch to play Mario Kart Live, but Hot Wheels Rift Rally works with iPhones, iPads and the PlayStation 4 and 5. Hot Wheels Rift Rally, arriving March 14 for $130, is an RC car video game that races around on your real-world floor.Īnd just like Mario Kart Live, it's a lot of fun. Now, Mattel and Hot Wheels have created a new mixed-reality game for remote-controlled cars with Mario Kart Live developer Velan. A few years ago, Nintendo's real-life-meets-video-game Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit turned my pandemic home into a theme park racecourse for my kids.

Hot wheels games to play