Hot Wheels Infinite Rush Review: Best Cars, Wrong World
My Hot Wheels Infinite Rush review comes down to a split I felt in my first hour and never shook. The cars are the best Milestone has built for this license, and the four Hot Wheels Infinite Rush islands they drive on are the weakest part of the package. I picked it up the weekend it launched and have been in it most evenings since, on PS5 with a few split-screen nights mixed in.
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush launched worldwide on September 10, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and Nintendo Switch 2. It trades the track-only structure of the Unleashed games for an open world and sorts its cars into four classes. The track builder that kept the older games alive made the cut too.
Below, you'll find what each car class does, how the islands and the Rush Masters hold up, why the track builder is the real reason to own it, and who should wait.
Hot Wheels: Infinte Rush Review Summary
Hot Wheels Infinite Rush review verdict: a great arcade racer wrapped in an open world it never needed.
Four car classes (Drifters, Speeders, Titans, Versatiles) each treat the boost meter differently, so swapping cars changes how I drive a corner.
150+ Hot Wheels Infinite Rush cars at launch, earned from dealerships, Daredevil chases and the four Rush Masters.
The four islands (Wheelswood, Tentacle Bay, Gearville, Drifty Temples) look great and repeat themselves fast.
The Hot Wheels Infinite Rush track builder snaps to terrain, clears scenery and lets you teach AI rivals your racing line.
Loading screens of close to a minute between islands and after big races are the worst technical problem.
Split-screen covers up to four players, for races only, with no couch free roam.
The Four Car Classes Change Everything
Every one of the four classes treats the boost meter as its own little puzzle. It's the smartest idea in the game. A Drifter fills its meter fast when I hold a slide, then loses pace on long straights. A Speeder does the opposite, charging up as it gains speed and bleeding momentum the moment I throw it sideways. I spent my first weekend in Drifters on the Drifty Temples circuits, and it took a Speeder race on a Wheelswood highway to show me how much the class decides my lines.
Titans got their hooks into me hardest. These heavyweights carry a huge meter, and if I let it overcharge, the car slows down for a moment. That one rule turned a dumb brute class into the one I think hardest with, feathering the meter into a jump and letting go a beat early. Versatiles split their meter into charges instead, so every press spends one full charge, and I started counting presses on a lap the way I count ammo in a shooter.
The handling underneath carries over from the Unleashed games, weighty with a lot of grip in a drift and plenty of crunch on contact. On the orange track it feels perfect. In tight city streets the same stiffness gets clumsy, and I clipped more lamp posts on Wheelswood corners than I care to admit. Each car takes a handful of earnable mods that tighten a drift, cut weight or put more punch into the meter. Within a week I had a Smashing Wheels Titan and a Drift Master car built out of the same garage.
The Islands Look Better Than They Play
Four playset islands make up the open world, opened one by one as you clear campaign events. Wheelswood is the city, Tentacle Bay the coast and its greenery, Gearville the industrial canyons, and Drifty Temples a neon-lit, Eastern-inspired stretch of temples and scenic roads. Giant toy creatures loom over the islands, and the first time a huge gorilla towered over a Wheelswood skyline, I grinned like a kid on a bedroom floor.
That grin faded within a few evenings. Each island is compact, so by my third night on Gearville I knew every canyon and every shortcut ramp. How many laps of the same canyon does anyone need? Side events fill the gaps: Daredevil chases against roaming cars, Stuntman runs where I smash scenery against a timer, delivery jobs that punish every scrape, photo spots and hundreds of gears and stickers to collect. I gave up on the collectibles early. A pile of gears never felt like a reward.
I miss the toy scale most of all. Unleashed 2 ran its orange track through an arcade and a family backyard, and the cars felt small in a big world. Here the islands are the playset, so the cars read as normal-sized racers on oddly themed roads. With no radio and no voiceover, a long drive between events gets quiet, and I started flying past free roam straight to the next marker.
Rush Masters Carry The Campaign
Progression runs through the Rush Masters, one boss driver per island with a Rush Squad of rivals to beat first. The four bosses drive the Rig Storm, a 2017 Aston Martin Vulcan, the Sharkruiser and the Mad Manga, and winning a boss race earns you their car and opens the road to the next island. That structure gave my evenings a goal, and beating a squad member always moved something forward.
Races cover all six official modes: Quick Race, Elimination, Waypoints, Smashing Wheels, Time Attack and Drift Master. Elimination and Drift Master were my favorites, and the classes make both richer. A Drifter and a Titan play the same Drift Master event in completely different ways. Smashing Wheels is a hot lap through stacks of tires where the best line keeps a score multiplier alive, and it's the one I play when I just want noise.
The AI is soft. On the medium setting I won most events on my first try, and I only felt pushed after moving the difficulty up a long way. The game ships with several difficulty levels and driving assists, which makes it a good fit for younger players. Anyone who wants a fight should raise the setting before the first Rush Squad race.
The Track Builder Is The Endgame
The Hot Wheels Infinite Rush track builder is the feature I expect to keep me playing long after the campaign. Building now happens on the islands themselves, and an adaptive snapping tool raises or lowers the track to match the ground under it. Any building, tree or pole the track passes through gets cleared automatically, so I stopped fighting the terrain on my first build and started designing.
Milestone also lets you place markers for AI opponents, setting their racing line plus their acceleration and braking zones. That changed what my tracks were for. I built a twisty Drifty Temples layout with fan traps on the exits, marked the braking points, and finally had rivals who raced it like they knew it. Bending corners and inclines with the analog stick felt quick from the first session.
Tracks go up to a shared community library, and browsing other players' builds became my wind-down after a campaign night. Switch 2 is the exception. Content shared there only reaches other Switch 2 players. The patch on September 29, 2026 also fixed ghosts that were not recording on player-made tracks. Records set before the fix stay as they were.
Loading Screens Break The Momentum
Performance on PS5 held its target of 60 frames per second through every race I ran, chaos in Smashing Wheels included. Plastic, chrome and translucent parts catch the light well, and up close the cars look like the toys on the shelf. The Switch 2 version runs at 30 frames per second, which is a fair trade for a handheld racer.
Loading is the real problem. Switching islands or finishing a main event can mean close to a minute of waiting, and stat screens in the middle of some activities freeze the car for a moment. For a game built around short, quick events, those pauses hurt more than any glitch. I started reaching for my phone during loads. A racer I love never makes me do that.
Split-screen works well with up to four players, and online play supports cross-play across every platform except Switch 2, with ranked lobbies on top. The couch mode covers races only. My kid and I could go head to head, but I could never just cruise an island with them on one TV, which feels like the very thing a Hot Wheels game was made for.
Is Hot Wheels Infinite Rush Worth Buying Right Now?
Yes, for anyone who loved the driving in the Unleashed games or wants a racer to share with kids. The classes, the car collection and the track builder are strong enough to carry the slower open world. The September 29 patch also fixed missing vehicle rewards after Challenge Events and a broken Titan meter in online races.
Hold off if a big open world was the main draw. Forza Horizon fans will find these islands small, and the loading will wear on anyone who wants to chain events. Waiting for a few more patches and a sale costs you nothing.
I would also wait on the Vehicle Pass. It adds 44 cars across 11 packs, Ferrari, AcceleRacers and Highway 35 models among them, and Milestone says the last of them arrives by October 2027. That is a long drip, so I'd buy it once most packs are out.
FAQs About Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush
Final Words
Milestone built a better car than it built a world. The four classes give every race a second layer, and I still find myself swapping a Titan for a Speeder just to see how a track changes. That part of Hot Wheels Infinite Rush has earned a long life.
Those islands feel like the box the cars came in: pretty, a little empty and too small for the load times sitting between them. Split-screen free roam and shorter loads would fix most of my complaints.
AI rivals who follow your own racing line could keep the community library busy for years. If you try one thing beyond the campaign, build a track, mark the braking zones and race it against them.
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