Wreckreation Review – Burnout’s Broken Baby Brother

Wreckreation Review

Burnout fans have been hungering for a new game in the franchise. Is Wreckreaction the answer to their prayers? Let’s see. Wreckreation comes from game developer Three Fields Entertainment Limited. The developers seem ready to deliver an open-world arcade racing game that also features high-speed driving, racing, crashing, stunts, and exploration. Games such as Dangerous Driving, and Danger Zone 1 & 2 share many of the trademarks of the Burnout games. They are all arcade racing games that feature crashing and vehicle destruction heavily.

With Wreckreation, Three Fields Entertainment Limited pushes their talents to cover an entire 400 square kilometer island driving game universe. In this world you can decorate and personalize, either alone or in collaboration with your friends online. You can create a place of your own where you can continually strive to outrace, out-stunt or even out-crash yourself and others with courses, tracks, and game modes designed by you, or your friends. What you have here is a big virtual playground to do pretty well anything your arcade racing heart desires.

The game mixes traditional arcade racing modes such as Drift, Air, Near Miss, Stunt, and Time Trials with World Building activities. All modes have Leaderboards to judge yourself against your peers. On the world-building side, you get to explore it and design your own tracks and stunts. With the construction tools, you can place jumps, loops, moving obstacles, and more almost everywhere on the island. You have control over everything. This means you can set the success criteria for team stunt events and races. Plus, success criteria can be location-based.

Wreckreation comes with a plethora of options that extend beyond the usual car and racing gear ones. You can paint car body colors, wheels, boost flames, engine sounds, glass colors, tires, and more. You can also mix the music to your taste from a selection of 16 channels. More directly, you can also control the weather, the time of day, and the amount of traffic.

Stunt Building

One staple of arcade racing games is smashing billboards to rack up points. Developers placed these strategically throughout the map, and their placement determined the difficulty of hitting and smashing them. “Ad Breaks” billboards are breakable, “Promotional Stunts” require a special stunt, and hitting “Wrecktaculars” billboards gives the highest stunt score.

In your drives around the island, there are empty areas the game tags as Vacant Lots. This is where you use the construction kit. Not only will you be able to build tracks and stunts, you can also build structures that can affect gameplay. Want more high-speed cop pursuits? Then, build a police station and see more of a police presence.

All of this sounds great on paper, but the genuine test is how all these disparate pieces come together as a whole. One can appreciate the game developer’s ambition, but too often their vision exceeds their capabilities. The game is not a seamless experience. Being a smaller team, Three Fields Entertainment Limited could not bring the same level of polish to the game as the Criterion Games team did with Burnout. This lack of depth is further stressed by the size of the island.

A play area of over 400 square miles sounds great in theory. Implementing such a large play area presents an enormous challenge. The challenge being content. Something that is severely lacking. There are no cities and the associated infra-structure such as highways, bridges, suburbs, industrial areas, or bustling with life downtown sections. The island is the same all over. It’s all generic green space and rocks. This lack of variety seeps into the races. Each of them feels the same, which leads to boredom.

For the races themselves, there is a surprisingly low limit of only five other opponents. Pretty low by today’s standards but not nearly as low as the AI. There’s some pretty blatant rubber-banding logic in play. This really kills a lot of the motivation to really push yourself when you know that no matter how well you race, the AI opponents will catch up.

There are the expected assortment of special events. In Takedown mode, you score points by wrecking as many cars as possible within a certain time limit. A better approach would have been to end such events based on the amount of damage your car has taken. Using time as the limiter often stops you in the middle of dealing damage. A real bummer.

Road Rage = Real Rage

A new event, Road Rage, is a bit of a misfire. In this mode, you can take out only certain cars. It seems like a good idea, but the execution leads to frustration. Taking out other cars invokes a time penalty. The frustration is further aggravated by there being only two target cars to take out. There is also a scoring issue as some takeouts do not get properly added to the players’ tally.

Overall, there are several underlying bugs that hobble one’s enjoyment of the game. Besides AI problems, there are issues with car handling. Yes, this is an arcade not a simulation game, but there are fundamentals that need to be in place. Take drifting, for example. The most important car-handling aspect in arcade racers is drifting because it is crucial to many things. Drifting is the quickest way to boost energy and your overall stats. So drifting behavior needs to be tuned to behave predictably.

With Wreckreation, drifting engages properly under braking, but there is no ability to control it. One would expect they could change the angle of drift so they could steer the car. You do this by manipulating the throttle. However, that is not present in the game. If the car is not moving in a straight line, the game will ignore brake and throttle inputs. You can brake or speed up predictably when moving in a straight line. If not, then forget about control.

On the other technical aspects, things are mostly good. Crashes are spectacular and are easily the biggest draw for the game. Other graphical aspects are solid, if not a bit bland given the empty nature of the island. Most noticeable are framerate stutters when entering a drift. Audio-wise, the game does a good job with car and radio sounds.

More Time In The Oven

Wreckreation, a game with a vision beyond the developer’s abilities, serves as a prime example of a game released too early. This feels very much like a beta release. If fundamental aspects of the game don’t work properly, players cannot enjoy ambitious world-building features like Live Mix. To their credit, the developer is engaged in bug fixes and has published a roadmap of upcoming patches. However, these fixes may come too late to keep players engaged. For Burnout fans, wait for the next game, or until they fix the bugs in this one.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***