Hot Wheels: Beat That! is a racing game developed by Eutechnyx and published by Activision for PC, PS2, DS, Wii, and Xbox 360 in 2007, based off of Mattel's Hot Wheels toy line.
Players race as the titular toy-sized cars through a series of events, including Quick Race, Eliminator, Rampage, and Tournament. The game features four locales based off of general real-life places: a bedroom, a golf course, an attic, and a bowling alley.
"Select a trope!":
- Anti-Frustration Features: The player earns "flame points" by placing in 3rd, 2nd, or 1st (2nd grants 2 flames, while 1st grants 3) and completing one of/both side objectives for every event, totaling to 5 possible flames for each event. While all 5 flames can be achieved in one go for most events, doing so isn't necessary, and the player can retry events and focus on just the flame point(s) that they haven't gotten.
- Benevolent Architecture: There's numerous objects throughout the tracks, from books to orange or blue track pieces, which form ramps for players to jump off of and get Air Time points.
- Covers Always Lie: Nothing in the game itself comes even close to looking like the futuristic tunnel on its cover.
- Cool Car: A standard for a Hot Wheels property, and there's several of them to choose from and unlock.
- Dash Attack: Boosting into an opponent will force them to drop "flame crystals", which can be collected to fill up the Power Bar.
- Do a Barrel Roll: Possible to do off of cone-shaped ramps, but impractical as it doesn't inherently give any more points than a regular jump would and will just slow the player down.
- Limit Break: By earning enough points from drafting, drifting, jumping, and collecting flame crystals, drivers can fill up their Power Bar. Once it's full, they can then Supercharge their currently equipped weapon, upgrading it into a more powerful form.
- Homing Projectile: The Supercharged Rocket weapon.
- Multi-Platform: As stated above, the game was released on PC, PS2, DS, Wii, and Xbox 360.
- Nitro Boost: The player can either get the Boost weapon or drive through a green Boost Vortex for a short burst of speed.
- Ramp Jump: See Benevolent Architecture.
- Shows Damage: Vehicles get somewhat mangled after either getting hit with a weapon or crashing into walls or other obstacles.
- Rule of Three: There's 3 difficulty modes, each race is 3 laps, and some weapons have an ammo count of 3.
- The Cameo: The game features a couple vehicles from Hot Wheels: AcceleRacers as well as cases of its first episode, "Ignition", in the bedroom locale.
- Timed Mission: The Rampage events, where the player has to destroy a set number of targets with Rockets before time runs out, lest they get blown up themselves.
- Vehicular Combat: While racing is the main focus, especially for single player, the game does feature two battle modes for multiplayer only where players score points by hitting their opponent with weapons:
- Stock Battle: The first to reach a specified number of points wins
- Time Battle: The one with the most points when time runs out wins.
- Weaponized Car: Players can drive through rings of fire to collect weapons and use against their opponents to slow them down and steal their flame crystals to fill their Power Bar.
