Welcome everyone to the bloodbath of Fall 2026, where several games will be competing for your time and, most importantly, your wallet, all for the prestigious position of second place. Yeah, it’s no secret that the release lineup for this fall is interesting because everyone is afraid of GTA 6 taking all the money and attention in the world. So, we’re back to a time when there’s a massive release basically every single week until the end of the year. That means a lot of good games are going to fall between the cracks, even more than usual, and Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is probably going to be one of them. The newest Hot Wheels game answers a question gamers have probably had for a while: “Did you like that collaboration with Forza Horizon but wish the cars actually handled like Hot Wheels cars instead of something from a sim-arcade racer?” If you said yes, then their newest game is for you. Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is essentially a kid-friendly version of Forza Horizon, an arcade open-world racer filled with races, collectibles, challenges, online multiplayer, and enough checklist objectives to keep the part of your brain that enjoys watching percentages increase extremely happy. Instead of another game built entirely around the orange tracks, Milestone has taken the cars and dropped them into four open-world islands designed around the scale and aesthetic of Hot Wheels. Buildings, roads, ramps, props, and even the environments themselves have this plastic toy-box appearance that makes the entire game look like the kind of ridiculous playset you imagined owning when you were eight years old, but your parents would absolutely never buy you.

Thankfully, the cars actually feel like Hot Wheels. This is not a game particularly concerned with braking distance or whether your tires are at the correct temperature. Cars slide around corners, launch themselves hundreds of feet through the air, smash through objects, and somehow land without the driver having every bone in their body reduced to powder. There are four vehicle classes: Versatiles, Titans, Drifters, and Speeders. They actually feel different enough that choosing the correct car matters. Drifters are obviously better when an event wants you sideways, Speeders sacrifice some control for ridiculous speed, Titans are the heavy boys, and Versatiles are basically the “I don’t know what I’m doing, just give me something decent” option. The open world is also just fun to screw around in. There’s a constant stream of things begging for your attention, whether it’s another race, a collectible sitting somewhere it clearly shouldn’t be, a hidden area, or another car driving around that you can challenge. Winning some of those encounters adds the opposing vehicle to your collection, which is a smart way of making the 150-plus-car garage feel like something you’re actually building instead of a giant menu slowly filling itself. There are performance upgrades and customization options as well, including liveries, stickers, wheels, boosts, and other ways of making your favorite cars feel a little more like your own.

Progression eventually leads toward each island’s Rush Master, basically the major boss waiting at the end of that area. Completing activities unlocks your chance to challenge them, giving each island a little more structure than simply vomiting icons onto a map and telling you to have fun. Beat all four, and you become the Rush Master yourself, which is an appropriately Saturday-morning-cartoon reason to keep working through everything. It isn’t exactly reinventing open-world progression, but the structure works, especially for a game clearly designed to be approachable for younger players while still giving adults something relaxing to play. There’s also a Track Builder, which goes a long way toward making Infinite Rush feel like its own game instead of Forza Horizon: Fisher-Price Edition. You can actually incorporate the open world into tracks, attaching pieces to the environment and building courses around buildings or above city streets. Hot Wheels has always worked best when the games remember that half the appeal of the toys is creating something incredibly stupid and then seeing whether a car survives it, so allowing players to bring that mentality directly into the open world makes perfect sense. Multiplayer rounds everything out with online racing and local split-screen, including support for up to four players locally. It’s exactly the kind of racing game that benefits from having other people around because nobody is taking this seriously enough to start screaming about racing lines. You’re driving tiny plastic cars through loops. If somebody launches themselves off the track trying to overtake you, that’s not a failure of competitive integrity, that’s Hot Wheels.

The problem is that once you strip away the Hot Wheels skin, Infinite Rush is still following an open-world formula we’ve been playing for well over a decade. There are icons everywhere, activities everywhere, collectibles everywhere, and eventually you realize you’ve been driving across the map just to make another symbol disappear. The different cars and ridiculous tracks give it personality, but the structure can become repetitive, especially if you’re the kind of person who already gets exhausted looking at a modern open-world map. The generally forgiving difficulty also means experienced racing fans probably aren’t going to find some brutal test of their abilities here. This is clearly meant to be accessible first, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it does mean the game can occasionally feel like it’s playing things a little too safe. After enough hours, the illusion of this being one giant toy box starts to wear off, and you begin to see the checklist underneath. Drive here, complete this, unlock that, collect another car, repeat. It never becomes bad, but there are stretches where you wish the game would surprise you a little more instead of simply giving you another variation of something you’ve already done several times.

But sometimes being derivative isn’t the worst thing in the world when the thing you’re borrowing is already fun. Hot Wheels Infinite Rush takes the Forza Horizon formula, removes most of the seriousness, replaces the real cars with tiny plastic death machines, and gives you a giant toy box to throw them around in. It’s colorful, immediately enjoyable, packed with things to collect, and knows exactly who it’s made for. During a fall when every publisher is desperately fighting for whatever money GTA 6 leaves behind, I can absolutely see this one getting overlooked, and that would be unfortunate because Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a really good arcade racer. It isn’t revolutionary, and after enough hours its checklist structure definitely starts showing through the plastic, but I kept having fun driving around, collecting cars, building tracks, and seeing how badly I could violate the laws of physics before the game finally told me no. It doesn’t need to reinvent the genre to succeed. It just needs to make driving tiny cars at stupid speeds fun, and for the most part, it absolutely does.

Score: 8 out of 10

Reviewed on PlayStation 5