Critics had a mixed response to "Hot Sugar". Ebony chose it as one of their favorite tracks, alongside "Love and War" and "The One", when Braxton and Herbert played it for the magazine. Praising the song as "smoothly sexy", Rick Florino of Artistdirect referred to it as a sign that "[the singer] knows how to have fun". Media outlets described "Hot Sugar" as a fan favorite. However, Shehnaz Khan of Yahoo! News criticized it, along with the album's other uptempo tracks, for "ruin[ing] the dynamic of the album"; Khan said it was "debatably skip worthy". Describing the song as "mind-numbing", AllMusic's Andy Kellman wrote that it was "no match for the fully formed songs that seemed rooted in Braxton's life experiences".
