Hot Wheels Infinite Rush Review – Looking at the Horizon
Hot Wheels was likely part of most people’s childhoods at some point, with numerous games based on the property over the years. We’ve seen the property as DLC for the Forza Horizon series, as well as in two very well-received Hot Wheels Unleashed games released over the last five years.
The developer of the Unleashed games is back again with something more ambitious than before by taking things to a more open-world setting in Hot Wheels Infinite Rush.
Hitting the Open Road
For anyone who has played Milestone’s other Hot Wheels games, you’ll feel right at home as soon as you start up Hot Wheels Infinite Rush. This is because it maintains pretty much the same controls and handling that you come to expect from their past games. These arcade racers have always taken things to the extreme with their physics and such to fit the Hot Wheels aesthetic, while also offering really well-designed tracks and controls to use. This is once again the case here, as it’s always a lot of fun to traverse across the tracks and even the new open-world islands. The only downside is that, with the addition of an open-world setting outside the races, the tracks themselves don’t offer the extra exploration that was really cool in the previous game.
Generally, the main controls you will have to worry about in this game are the accelerate button with the right trigger, the brake/drift button with the left trigger, and the boost button with X on PS5. There is a dash ability to move left or right quickly by pressing Square or Circle, respectively, but I hardly ever found myself using this technique and was able to succeed in races regardless. Something fans of the series will expect, but other racers may not, is the in-air control of your vehicle, as you are more prone to end up in the air here due to being a Hot Wheels game.
An Island Adventure
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush feels very much like the evolution from Forza Motorsport to Forza Horizon as it takes the series open-world and offers additional challenges and collectibles to be found across the game’s open-world. However, the game is nowhere near as large or detailed as Horizon, though, with the game split into four smaller open-world maps instead of one larger connected map. At the start, you’ll only have access to Wheelswood Island, but will eventually unlock Tentacle Bay Island, Gearville Island, and Drifty Temples Island, each of which offers a different theme and design that sets them apart from one another. My favorite is provably the Japanese-themed Drifty Temples, but each has its own strengths. The only downside here is that each island does have a lot of areas that look the same and feel more like a driving-through vessel between events than one you truly want to explore after a while.
Another minor issue that came up both during races and in the open-world islands is that while you can run into objects and cause lots of destruction, anything you do will be very quickly fixed. I love when races have obstacles that you can hit and will stay the way they were left in future laps, but here it will reset to how it originally was as soon as you move past it. The same goes for the open-world segments, as things will show as knocked over and out of place if you’re staying right in that general vicinity. Once you go a few blocks away and come back, though, everything is pristine as if you’d never been there, which is a bit of a letdown.
The setup in Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is that you get placed in Wheelswood Island first, as mentioned prior, and must complete five specific events to then unlock a Rusher Challenge for that island. Upon beating the Rusher Challenge, you will then unlock the next challenge, though you will at the time see that you’ve only completed a fraction of the available challenges on the first island, and so on.
Rather than allowing you to do everything on each island before advancing, there are only a set number of challenges available besides the five main races that are found on the map as gray question marks, which you can set as a target and drive to them to find out what they are. The majority of these are known as Tourist spots, where you are tasked with using the photo mode to take a specific picture in that spot. This includes either a landmark nearby, like a building or a giant creature such as the giant scorpion in one of the maps, as well as often including a set vehicle type in the picture that may require you to swap your current vehicle out temporarily.
Other challenges on the map include challenges like a Speed Stunt where you have to maintain a certain high speed while driving between checkpoints, a Drift Stunt where you have to reach the finish line in time while also pulling off a certain number of drifts, a Boost Stunt where you have to dash through Portals using Boost as fast as you can, Stuntman where your goal is to destroy as many object as you can in a short time, a Find the Flame Stunt where you have to find the giant flame in the fastest time, and the Delivery Stunt where you have to deliver a package to a dealership in a short period of time without taking too much damage. In fact, the latter stunt will unlock a special Hot Wheels at the Dealership for each island that you can then purchase.
There are also three types of collectibles on each island for you to collect. For each of the four islands you visit, there are 300 blue gears to grab that correspond to that island. They are always located in the same spot and can be gotten over a series of multiple trips. Similarly, there are 10 Hot Wheels logos and 10 Stickers for you to find on the map to collect. Every island also has 12 Daredevil vehicles that you can come across and challenge to a race, with you adding that vehicle to your collection upon winning. Needless to say, there is a good bit of content to do if you are trying to complete everything in the game.
As aforementioned, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is set up so that you have to advance to new islands to eventually unlock new events on past islands. After you complete the initial challenges on all four islands, you will finally unlock additional challenges on the other islands. At this point, though, they will all unlock at once and let you choose which order you want to tackle them in from there. Most of these are similar variants of the older ones, though there are now harder Challenge events.
In the end, each island has 12 event portals that keep adding more and more events to them as you advance the crown points earned on a specific island. After the initial 5 crown points that you need to unlock the first Rusher Challenge, there are subsequent Rusher Challenge unlocks at 15, 30, and eventually 49 total crown points. In addition, there are 27 activities, the latter of which includes tourist spots and the various stunts that will be unlocked on each island along the way too.
Collect Them All
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush expands even further on Milestone’s past outings by offering 150+ different Hot Wheels in the game to collect and use, most of which must be unlocked in the game. These vehicles can be earned or purchased in the game, so there’s plenty to keep working towards as you continue to play the game. Some of my favorites in the game include Feline Lucky, Drift Rod, F1 Racer, Power Rocket, and Spoiler Sport. I was hoping for a few third-party surprises like in the past, such as the DeLorean from Back to the Future, but there are still plenty here to make up for that. There are so many different Hot Wheels to choose from in the game across the four types of Versatile, Speeder, Drifter, and Titan, so you will find yourself swapping pretty often.
All vehicles in the game can also be customized with superficial changes like the design, aka the liveries, as well as special Boost Effects, Boost Sounds, and Dashes that you can purchase. In addition, you can equip perks onto your vehicle as you unlock more in the form of mods. You will unlock the C, B, A, and eventually S-level mods that allow you to play specific mods you also earn to enhance vehicles beyond their normal stats to help you finish first in the most difficult of races.
One major downside that I noticed with the open world setup is that there was no kind of fast travel in the game as you’re driving across the four islands. While the islands aren’t that big and you can reach pretty much any point you mark in a minute or two at most, it still would have been nice to have had a fast travel feature unlocked, at least after you unlocked all four islands. Instead, you have to not only travel around each island, but also drive to the one area with a plane that lets you select a different island to travel between them. With how they opened up the world for the first time here, this felt like a feature that was sorely lacking to streamline the overall experience later in the game.
Beyond the game’s single-player campaign, you can play locally with 1-4 drivers or online with just one player. As of the time of review, Ranked Races were not available yet, but we were able to try out Rush Events instead. If you have at least two people in your party, you can also do private races online with friends too.
The Verdict
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a natural evolution for the series that was already exploring exploration within its own tracks, now offering four open-world islands to explore and race in. The difficulty is nowhere near that of some like Forza or Gran Turismo due to its style and accessibility, but there is still some challenge, and there are so many events and activities to take part in. While it may be built around tiny cars, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush delivers a surprisingly big package with the amount of content here.
Pros
- Maintains handling and controls that worked in past
- 150+ Hot Wheels available in the game
- New open-world islands
- A lot of replay value with all of the events and activities found throughout the islands
Cons
- Tracks themselves no longer explorable
- Destructible objects fix almost right away
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.
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