Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a new open world racer inspired by Forza Horizon, featuring model cars driving around a realistic looking city. The game is primarily aimed at a younger audience, but its pitch seems muddled, with too much realism for kids and not enough for adults. While the racing itself is perfectly competent, it doesn’t take long for it to start to seem like a missed opportunity.
A familiar formula with four islands
Despite the obvious comparison, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is by no means a clone of Forza Horizon. It features four separate islands: a city, a desert industrial zone, a tropical island, and a Japanese looking area. The game makes a good first impression visually, with realistic looking cityscapes pierced by the bright orange of authentic looking Hot Wheels tracks, and the old plastic-looking gorilla and other oversized fauna. The cars look great too, as they’re modelled to look exactly like the toys, not real cars, complete with painted out windows and copyright information moulded onto the bottom of the chassis.
However, the process of turning it on for the first time is a strangely overwhelming one, with a blizzard of explanation screens and instructions. The basic controls are straightforward enough but each of the vehicles is divided into one of four class types: speeder, drifter, titan, and versatile. The distinctions are fairly clear in theory, even if in practice they don’t seem to make enough difference to justify the fuss made over them. Many races force you into a specific class and not uncommonly the least suitable one, which seems to defeat the whole point.
Race types and structure
The race types range from basic checkpoint competitions to drift challenges, elimination modes, and time trials. Additional tasks, ranging from stunt courses to photography tasks, can be found while roaming the city. There’s plenty to do and a loose overall structure, where you’re trying to earn enough points to take on the Rusher of each island, who works kind of like a gym leader in Pokémon. Only a minority of races reward you with points, so it takes quite a while before you can challenge them. There is plenty of reward beyond just points though, most obviously new cars – with over 100 in total to collect.
The racing model is solid, without being exceptional or especially distinctive. What you’re driving looks like a toy car but it handles more or less like a real one. That feels more like a problem than a positive though, as if it weren’t for the orange tracks, and other toy landmarks, the game just looks like it’s set in the real world. The previous two Hot Wheels Unleashed games had a Micro Machines style premise where you were driving around living rooms and gardens, as if the car really was just a couple of inches long. Infinite Rush abandons that idea, which is considerably more interesting and distinctive than its quasi-realistic take.
A lack of personality
Apart from the bright colours, it’s easy to forget this is a Hot Wheels game at all, as there’s absolutely no people anywhere. There’s no toy driver and no toy pedestrians either, which makes everything feel very empty and characterless. On the positive side, there are split-screen and online modes but you can’t free roam with another player. The game is a strangely juiceless experience, with no real attempt to leverage the licence, beyond a simple track editor. There’s nothing of substance here that you can’t find in existing games with much more nuanced driving models. It’s too basic and repetitive to attract serious race fans and too finicky and restrictive to interest younger players, which makes its appeal disappointingly finite.
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a peculiarly drab attempt to make a more family friendly version of Forza Horizon, that’s predictably less fun to drive and offers little in the way of unique attractions. The driving is solid, if not exceptional, and there’s plenty of visual variety in the four open world islands, with lots of different challenges and race types, and the toy cars look great. However, nothing is all that much fun, with repetitive race types and a general lack of personality. Little use is made of the Hot Wheels licence and there’s no co-op free roam. Confusing tutorials and long load times further detract. The game scores 5/10.
