Hot Wheels Infinite Rush was revealed at Summer Game Fest on Friday and now we can exclusively reveal some extended gameplay from the upcoming racer. As you can see in the player above, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is slated to include tons of new elements not found in its predecessors including a Drift Stunt Challenge, Stuntman Challenge, and Destroy Everything! Challenge, where players get to utterly wreck everything that possibly can within a set timeframe.

Ahead of the gameplay reveal at IGN Live 2026, I sat down with Michele Caletti, Development and Creative Director at Milestone – the studio behind the game, who told me that Hot Wheels Infinite Rush has a lot that fans of previous Hot Wheels Games will recognize, but marks a whole new world for the popular series.

“It’s not at all Hot Wheels Unleashed 3,” Caletta says. “It’s a completely different thing.We wanted to keep some of the positive aspects that were very well recognized because basically Hot Wheels 1 and 2 are proper racing games with nuance, with content, with quality through and through. We built a community. So making Infinite Rush has been a very big challenge because we wanted to preserve the good, but we wanted to change a lot.”

Perhaps the biggest new element in Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a series of freely explorable islands which allow players to hunt for a slew of discoverable items.

“There are going to be four big islands,” Caletti says. “You can freely explore, go around. [They are] different one from the other. You can find challenges, races, secrets, [and] collectibles. You don’t select the next challenge or next race from a menu, but basically you go around, have a look and find things along the way in the classic open world pattern.

“This is a huge change because you can easily find yourself spending hours going around trying to catch the last secret, trying to find some new challenge that you’ve spotted. And it’s completely different from the game loop perspective and from the way you perceive the game.”

In addition to the islands, Caletti says there’s a second major shift the development team implemented while building the game.

“The second huge change is the artistic vision placement,” Caletti says. “The other Hot Wheels games were based on the mantra of ‘Hot Wheels cars in real life-size, in toy form, in the real world, where you race in the back yard [or] in the kitchen.’ [With Hot Wheels Infinite Rush] we wanted to experiment with something very different.

“You’ll still be a toy car, but you’re going to race in a world made like a diorama. So there are islands themed like cities, like resorts. Everything is in the scale of the car yet it’s somehow toy form. Everything is clearly made in plastic [so] there’s a significant shift. The things we’ve been able to create from the artistic perspective is very, very different.

“On top, there are smaller changes,” Caletti says. “Here we have gone a step further in terms of differentiating the vehicles and creating four big classes with peculiar mechanics, their own vehicles, challenges, and race mechanics. Being able to zip around [the islands] opens up a different variety of challenges. Everything is somehow familiar and yet everything is different because of the scale factor.”

Beyond the new islands, mechanics, and scale that Hot Wheels Infinite Rush brings to the storied franchise, Caletti says that he’s excited for some of the more social elements the game will feature.

“I’d be very happy if [players] start interacting with each other online,” Caletti says. “Discussing how to catch all the secret items or the hidden items or the items that seem very hard to pick around the world. In other racing games, there’s the discussion where to find all the cars, where to try to find all the secrets and to smash all the items. I’d like players to do the same with this game.”

For more IGN Live, check out all of the cool things you can see when the event wraps up later today.

Michael Peyton is the Senior Editorial Director of Events & Entertainment at IGN, leading entertainment content and coverage of tentpole events including IGN Live, San Diego Comic Con, gamescom, and IGN Fan Fest. He’s spent 20 years working in the games and entertainment industry, and his adventures have taken him everywhere from the Oscars to Japan to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Follow him on Bluesky @MichaelPeyton