Choosing a car all gets terribly boring when you’re an adult. Hybrids, engine sizes, backseat leg room and boot space gradually become the only things you care about, and exciting stuff like decals and how fast it moves go out the window. Milestone are focusing on the fun with their latest, taking us back to a point in our lives where the only cars you cared about were Hot Wheels, and whether you could get all the way around a loop-the-loop. In Hot Wheels Infinite Rush, you definitely can.
This is Hot Wheels by way of Forza Horizon, but as its own standalone game instead of a DLC. Unlike the previous two Hot Wheels Unleashed games, which saw the tiny cars careening around tracks made in real-world settings, Infinite Rush gives you four open-world toy cities to race around, with each bringing with it their own features, races and events. We got to go hands-on with the first of these cities, Wheelswood, to check out just how it feels to race around as a toy car.
This is a city that looks and feels like a giant Hot Wheels playset. In fact, there are some recognisable elements of the real-world toys lurking here, including a giant shark head that chomps through the track, and a burger bun that slams shut with your car inside it. There’s the iconic orange track parts too, but they give way to city streets and buildings that make it feel like a toy city that’s come alive.
The streets are also teeming with other cars. Bashing into them doesn’t result with a wreck, and thanks to the same weightlessness you’d expect from a toy, you can just shunt them out of the way with no damage.
Across the city you’ll find an array of events and races to take part in, from your standard racing action through to one where you have to smash up all the scenery, or zip around snapping photographs. Drive up to the logo, hold down the button and you’re in the event. It works in Forza Horizon and its ilk, and it works here, though the larger icons make it easier to spot events.
Racing is fun and frenetic. A tap of your brake button serves up a tight and instantaneous drift, in a way that approaches classic Ridge Racer, and once you’ve got a grasp on how these cars handle, you’ll be well away.
They key thing is, Milestone have made them handle like toy cars, or at least, how you might imagine toy cars would handle. They’re light, but undeniably fast, and you can do a host of un-car like things with them, whether it’s bashing left or right, or tilting and turning in the air as you take them across a giant jump.
It works really well. There’s also a boost mode, with different car types having different boost modes whether that’s a set number of activations or a whole gauge to utilise whenever you want to. You can deplete your boost completely, and this then stalls your car, losing you precious seconds while it recharges.
There’s more than 150 cars, split across four different vehicle types: Versatile, Drifter, Speeder and Titan. We had a lot of fun looking out for cars that we have in the house, and with two boys, theres a lot of Hot Wheels lurking about to accidentally step on. Forget Lego blocks, a Hot Wheels to the sole of your foot is the true danger as a parent.
What isn’t painful is the ability to upgrade each of the cars, with four unlockable module slots that you can add perks to, from boosts, tighter turning and shields to ones that reduce the weight of the car. Our hands on gave us all of these to muck about with, and they really let you dig into your own driving style, or let you choose a loadout that’s going to give you the edge in a a specific event.
The final game will have a major amount of customisation too, so alongside tinkering with your cars’ look there’s a track builder, and both a livery and sticker editor too, which I can see people really digging into at launch.
The worry with Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is that it could feel too much like My First Forza Horizon. It is certainly aimed at a younger audience, the map isn’t so overwhelming in terms of events, but I still really enjoyed what we got to take part in. The similarities with Horizon aren’t necessarily a bad thing, and it does seem to have enough of its own identity to rest on its own four wheels.
