It’s often pointless to wish a game series would come back once it’s been thrown on the great pile of dormant names. I try, and regularly fail, to stop myself yearning too forlornly for a new Midnight Club, a new Motorstorm, or a new Burnout.
Mostly because it means that when a game like Wreckreation comes along, there’s a temptation to go into it with lofty expectations inflated by a rose-tinted longing for something the game more than likely isn’t. Despite drawing plenty of elements from the anarchic arcade racer and the Criterion credentials of devs Three Fields Entertainment, Wreckreation isn’t Burnout, coming home after all these years getting takedowns in the wilderness.
That’s fine. The problem is that I’ve struggled so far to enjoy it for what it is – a metamorphosis of open world Burnout and the GTA Online/Trackmania-esque calling card of customisable races along airborne tracks. That idea’s got potential to bring together fans on both sides of that tyre-treaded coin. At the moment, an array of hangups stop it from delivering.
Starting off on the ground, the bones of latter day Burnout are there, from the classic road rages, to boosting about, and even Paradise-style road rules. The rush they offer isn’t as satisfying as it could be. Things start and end, as they do to an extent in all driving games, with the car handling model.
This was my main sticking point with Three Fields’s last arcade racer, Dangerous Driving, and it remains so. Rather than the expertly tuned fluid, but weighty movement which made Burnout’s cars so addictive to throw around, Wreckreation’s rides handle more stiffly than the corpse of someone who swallowed an entire pack of viagra before snuffing it.
They feel good and have a great sense of speed when moving in perfectly straight lines, but outside of the odd boost slide at max velocity, they’re averse to drifting for more than a few yards at a time. It seems to have gotten marginally better following the swatting of an “unnatural speed drifting bug” in the game’s first patch, but I still wouldn’t class it as being as intuitive as it needs to be. As is, the car setup might work in a more straight-faced racer for people who care about tyre wear, but the best fun-focused arcade blasts Wreckreation aims to rank among run on style as much as they do speedy substance.
The issues extend to an even more important aspect of any racer aiming to draw on a bit of Burnouty appeal. Colliding with other cars feels awkward. Side-swipe one, and a limp bounce pushes them a few inches, usually resulting in a takedown only once two or three bumps have pushed them to the edge of the road. Traffic takedowns are still doable, but I’ve not managed one of Burnout’s classic wall-grinding takedowns yet, because Wreckreation’s physics don’t seem set up to allow two cars to rub against each other for long enough.
Making this even more glaring are the hilarious short durations of many road rages – events which task you with destroying a set number of hostile cars by bumping them off the road or into obstacles – hand in hand with the fact a maximum of three enemy vehicles spawn at a time during these events. Several I’ve done have given me a minute on the clock to rack up eight takedowns. Ten or so seconds are burned just catching up to the three vehicles that spawn off that bat, and naturally once you’ve taken them all down, you have to catch up to the fresh foes which spawn in. Despite my well-honed Burnout muscle memory, I’m regularly hitting a failure wall with rages opened up barely halfway – if that – up the difficulty curve of Wreckreation’s drivers licence-based levelling system.
I’m also not a fan of the variation on rages Wreckreation rolls out to try and spice up its relatively small number of event types. These are penalty road rages, in which you’ll have a car you’re not allowed to take down buzzing around you like a wasp. Take it out and you bleed 15 valuable seconds off the time you’ve got to do the usual road rage baddie wrecking, making the main issue with the regular rages even more of a problem.
As a result of that, I’ve had most of my fun doing regular races and wreckonings – the latter being the name the game pastes over Paradise’s burning routes, those being timed runs which yield tuned versions of cars you already own. Aside from some sections which evoke a bit of the switchback magic of 2010’s Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, which Three Fields’ Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry co-directed, the sprawling map of rural highways suffers a fair amount of visual blandness in terms of vistas to drive past or through. I’ve found a scrapyard and an airfield which were fun exceptions.
The reason for that is almost certainly the game’s sky tracks. Rather than just having you drive routes developers have put together, Wreckreation gives you the tools to fill the world with custom races and stunts of your own making. Each session is a unique world controlled by a host player, with the option to create with friends if you hop online.
Sounds good, but in practice it’s got some teething issues. Creating a standard point-to-point road or offroad race on the terrain Three Fields have designed works well. On the other hand, I’ve yet to actually succeed in making a sky track race the game’ll let me actually race or save. Laying out the track itself via the game’s ‘live mix’ building mode works, then you’ve got to add a start, finish, and checkpoints in between. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. Based on the standard race creation, I should just be prompted to save or try out my race upon exiting live mix, but instead I just lose everything.
Taking a look at the in-game written tutorials hasn’t helped me suss out what I might be doing wrong, and there appear to be options to either save or have the game run an error pass while you’re laying out your route. There could be an obvious hangup I’m missing, but the fact that it appears pretty easy to get stuck like this with Wreckreation’s flashiest draw is far from ideal. It’s a shame, because it’s good fun just flinging what’s shaping up to be a nicely varied roster of cars with some decent surface-level customisation options around the bits of sky track I’ve assembled.
I’ve spent six hours with Wreckreation so far – mostly in single player, given I’ve not been able to join an online session I wasn’t hosting without the game hitting a permanently hanging loading screen. It could be something great with a lot of work and refinement, and I can’t help but think that given all of the moving parts at play, Three Fields might have been better opting for the same kind of gradual build via early access that Wreckfest 2 is currently undergoing.
As it is, I’m thinking a lot of folks who might eventually like what Wreckreation could morph into will be long gone by the time it reaches its full potential, if it ever does. Some might stick with it and wait, but many will quickly decide doing so’s pointless.