{"id":15312,"date":"2026-09-17T10:50:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T10:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/09\/17\/hot-wheels-infinite-rush-review\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T10:50:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T10:50:50","slug":"hot-wheels-infinite-rush-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextlevelnews.co.uk\/blog\/2026\/09\/17\/hot-wheels-infinite-rush-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Hot Wheels Infinite Rush Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Giving the modern Hot Wheels racing series a radical, Burnout Paradise-inspired overhaul sounds like a pretty fabulous idea when you say it aloud. That Criterion Games classic is, after all, one of the most revered arcade racers in the business \u2013 even if it was ultimately the last proper Burnout we ever got. Unfortunately, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush has sacrificed far, far too much of what makes developer Milestone\u2019s initial pair of Hot Wheels Unleashed games so eye-catching, zany, and special. Infinite Rush\u2019s four modestly sized maps weave familiar bits and pieces of plastic track through otherwise unmemorable slabs of landscape and basic city blocks, and they totally lack the scope and spectacle of the Unleashed series\u2019 life-sized skate parks, construction sites, and neon arcades. The racing may be fine and functional, but Infinite Rush is disappointingly basic and bland compared to its existing brethren, so it\u2019s difficult to recommend over either of them.<\/p>\n

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Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is instantly recognisable as a Milestone Hot Wheels game thanks to its unmatched ability to present these car models in an uncannily photorealistic way. The cars still broadly look fantastic. From zinc to plastic, the surfaces of every model gleam with authenticity and \u2013 despite the fact it\u2019s been this way since the first one arrived in 2021 \u2013 it still remains thoroughly impressive to me how terrific they look on screen. They just look real<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[It\u2019s] instantly recognisable as a Milestone Hot Wheels game thanks to its unmatched ability to present these car models in an uncannily photorealistic way.<\/section>\n

Unfortunately, they no longer appear to accumulate wear and tear like they did in the Milestone\u2019s earlier games. Upon reaching the end of a race, my cars now look just as factory fresh as they did when I started. The scratches, rubs, scuffed plastic, and kerb rash that builds up on cars in the Unleashed games is a big part of what pumps up their credibility; that is, making the cars look and feel like they\u2019ve just tumbled down the driveway a dozen times really seats them into the maps and makes them look like actual play-worn toys. In contrast, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush feels glossy and consequence-free. Am I missing something here? A hidden setting? Was this an intentional change for Infinite Rush for some unknown reason, or a licensor change-of-heart? Whatever it was, it\u2019s a really weird step back and I\u2019m not a fan.<\/p>\n

Sister from Another Blister<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It appears about one-third of the options that make up the roughly 150-car roster are new, rather than recycled. This is welcome, as it certainly doesn\u2019t make much sense to keep wheeling out the same cars when there are almost 60 years of Hot Wheels castings to choose from. That said, the garage is still weighted very heavily towards new and recent models. There\u2019s a decent smattering of early to mid-2000s castings, including AcceleRacers, but there\u2019s really nothing here for Gen X parents or grandparents to share with younger players. The \u201970s, \u201980s, and \u201990s remain woefully underrepresented. I get that older players aren\u2019t really the primary audience of a licensed Hot Wheels game, but I know that my sons\u2019 Hot Wheels collection is like a core sample of Hot Wheels history. It\u2019s got recent cars, my childhood cars, and old cars from their uncles \u2013 and even great uncle. I get the feeling that\u2019s probably a pretty common occurrence. The balance in Infinite Rush is just\u2026 off. There are definitely times it feels like it was more important for this to be a catalogue of cars kids can still see at the shops rather than a rummage through the toyline\u2019s past.<\/p>\n

Infinite Rush is also missing the pop culture cars that were fixtures in the Unleashed games. The fact that it features Ferrari is neat enough, considering the Prancing Horse\u2019s decade-long absence from the real-life Hot Wheels line-up from 2015 to 2025, but the lack of any movie or TV cars feels a bit cheap.<\/p>\n

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Infinite Rush uses a similar class system for the cars as Unleashed 2, although it dials it back to four distinct classes rather than six: Versatile, Speeder, Drifter, and Titan. Each has nuances you need to cater for as you drive. For instance, Titans are strong but bulky \u2013 and they have extra long boost meters to compensate. However, run your boost all the way down to zero and your default speed will be strangled momentarily as your engine coughs back to life. Versatile racers have a drift bar that\u2019s consumed in chunks, meaning you can\u2019t stop a boost once you\u2019ve started. It means they\u2019re not a great fit for navigating the urban, grid-like portions of the maps, because it can be hard to force them into the right direction when in the middle of a briefly unstoppable boost. <\/p>\n

Drifters are my preferred class, since they\u2019re the easiest to sling sideways and therefore the best fit for an arcade racing game. The other classes are less satisfying to drift, and there sometimes seems as if there\u2019s even a bit of a speed penalty for doing so. There were definitely occasions it was overtly faster to Hail Melon around a corner, Ross Chastain-style, than it was to slide into it properly. This shouldn\u2019t really be the case in any arcade racer.<\/p>\n

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Toyz N the Hood<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The biggest problem with Infinite Rush is how surprisingly generic the open-world approach makes it feel. It doesn\u2019t have a single, large open map to explore like, say, Burnout Paradise or Forza Horizon 6. Instead, there are four separate, modestly sized islands \u2013 each themed in slightly different ways. There\u2019s Wheelswood, a commercial-style, downtown-inspired map; Tentacle Bay, another city-oriented environment, only with a little more open countryside; Gearville, a desert-themed, industrial zone; and Drifty Temples, an East Asian-inspired island. I just find myself blazing through them, smashing through bushes and benches. There\u2019s some decent imagination on display \u2013 and I do think the huge Hot Wheels Mount Rushmore on Gearville is pretty cute \u2013 but broadly speaking there\u2019s just not much that grabs my attention. Not even the big, plastic animals.<\/p>\n

In the Unleashed games, you find yourself racing through half-built skyscrapers above the clouds \u2013 or staring up at enormous arcade cabinets, which might as well be skyscrapers themselves with the way they loom over your tiny toy cars, from down on the sticky carpet. Infinite Rush has absolutely none of this scale, and it\u2019s all the worse for it. They\u2019re not quite believable dioramas, even if they\u2019re filled with moulded plastic props. But they\u2019re not quite real places either \u2013 even if the default measure of distance to my next waypoint is metres. 800 metres away, in a car that\u2019s ostensibly three inches long? Something\u2019s not adding up.<\/p>\n