Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush is an open-world arcade racer that feels like Burnout Paradise with toy cars

Milestone – the studio behind two previous Hot Wheels games and the underrated anime racer Screamer – showed up at Summer Game Fest 2026 with Hot Wheels: Infinite Rush, and it's a significant departure from what the series has done before. Gone are the dedicated tracks set inside living rooms and fantasy landscapes; in their place are open-world zones stuffed with missions, side content, and general toy-box chaos.

The game launches players into large open zones with over 150 cars split across three classes – speeder, titan, and versatile – and lets you swap freely between them between missions. The mission variety is broad: traditional races, time-trials, vehicle delivery runs, destruction derby challenges where the goal is maximum environmental damage, and a photo mode mission type where you hunt down landmarks and snap them for an in-game album. IGN's hands-on covered two zones – Wheelworld, an open city metropolis, and Gearworld, an industrial desert town. Both are built in a diorama style that nails the look of those wildly over-the-top toy playsets from old TV commercials, the ones that always looked better than anything you could actually buy. A giant scorpion spewing venom across Gearworld was a particular highlight, and it captures exactly the unhinged energy Hot Wheels has always traded on.

The open-world structure draws obvious comparisons to Burnout Paradise – free roaming, map-scattered objectives, and a loose approach to getting from A to B. It's a bold structural shift for a franchise that has leaned on track-based racing, and it mirrors the kind of upgrade Lego Batman recently made by moving into a Batman Arkham-style open world. The arcade driving feel is still intact: fast, loose, and not remotely interested in simulation.

No release date has been confirmed yet, but the Summer Game Fest demo suggests Milestone has a clear vision for where the series is headed. If the open-world ambition holds up across the full game, Infinite Rush could be the most interesting entry the Hot Wheels franchise has produced.