Our Hot Wheels Infinite Rush review takes us into a fast-paced arcade racer packed with open-world exploration, challenges and more than 150 cars to collect at launch.
Taking inspiration from racers such as Forza Horizon, Need for Speed and Mario Kart, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush mixes high-speed racing with large areas to explore, different vehicle classes and plenty of collectibles scattered across each map. More fan-favorite cars are also planned for the months following launch, with a road map of updates already lined up.
As you progress, you will race through a variety of biomes, completing challenges across four different vehicle classes before eventually taking on tougher mini-boss stages and unlocking the next area. Along the way, there are cogs, banners and rival cars to discover, giving you plenty of reasons to venture away from the main routes.
So, pop the kettle on, start your engines and let’s see whether Hot Wheels Infinite Rush can race its way onto the podium.
Vibrant worlds, fast paced and new suprises with each corner
We dive straight into the game and are immediately given the choice to pick from one of the 4 starting car classes which focus the type of car they fall under, versatile, drifter, speedster and titan. Don’t panic too much however as even with the initial choice you can still choose between the four once you get full control over the open world, you set off in a few smaller races with some hefty tutorial popups explaining the basics of the game, whilst these can help they can feel a little intrusive and repetitive in the early stages of the game, once those are out of the way it’s plain racing.
The game really does shine in the mechanics its utilised from previous games and other games in the genre, offering a load of variation of content from picture moments, races and random challenges like destroy things in a set amount of time, get a car to a finish line without taking any damage or simply a race with another rival car for a chance to win a new car for your collection, I rarely found myself without things to do or direction to do any of them, and some of the car unlocks were totally worth the effort, it’s a car but it’s a duck! I love driving around in my little animal themed cars from the duck to dragons.
Four Biomes Packed with Challenges and Collectibles
As mentioned before the world map is split into different biome, 4 to be exact which tend to favour one car class overall but has the option of a few smaller missions for the various other car types, you can still choose which car you want to drive around in the open world, but when you start the races you will have to choose from the set class for that race type, similar as to if you were to play Forza for example, we have Wheelswood which focuses more on the speedsters, tentacle bay which is more of your versatile map, Gearville which favours the titans and finally Drifty temples which is for drifters, each island has a different environment, weather conditions and plenty of different variation to landmarks, from King Kong to Dragons.
I found myself spending hours driving around the four biomes just trying to collect cogs, banners, cars and stickers to name just some of the collectables, trying to expand my collection to unlock even more content and cosmetics, the game really does have a ton of readily available content at launch and I’m excited to see what more they add with the roadmap.
Customisation, Track Creation and Making it Your Own
Now with any racing game, customisation has only one limit, you! Dive into track creation, custom liveries for vehicles and profile customisation to show off your achievements, I spent many an hour making some custom races and have them set to publish in time for launch, make them as fun or as challenging as you want, whilst there are limitations on how long you can make a track you can still make some awesome creations and I can’t wait to see what the community do with the feature post launch.
Visually the game is eye catching as well as it is fast paced, and the detail on both the cars and the environments are eye catching and impressively tied to each biome, for such a small car it really has an incredibly big, vibrant and detailed world to explore as you race around Japan, the wasteland and more, alongside an impressive array of soundtracks you can easily find yourself sucked in for hours whilst racing around, safe to say I myself lost a night or two just racing around the game.
How Wheels Infinite Rush Review: Final Verdict
Overall the game boasts an incredible selection of things to do and cars to race with, it’s certainly one of the more impressive racing games I’ve got my hands on since the old need for speed days and I don’t say that lightly, and I can’t wait to see some of the creations that people add at launch, whilst having a chance to dive into some of the multiplayer content available post launch.
Do not just take my word for it though, if fast paced racing games and hot wheels are your thing, check it out now! Launching on Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, Epic and Nintendo switch 2 on the 10th of September for £44.95 be sure to catch this early and get ahead of the competition!