Matchbox™ Driving Adventures

My first thought loading up Matchbox Driving Adventures was: who exactly is this for? Spend ten minutes with it and the answer is pretty obvious. This is a bright, colourful, low-stakes arcade racer aimed squarely at younger kids, and everything about its design confirms that intention. Auto-accelerate, lane-assist steering, three difficulty settings, and handling so forgiving that even a genuinely small human can stay on track. That accessibility is the game's clearest strength, and it is worth taking seriously if you are shopping for something couch-friendly that the whole family can play without someone rage-quitting. The game splits into two modes that sit weirdly apart from each other. Adventure mode puts you on a node-based map of Matchbox Adventure Island, where you physically drive between mission nodes on roads full of traffic before arriving at the next challenge. The mission variety is decent on paper: circuit races, time trials, point-to-point deliveries, ramming missions where you chase down a rogue vehicle, and hazard-survival runs where you escape avalanches or dodge gators in the swamp biome. Six locations cover City Center, Beach, Mountains, Arctic, Jungle, and Volcano, each with their own environmental hazards and character. Earning bronze is enough to progress, but chasing gold medals is a real step up in difficulty that feels inconsistently tuned for the game's target audience. The whole adventure mode clocks in around two to three hours for completion, so do not expect a long solo campaign. Competition mode is a separate beast entirely: fourteen tracks with four layout variations each, playable solo against AI or with up to four players in local split-screen. This is where the Saturday-night question matters, and the honest answer is mixed. Split-screen runs smoothly, the tracks have shortcuts worth hunting, and getting a group of kids around a screen works well. However, the circuit racing strips away all the mission variety and leaves you with pure laps and no combat items, no power-ups, nothing but the drift-to-boost mechanic to separate runners. The boost system rewards drifting, close passes, and air time, which adds a thin layer of skill expression, but the handling itself is divisive: vehicles feel heavy when turning in and prone to oversteer once committed, and the drift input needs a few races to feel natural. The camera is locked to a chase view with no first-person option, which will frustrate older players used to more flexible settings. Progression is kept deliberately simple. You earn credits from missions and spend them on new vehicles, sports cars, jeeps, trucks, fire engines, and mail vans, each carrying different stats for weight, speed, handling, and boost. Picking the right car for a snowy uphill stage versus a beach circuit genuinely matters at the margins. Paint jobs are the only customisation beyond that, and the roster is slim. There is no online multiplayer at all, which is the right call for a PEGI 3 title but worth flagging if you were hoping for any kind of remote co-op option. For adults or teens who grew up with the Matchbox brand, the nostalgia ping is real but brief. The Hot Wheels Unleashed games are a better comparison point for anyone wanting depth and replayability from a toy-car racer. This one sits comfortably below that bar. What it does deliver is a genuinely accessible, technically solid split-screen racer that is nearly impossible to break and easy enough for a child with no gaming experience to pick up and enjoy. If that is what you need, it delivers. If you are buying it for yourself, manage expectations hard.

Riley · Scout Team

Sports & racing

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