Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush Review - A New Horizon for Toy Cars
The joy of Hot Wheels is one that gamers have had for quite a while now. The most recent Hot Wheels titles, Unleashed 1 & 2, were both great arcade racers that had a good amount of challenge, while at the same time were perfect for couch multiplayer sessions with friends and family. There have also been a couple of Hot Wheels expansions for the world’s premier car game, Forza Horizon. So it is no surprise really that the next Hot Wheels release takes elements from both of these branches to create something that should keep Unleashed and Horizon fans pretty happy. Infinite Rush is here, and it brings the trademark Hot Wheels fun into an open world.
Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush changes things up with an open-world structure that feels, in a lot of ways, like a smaller-scale version of Horizon. Instead of one giant map, there are four smaller ones, each built with a specific theme and chock-full of all the things you would expect from a Hot Wheels title. There are loops, corkscrews, ramps, and a host of crazy scenery that gets incorporated into the racing action. One glance at these maps makes it clear: this could only be a Hot Wheels title. The maps have a host of activities that players can jump into. There are, of course, races, but in addition to this, there are photo locations, collectibles, drift challenges, wrecking zones and speed sections, just to name a few. It is quite a good bit of fun to simply zoom around the maps and complete these different activities as they show up and ignore the racing completely.
Speaking of the racing, there are four classes of cars that players have access to, and each race is class-specific. Titan, Speed, Drifter and Versatile classes all drive significantly differently, requiring players to learn each class’s tricks to be competitive. It is a nice system and really adds a bit of variety in the gameplay. There are also a few different types of races, each of which throws a little wrinkle to proceedings. Things like Elimination and point-based races (where points are scored by crashing through tyres on the track) add to the range of things to do in the game.
Unfortunately, there are some issues that show up before long. In the name of building an open world, the tracks themselves don’t seem as wild and wacky as they were in the Unleashed games. Sure, there are still occasional loops and the like, but the tracks certainly feel a bit more tame in Infinite Rush when compared to the previous titles. It is a bit of a shame, really, because if you can’t go nuts with tracks in a Hot Wheels game, when can you? In good news, though, the creative modes are back, so I am sure it won’t be long before the community has built a nice bank of bonkers tracks for racers to zoom through, so the disappointment won’t last too long, hopefully.
The racing itself seems to have been balanced out a bit too. In Unleashed, the AI was relentless and aggressive, even on medium difficulty, but here, medium presented little challenge. I had to ramp the difficulty up to hard before it felt like I was being pushed at all. I understand why the game is this way, though, because after playing the Unleashed games with younger family members and watching them find it way too hard to find success, they would put the game down and never come back. The developers may have overcorrected here, but that overcorrection is probably better than going the other way.
The game ran really well on my PC, Xbox Ally X and laptop, with no real issues and minimal noticeable difference between “Low” and “High” settings. However, there were some oddities in the PC version that will hopefully be sorted out shortly after launch. The game often picked the incorrect resolution when starting the game for the first time, and the highest resolution on offer was 1080p. No, 2 or 4K resolutions in this day and age seem extremely odd. So odd, in fact, that I wonder if they will include it in the day-one patch, because it feels like something that should be there.
Multiplayer modes are present and accounted for, with split-screen racing and online play both available. The lack of variety in the tracks does hurt a little here, though, but once again, the community should fill that hole pretty quickly. The other issue here is the same one that has plagued other Hot Wheels games, and that is the fact that it is a lot of work to unlock cars. Getting a big collection of wacky toy racers is undeniably a grind, and that carries over to the multiplayer.
Infinite Rush is a really solid racing title. It does make some compromises in the move to an open world, but those compromises are understandable in the big picture. It is welcoming, easy to like and comes with a big play area to live those toy car fantasies. This is an ideal family game and something that almost any gamer can get pleasure out of, no matter their age. It is, by no means, a perfect game, but its problems are not enough to take away from the joy that is on offer. Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush feels like the sort of game that will find a home on consoles everywhere, waiting for a family gathering, party or just a pizza night with friends, and frankly, there just aren’t enough of these any more.
Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
