HOT WHEELS Infinite Rush - PS5 Review

HOT WHEELS Infinite Rush by developer and publisher Milestone—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Jim with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes. 

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Who hasn't played with Hot Wheels as a child? I know I did a lot. I may not have gotten many new ones. Still, I have fond memories of going over to my grandmother's house and playing with all the cars she had on the rug, which I set up as a racetrack, or actually setting up the orange tracks you could buy and racing two cars down them to see which car was fastest! I never really got into the Hot Wheels video games, even as they came out on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 and so on. It wasn't until the PlayStation 4 game Hot Wheels Unleashed came out that I played and really enjoyed both the first and second games. Then I got the chance to review Hot Wheels Let's Race: Ultimate Speed, and I wasn't a fan, though it was by a new developer. Now Milestone, the original developer of the two Hot Wheels Unleashed games, is back, and I was hoping it would be as fun as the last two Hot Wheels games they made.

Infinite Rush is more of an open-world game with four islands to explore once you unlock them. You unlock them pretty quickly, and once you have them all unlocked, you can play them in any order you want. Sadly, the game doesn't really have a story. You are just dropped onto the first island, given a tutorial, and away you go. The only info you get is that you're trying to be the best racer, and to do that you will have to do races and events to unlock a race with a rusher, a leader of the island. Each island has four rushers. Once you beat a rusher, you will win the car and unlock more races and events. The objective of the game is to beat all rushers and become the best racer! The gameplay can become repetitive, which might affect long-term engagement for dedicated players.

What makes this game unique is that there are four types of cars, each with its own weaknesses and strengths, that you can switch to at any time while driving around the map. The car types are versatile, drifter, speeder, and titan. Versatile cars are good all-around cars with average stats; drifters have good handling and make drifting easier, hence the name; speeders have good speed but not as good handling; and titans are slow but can have good acceleration and handling, depending on the car. Every car in the game can boost; how much boost depends on the car's stats, and each type of car gains boost in different ways. 

Versatile cars gain it by speed and drifting; drifters gain it by drifting; speeders gain it by speed; and titans gain it automatically, but if you deplete the boost, you will overheat the car, and it will slow you down for a few seconds. You can also gain a boost in races, as each race has a 3-second countdown to the start. If you hit the gas as the number 2 shows, you will gain some boost at the start of the race, depending on how close to the 2 you press the gas, which will determine how much of the boost gauge you will fill. 

Aside from boosting, the cars can also dash left or right. You can do tricks in the air when you go off ramps by using the analog sticks to turn and flip the car. It can be fun to do a big jump and see how many flips you can pull off. I hardly used this, as it didn't really seem to do much, even when I used it to try to smash my opponents. There is a good mix of real-life cars, like my all-time favorite car, the Dodge Viper, and, of course, there are lots of fun and funny Hot Wheels cars, like the Duck n' Roll car that looks like a rubber duck with wheels!

Each of the four islands has hidden things to find—10 stickers, 10 Hot Wheels logos to jump through, and 300 small blue gears to find. Finding the stickers and taking a photo of them in-game lets you collect the sticker you can use in the livery editor; finding the logos and gears unlocks new cars. Honestly, I didn't like looking for the 300 gears. I did find them all, but once you get down to the last few, it becomes very time-consuming, and I wasn't a huge fan of it just to unlock a car. Aside from these hidden objects, there are also activities you can compete in; each island has a handful of these, like Tourist, where you need to take a photo of a landmark, like in the first level of a giant gorilla on a skyscraper, and a lot of times you will need to have a certain type of car in the view at the same time. These honestly felt boring to me. Next is Stuntman, where you get points for driving through destructible objects like trees and fences. It's fun, but the scores it wants you to beat are easy to achieve. There are drift stunts where you need to drift a certain number of times before crossing the finish line in a time-trial-type race. There are others too, but overall, it still felt lacking given how few there are.

There are different race types in the game, also, from normal races called a quick race to time attack, and even some unique ones like Smashing Wheels. This is where you have to drive wheels through to get points and make it to the finish line with so many points to win; you race alone in these. There are Drift Master races where you race alone like in Smashing Wheels, but you get points for drifting, and you need to finish the race with enough points to win. There are elimination races where you need to stay out of last place so you aren't eliminated. Lastly is waypoint, where you race alone again, but you have to reach waypoints, go through them, and try to make it through them all in time. You have to go through them in order, but you can go any route you want. Each race has a type of car it wants you to use, so you can't switch cars while racing.

As you explore the island, sometimes a daredevil will pop up. If you get close enough to them, you can start a race, and if you win the race, you can win the car you just raced. I kind of like this; it reminds me of older street racing games where you could race others for pink slips. But there are only so many of these per island, and once you beat them all, they keep showing up, but beating them again gets you nothing. However, you can use any car you want to race them, and if you lose, they will show up again later, so there is no worry.

After beating enough races on an island, you will be able to race a rusher who is a boss of the island. Winning these races gets you the car and unlocks even more races and sometimes activities. Having to do this four times on each of the four islands started to feel really repetitive, since there didn't seem to be enough tracks or race types, and I swear I played the same race on the same track multiple times with only a slightly harder time to beat. Aside from the difficulty setting, the main game has three different levels (1-3), and you start by doing level 1 races. As you progress on the island, you will unlock harder races, but even when I turned the difficulty level to hard, even the level 3 races were not that hard, with only a few of them where I needed to redo a race.

Every island has its own shop where you can use rush coins you get by winning races, doing enough tricks like flips, drifting, boosting, getting near misses, or even destroying things. Shops offer new cars, boost effects like the color of the flame coming out of your car, and dashes that seem to change only the dash sound effect. I didn't see any difference beyond that.

As you play, you will be able to unlock upgrades for your cars. Upgrades can add stats like boosts, handling, and more, or do other things like make your dash stronger. Upgrade levels range from the lowest C to the highest S. Once unlocked, you can equip one boost per level, and you can swap them out since they aren't permanent.

A handful of creative tools let you customize things. You can make your own stickers to add to your cars, use a livery editor to change the livery of any car you have, and, lastly, a track builder that lets you build your own track. I didn't really understand how to use it, even though the game tried to tell me what to do, but after some tinkering around, I was able to build my own track. I was never a fan of these types of things, but I do like seeing what other people create, and I can see some really cool tracks being made with this track builder once the game releases.

Hot Wheels has both split-screen up to four players and online play races. I wasn't able to play online as of this writing; the game hasn't been released so that I couldn't find any other racers. I do like that they added split-screen, though it's getting rare to see this in games today.

Graphically, the game has a lot going on, like traffic when driving around the maps and giant set pieces, like a giant scorpion that spits green stuff onto the ground that will slow you down. The world, and a lot of the buildings and foliage, look like plastic; even the trees you can run into and destroy almost look like Legos or something. These cars are Hot Wheels, I think it fits very well. The graphics aren't groundbreaking, but they aren't bad either. I have no complaints about how the game looks.

The sound design is also very well done; each car seems to have its own engine sound. I even had a futuristic car with a really cool, sci-fi-sounding engine. Hitting trees, rocks, and other things sounds like hitting plastic and Legos, which is cool, almost like the whole game might be in the imagination of a child. I did run into a few sound glitches, though: one time the engine sound never stopped, and another time it sounded like I was still driving over a puddle of water when I wasn't. These only happened a few times, so it seemed rare. Music in the game is hit and miss. I didn't really care for the music in most of the levels, except for the island called Gearville, where the tracks were more rock-type music. There was one other song from one of the other islands that sounded a little like Daft Punk, but honestly, you could turn off the music and play Spotify, and it would be just as good, if not better. I did run into a glitch on the last island only, where the music would stop and not start playing again unless I changed islands and came back.

Overall, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is fun at first, but after you play it for a while, it gets very repetitive. I could see this game appealing to younger kids around 10-13 years old, as it's good, clean fun, but for adults or older teens, I don't see enough new content after you beat each of the first rushers. It's a rather easy game even on the highest difficulty. It's not a bad game; I did enjoy it at first. It just gets boring after a few hours, and don't get me started on finding the 300 gears on each island! 1200 gears is way too many! I can't wait to see what players make with the track builder, though. Hopefully, there will be some cool new tracks to try out in the future.

Score: 6.5 / 10