Hot Wheels Infinite Rush Review
Release Date: 10/09/2026
Platforms: PS5, XBOX, NS2 & PC
Platform Played On: PS5 Pro
Hours Played: 90
Score: 8/10
The toy scale is gone. The speed absolutely is not.
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is the latest entry in Milestone's Hot Wheels series, and it does something the two Unleashed games never did: it goes open world. That is hardly a surprise in 2026, where just about every racer and most games in general are heading the same way, but in this case it actually makes sense. Instead of picking tracks from a menu, you are set loose across four islands to race, explore, chase down activities and dig up secrets. Not all of them are open from the start, but a little story progress opens the rest, and from there you are free to tackle them in whatever order you feel like.
The islands are all roughly the same size and each one has a clear identity of its own. One is a dense city centre that had me thinking about the good old Burnout Paradise days more than once. Another sends you up Japanese mountain drift roads. Graphics are not really the standout here, but everything looks good and runs clean, with basically zero frame drops across my time with it. The only crashes I had were in online mode, and those felt more like server hiccups than anything wrong with the game itself.
The one real casualty of the open world is the toy car feel. The Unleashed games sold that fantasy beautifully, sending you along orange track looping through a kitchen, across a pool table, out into the garden. None of that is here. The world in Infinite Rush is scaled around you as if you were a real car on real roads, so if that miniature scale was the reason you loved the older games, this is going to feel like a very different thing.
What you get in exchange is content, and a lot of it. There are 400 events, 200 of which make up the story, plus over 1400 collectibles and activities scattered around the map. The activities will feel instantly familiar if you have played Forza Horizon, with drift zones, speed traps and plenty more, all feeding into unlocks for new cars, stickers and profile icons.
If I am honest though, I think they went a little over the top. 400 events sounds great on a box, but the variety is not there to support it. There are only a handful of modes powering the main events, so you regularly find yourself running what feels like the exact same race or time trial again with a slightly tighter target. That gets worse when you factor in the difficulty, because normal is very easy for most of the game outside of a few optional events, and there were long stretches where I was clearing content on autopilot. In fairness to the game, I did not spend time on very hard, so there may well be a sharper experience waiting there for anyone who wants to be pushed.
What does keep things moving is the car classes. Events have you rotating through the game's four types, Drift, Speed, Versatile and Titan, and each one handles differently and has its own boost gauge. That carries over online too, where the voting system locks in a class for each race, so unlike Unleashed you cannot just ride one favourite car the whole way through.
Perks are another genuinely good addition. Each car has four perk slots, and the effects range from better braking at the cost of harder drifting, to a higher top speed, to a more powerful boost, among plenty of others. It is a small system, but it is enough to make each car feel like a build rather than a stat line.
The bigger miss for me is how little the open world does with being online. There are online races, and they are much the same as the ones in the previous games, but out in the world itself you never see another player. No drop ins, no ghosts, no option to pull a few friends in and just cruise around together. The only trace of anyone else is the leaderboard attached to each activity, so you can at least compare your scores. I kept circling back to Burnout Paradise while playing, imagining co-op challenges, or the co-op story races from Forza Horizon, and how well either would have suited this game.
That said, if the online side of Unleashed was your thing, as it was mine, Infinite Rush does bring a Ranked Season mode with global leaderboards that sharpens the already fast and competitive racing into something properly tense. I sank a huge amount of time into Unleashed's online chasing a trophy and ended up falling for it completely, and even with the toy track fantasy gone, the short time I spent in Ranked here was a joy. Enough of a joy that I did not put the controller down until I hit Global Rank #1, if you will allow me the cheap flex.
So if you enjoyed the Unleashed games, or you just like modern open world racers in general, you are going to have a great time with Infinite Rush. Go in knowing the toy scale charm has been traded away and that the online offering starts and ends with the races, and there is a genuinely fun, generously stuffed racer waiting on the other side of that.
