Hot Wheels Infinite Rush

Genre: Open-World Arcade Racing

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local Split-Screen), 2-12 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a family-friendly Open-World Arcade-style Racing game released in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2. Though… “Open-World” may be pushing things a bit, as this is more of an “Open-Zone” game, with the multiple distinct areas of the game separated into different islands that can only be accessed via an “airport” on each island (it’s one of those orange tracks with a motor that flings your vehicle into the sky via a ramp). Anyway, this game has players exploring these islands and completing various events on each one.

The presentation… I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, you have nice, clean 3D visuals without any slowdown I noticed, a good sense of speed, and these visuals do a great job of conveying the materials these toys are made out of whether it’s plastic, polished chrome, or glitter-painted metal.

On the other hand… I feel like this game is confused about the world it’s presenting to us. Are these supposed to be toys? Because if so, the grass is at the wrong scale, and the various city buildings and other things don’t match that toyetic look… but if this is meant to be toys in a full life-size world, why are all the trees made of plastic, and the city layouts don’t resemble anything like a functioning real-world city?

Also, while the vehicle sounds are fine, this game’s energetic synthesized soundtrack is painfully bland and forgettable, to the point where races in the game often have the song shift with radio static mid-race and my response isn’t annoyance so much as “eh, okay, I wasn’t really listening to that anyway”.

Before moving on, let’s get one thing straight, because I have a fair amount of criticisms here. The actual racing in this game is solid. Like I said, there’s a good feeling of speed, racing, drifting, and boosting all feels great, there are four vehicle classes with different boost types that are distinct enough to make them all interesting, unlockable perks you can use to customize how those vehicles perform, and a decent vehicle customization mode and course creator where you can share your creations online (and oddly have to if you want to use them yourself, for some reason).

That said, we have to address the Open-World elements here, because even though they’re not quite as pointless as what we saw in Mario Kart World… they’re pretty close. Different challenges are spread across the maps, ranging from standard races to challenges where you need to destroy stuff within a time limit, and even tasks to photograph a specific landmark. However, the game doesn’t do much to incentivize players to explore. There are collectable gears, stickers, and Hot Wheels logos to be found, but much like the collectables in Mario Kart World, these don’t really do anything noteworthy beyond just… being there to collect. You do also earn coins for doing tricks and breaking scenery, but earning coins is pretty slow this way compared to doing so in actual events.

And here’s where Mario Kart World’s lackluster Open World elements edge out Hot Wheels Infinite Rush, because Mario Kart at least let you instantly warp to the races you wanted to engage in, where Infinite Rush forces you to drive over there. Plus, as noted earlier, its Open World maps aren’t really conducive for exploration, being designed in an unintuitive way that can force you to try to figure out how to get from point A to point B at times.

Sadly, they’re not conducive to racing either. Mario Kart World plopped traditional race courses into its open world, making them stand out and often seem inorganic. Meanwhile Infinite Rush’s courses are often made by cordoning off the intended path with transparent arrow fences showing you which way to go to get to the next gate marking that correct path, which often doesn’t coincide with where the actual roads are, and it can be very disorienting when the road goes one way and the race’s path goes another, giving you a moment of panic when you’re not sure you picked the right one to follow.

This is remedied somewhat when you head onto Hot Wheels’ signature orange plastic roadways that loop around into the air, but then things look even more samey than they already did. Oh yes, that’s another issue – while each of the islands is its own distinct location, the areas within those islands don’t have enough visual distinction to keep things interesting.

With all of that complaining having been said… believe it or not, I actually enjoyed Hot Wheels Infinite Rush. Like I said, the core Arcade Racing gameplay here is still quite solid. But so much of the rest of this game doesn’t seem to have a clear vision of what it’s trying to do, and the game suffers as a result, from boring, samey courses that run counter to the layout of the open world, to the open world itself having too little reason to exist, to the game as a whole not being sure what sort of sense of scale it’s aiming for. I think there’s still a lot of good to build on here for future Hot Wheels games, but I really hope that when that inevitably happens, the game’s creators actually sit down and take a moment to think through the gameplay elements they’re tossing into the game and why. As-is, this is a good Racing game, but it’s so riddled with these problems it feels like more time put into the planning stages of this game could have made it something truly great, and it’s disappointing that we didn’t get that.

tl;dr – Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a family-friendly “Open-Zone” Arcade Racing game, and the core racing mechanics here are solid, but this game seems seriously confused about everything else. Its Open-World elements seem shallow and poorly-implemented, and it can’t seem to decide what sense of scale it’s aiming for. Despite its flaws, this is a solid Racing game, but it could have been much better.

Grade: B-

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