On the face of it, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is a surprisingly good game. On the other hand, it’s not shocking at all. Italian developer Milestone has created a solid reputation for enjoyable, specialist racing games, but has spent the last few years going even more niche — and quality refuses to drop.

Hot Wheels Infinite Rush arrives at the perfect time for disaffected Forza Horizon obsessives like me, who’ve pulled away from FH6 , because there are only so many times you can eat your favorite meal before you get sick of it. To its credit, it took me 63 hours to drop Forza , but I put 220+ into FH5 without breaking a sweat.

Infinite Rush borrows its ideas heavily from Playground Games’ best franchise, but that’s not a bad thing. It does it with more wink-and-a-smile than copy-and-paste, while turning the escapade into a collectathon built around four different vehicle disciplines. Much like Milestone’s overlooked Screamer , everything clicks as soon as you suss out Infinite Rush ’s rather unique control system and approach.

It’s done well to build on Hot Wheels Unleashed , and while it lacks a little finesse and detail, you can’t quite put it down. It’s an impressively fun, entirely unserious game with racing and challenges that will push you to your limit, whatever your age, especially if you’re willing to raise the difficulty.

There’s something to admire about a game that doesn’t even try to push a story. Hot Wheels Infinite Rush is more of a “here are some rules” experience, for better or worse: you’re on one island, there are three more to unlock, you need to collect stuff and win races, and there are brief instructions before every new game mode. That’s all there is to it.

It’s a breath of fresh air: a less sentient Cars world, where you don’t want to question how it was built, and not just because die-cast vehicles don’t have opposable thumbs or a basic grasp of civil engineering. If you scratch the surface, you’ll start to compare it to Lego, where minifigures effectively live in houses made of their own flesh. Thankfully, you quickly escape this darkness because Hot Wheels Infinite Rush reminds you that you’re just playing with toy cars in a different way, right down to the moment you accidentally flip your vehicle and it gets corrected as if a human picked it up.

You might not believe in its world — not that it matters — but visually, Hot Wheels Infinite Rush does everything to make it look like it exists IRL. The vehicle models are absolutely gorgeous, framerates are smooth and stable, and enough color to make Roy Lichtenstein blush. Textures occasionally drop out, but this doesn’t break immersion.

Hot Wheels Infinite Rush centers on a garage built from four different vehicle classes: Versatile, Drifter, Speeder, and Titan. These are permanently accessible through a quick swap function on the D-pad, and you swap your favored cars into each slot as you unlock bigger and better vehicles.

While I thought I’d feel much more at home with Drifters over others, this class is easily the most difficult to get to grips with. Speeders react more like you’d expect an arcade drift class to work. You’ll still all-but-master them within a few minutes of messing around, and you soon learn that boosting is absolutely central to success. Each car has different configurations and rewards you with refills in different ways, but the bottom line is that you’re always checking your boost meter.

As you unlock more cars, you can swap better models in. Still, it’s not a paint-by-numbers rule based on simple metrics, as no two cars with the same stats feel the same. Not only can you upgrade your cars with different bolt-ons that you unlock along the way, but certain cars have very different handling from one another; it turns out that the best on stats isn’t the best to drive, as I found with an OP Fiat 500. Still, at standard difficulties, higher performance doesn’t really matter.

The blend of open world exploration and events is nicely balanced. Collectibles like gears, Hot Wheels signs, and stickers keep you on your toes, while events slowly unfurl across each island. While Infinite Rush lacks fast travel, you don’t need it. Driving from one extreme point of the map to the other is quick, save for the occasional road design or massive building, and that plays to its strengths in different modes, especially off-the-cuff races, or point-to-point dashes against the clock.

That said, traveling between different islands isn’t ideal, as you have to use each world’s single cannon to shoot you to your chosen destination, but in real terms you’ll probably prefer to mop up every collectible and challenge on an island before you move on.

Core races are a real delight, though a little too easy for seasoned driving game fans — Hot Wheels Infinite Rush clearly targets younger players, and does a great job of meeting this audience — but dialing up the difficulty really does make the game a great challenge, and nine times out of ten, you lose because of your own mistakes, rather than the sweaty antics of the AI.

All the while, your rush counter, Hot Wheels ’ alternative to the combo meter from Forza Horizon , ticks up with similar events, like wreckages, near misses, and drifts. You’re not penalized for crashing, either, especially because NPC vehicles delightfully ping off your car as you plow through them; the focus is on chaining your stunts. Its scoring system is much lower than Horizon ’s — double and triple digits — but so are the in-store prices for upgrades and unlockable cars.

Admittedly, Infinite Rush ’s economy isn’t great. Given the game’s strong focus on collecting and completing sets of vehicles, you earn money too slowly, effectively blocking garage purchases for long periods. It makes cars feel less valuable when you can finally afford them, given their stats are almost always very poor compared to vehicles you unlock in races and Daredevil battles along the way.

Another issue is the camera. Tight races, especially one-on-one point-to-point chases with sharp turns, can be real battles, but there’s no reverse view when flicking down on the right stick — it slowly rotates the camera, lacking the immediacy of Forza Horizon ’s look for absolutely zero benefit. The quick-look is instead pegged to LB, which is terrible placement when you’re almost constantly using LT to drift.

Still, these issues are small potatoes given the fun you’ll have. Sure, its worlds feel strangely lifeless, it borrows heavily from its peers, and its handling models are a little too inconsistent for an arcade racer, but there are few delights quite like overtaking a Deora II on the back of a snake, finally finding that last sticker after hours of driving, or unlocking the Lancia HF Delta Integrale that’s on your office desk and sticking with it on sheer principle, even though it’s crap compared to everything else in your collection.

The track creator, too, is utterly superb – a mode that I couldn’t get the most out of because I’m simply not that creative, but one with intuitive controls and a remarkable scope for huge circuits.

Milestone is doing incredible work with beloved brands, and Hot Wheels Infinite Rush has built firmly on the hard graft it put into Hot Wheels Unleashed ; you can only assume a follow-up will make its ideas even better in the next few years.