HOT WHEELS Infinite Rush Review |

The car roster is pretty large, with over 150 cars on day one, which doesn’t exactly compare to other racers, but it’s still a lot. Most of the cars you acquire are Hot Wheels creations like Twin Mill, Bone Shaker, Feline Lucky, and so on. Now, there’s a good number of real-world vehicles you’ll want to have in your collection. I still love how well Milestone makes these games, where the Hot Wheels cars are made bigger and in greater detail than your experience in the real-world. This is a series that’s always had a hefty amount of DLC, so if you manage to collect everything, it won’t be long before a new pack will offer more to go after. Each island has a car dealership to purchase a selection of cars that differ between them, and is the only way to obtain them.

All cars can be customized, both visually and with modules. The visuals are things like liveries, but you can also slot in styles of boosts and dash effects. On the upgrade side, it is a much simpler system than it was in previous entries. You have four slots, corresponding to tier: C, B, A, and S. You’ll unlock modules in each tier that you can assign to the vehicle, such as making it have better acceleration or boost, but more nuanced options become available with more progression. Even with applying upgrades, when picking cars for a race, there’s no good way to see which car in each class is best as you can’t sort or filter. You just have to scroll through all the cars to see which one has the most pips.

HOT WHEELS Infinite Rush offers a big open-world where there’s zero consequences with everything you do. Its greatest strength is how it unshackles progression, giving you complete freedom to tackle activities in any order. Except, the open-world is pretty boring. Sure there’s things to do and roads & off-roads are littered with traffic, but in something like Forza Horizon, it’s about the multiplayer, driving in real locales, and being immersed with the car you’re driving because it exists. Here, it just looks and feels like the elaborate and expensive playsets it imitates. It’s far away from the original UNLEASHED‘s imagination-filled house. About the only reason to spend time in the open-world is to collect each island’s 300 gears (among several other types), but that’s 1200 gears in total – what does this game think it is, Banjo-Kazooie? The first island you are given access to, is a Hollywood-esque place set in a California-type appropriately called Wheelswood. Next is the tropical beach town of Tentacle Bay, followed by the desert island of Gearville, and finally a Japan-esque Drifty Temples. As you go to each place, they do become increasingly impressive in the order you’re taken to them. It’s unfortunate these places don’t offer a day/night cycle or weather, just sunrise to sunset based on the event.

I feel like there’s a lot less wacky races where you are magnetized to the track, and are being flipped upside-down. Instead there’s more targeted racing types like speed stunts where you have to go through checkpoints as fast as possible or drift stunts, where you have to complete a number of drifts before crossing the finish line. Like Burnout Paradise, specific cars will be tagged for you to chase after, and initiating a race starts a daredevil event where a series of checkpoints appears and if you beat them, you win their car. Photo challenges ask you to take photos of a thing and maybe a car; these are woefully simple and mindless to complete, requiring almost no effort. Though, the worst event by far is delivery. What should be a tense experience is up-ended by wonky physics where damage could mean race over and there being way too many objects to collide with, leading to an unfun restart. Overall, the racing is fun and engaging as you progress through it, though I did have to ratchet up the difficulty to hard to get a decent challenge.

Like the HOT WHEELS UNLEASHED games, Milestone has included a comprehensive and detailed track builder. It’s essentially a no-brainer at this point for them, but the tools are getting so much better and are easier to use. With so many biomes to choose from, you really get an infinite number of options to pick from and create with.

Music in racing games is a staple, and while I wouldn’t expect licensed music to hit these HOT WHEELS games, it’s just so bad and generic here. I eventually had to turn it off as it just seemed like it was all randomly plucked from a basic music library.

I was unable to play multiplayer due to having access to the game prior to release, and not being able to matchmake with anyone when I tried. In the past, this has been a solid mode to partake in with friends or strangers. Here you have the option of playing Ranked matches, Rush Event, and Private Race (which requires two players to even start). It seems a bit more bare bones than its predecessors, but given the single-player is so varied and fleshed out, I think it’s fine the multiplayer keeps things simple.

Infinite Rush looks the best of the series, but there’s still areas where it doesn’t look as good as it could, with everything set to Ultra. This again runs on Unreal Engine 5, and it does a passable job here. I was able to get a window of 108 – 120fps depending on the area and race, DLSS was enabled and set to Quality. When set to DLAA, it was more than fine but the average was around 80fps there, and this is a game that feels better at higher frame rates. I’ve talked about how great the cars look, and they absolutely look awesome. Interestingly, some menus don’t support ultrawide screens like the rest of the game, so there were some menus that were cut off and hard to read. This I think will likely be fixed in a patch pretty soon, but performance on PC seems pretty solid all around.

HOT WHEELS Infinite Rush is a competent, well-crafted racer for all ages that tries to pivot the franchise in a new direction, but its ambitious open-world is wide as an ocean and shallow as a puddle compared to its contemporaries. I far prefer the focused, menu-driven progression of earlier titles. By stretching itself thin to copy today’s open-world trends, Infinite Rush loses the spark of its predecessors by delivering an experience that offers surprisingly finite enjoyment.