When I heard of Micro Machines game being released on virtual reality headsets, my mind went nuts. I just started thinking on the possibilities. A game like Hot Wheels Unleashed, but in VR? A game where I would be able to race as a miniature car in a diorama-like environment, in a perspective not unlike the VR version of Lego Bricktales? It sounded exciting, a brand-new way to bring racing games to VR. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Though Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem is filled with great ideas, its execution and design choices pretty much ruined it.

What we have here is a racing game… but not quite at the same time. Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem is comprised of two parts. The first one is the racing itself, with you selecting a miniature and then trying to get to the finishing line of a racetrack built on an imaginary living room, an arcade parlor, or even your own living room, taking advantage of the Quest’s augmented reality functionalities. The second one is being able to create your own races by placing plastic tracks throughout the same imaginary location or your own living room. In theory, great concept! When it comes to its execution, however…

Let’s start off with the “best” part of Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem. Building the tracks can be fun at times. It’s not as intuitive as the pristine track creator from the Hot Wheels Unleashed games, but it does work. It’s just hampered by really cumbersome and dated VR controls. Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem still thinks we are living in the age of the original PSVR, thus forcing us to move around the map with a really clunky teleportation system. Only one analog stick is used, in order to control the camera. A second one could have easily been used to let me move around with more precision and freedom. It’s the Quest, and it’s 2024; our stomachs are more accustomed to VR nausea by now.

Then there’s the racing, and this is where the game just went from promising to utterly disappointing. Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem is not a freeform racing game. It’s more akin to a slot car racer, where you’re just told to care about accelerating and slowing down, in order to keep your car on the track, and not trip over due to some weird physics. I get that this is exactly what playing with miniature cars on plastic racetracks feels like, but that doesn’t translate very well into a fun video game experience. Hot Wheels managed to transform this same premise into something fun and freeform. As a result, Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem feels dated and limited in scope, akin to something you would have expected from the PSVR in 2016.

Most of the races are just mere time trials in which you just need to accelerate properly. You don’t exactly race against others. The game isn’t even compatible with any multiplayer modes. This would have been considered interesting in the earlier days of VR gaming, but even back then Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem would have been considered a neat little tech demo at best. There’s just not enough substance to keep you entertained for more than, say, twenty minutes at a time.

As for the rest, this game doesn’t impress when it comes to visuals or sound, either. Again, it just sounds dated. We’ve seen better-looking racing titles even back during the PSVR days (a system that, let’s face it, wasn’t exactly a lot more powerful than the Quest 2), with some environments looking like they came straight out of Toy Story 2 on the original PlayStation. Playing the game in Augmented Reality mode might mitigate that, but that also means limiting your view to a top-down perspective, making the game feel even less intense. A lose-lose situation no matter how you decide to play it.

The biggest problem with Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem is that, despite featuring some interesting ideas, it feels incredibly tame, limited, and dated. It could have been the VR equivalent to Hot Wheels Unleashed or Re-Volt, but it ended up being nothing more than a slot car racing simulator with simplistic visuals and an overall lack of excitement. Not even being able to move your car in a racing game in the year 2024 was just too much of a mistake for the game to ever dare to succeed. There isn’t a shortage of racing games available in VR platforms as of now, so I don’t see a reason to recommend this particular title, unless you’re just the single most die-hard Micro Machines fan in existence.

 

Graphics: 5.0 Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem gets the miniatures correctly, but the environments look like they came straight out of a PS1 game.	Gameplay: 6.0 The track builder controls are a bit cumbersome (especially with the insistence on using teleportation as movement), but serviceable. The racing controls might be responsive, but are obscenely shallow, to a sleep-inducing degree.
Sound: 6.0 Not a lot that can or needs to be said about the sound design. The music is basic, and the sound effects are just serviceable.	Fun Factor: 5.0 Creating a track can be somewhat interesting, but playing the game itself is boring. There’s no excitement to be had.
Final Verdict: 5.5

Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem is available now on Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, and PC.

Reviewed on Meta Quest 2.

A copy of Micro Machines: Mini Challenge Mayhem was provided by the publisher.