Wreckreation Review

One of the series that really failed to take off on the newer generation of consoles was the Burnout Paradise series. However, developer Three Fields Entertainment, alongside THQ Nordic, appear to want to bring back everything we loved about crashing, racing, and crashing some more with their latest title: Wreckreation. The question now is if this is a road trip you should engage in, or if it's time to hang up the ol’ steering wheel.

Wreckreation is, in essence, an open-world racing game that focuses on several different events. As such, there’s no real story here at all beyond any that you might choose to make yourself with your friends. So, if you want a reason to be driving around beyond the sheer joy of doing so, then you probably want to look elsewhere. 

First things first, what will you actually be doing in Wreckreation? The majority of your time will be spent in the open world, which serves as a kind of hub. You can drive around, change your cars, and find events to engage in. It’s a large map with lots to discover and destroy, plus the need to find more events certainly gives you a reason to actually explore. You also have a lot of freedom to set the world around you, including how many other cars are on the road and trust me, that’s important. 

Now, the races mostly work as you would expect: you and a group of AI-driven cars speed down the road to be the first to cross the finish line. However, some events focus more on the second main element of Wreckreation… wreaking stuff. See, my initial association with the Burnout series wasn’t me pulling a name from the ether. When you crash or cause opponents' cars to do so, the game goes into slow-motion and shows off the damage you did to the opposite vehicle. 

It's entertaining, plus the game is fairly good at making sure your car doesn’t crash as you watch the others spin out. Several of the events are focused on destroying vehicles, and it’s still a lot of fun to cause the biggest pile-up you can. It also helps that everything is easy to control, even when they have different top speeds. The handling manages to remain responsive, which helps to make it really easy to get a good wreck going. It’s not just about destroying stuff, though, as causing wrecks or generally driving dangerously builds and expands your boost. 

The different events are all pretty fun to play through, but there are a few issues. Firstly, the stats of your cars don’t always seem to be the same for the AI. I’ve seen vehicles that were the same as mine suddenly speed ahead of me. It could be that they used their boost, but that early in the race would indicate that they started with more. Also, the game likes to lock you into a brief explanation about what the event is, but there is no means to skip this. It’s really annoying, especially when you have to restart an event a few times. 

Outside of racing, you can also build your own sky ramp anywhere in the open world. While you have to unlock the majority of the different pieces, it’s an easy enough system to use, and it’s quite fun to build a really intense track that you can test yourself on. You can then let your friends try out your track and get suitably annoyed when they beat you (then proceed to ram into them at full speed so that they explode).

Graphically, Wreckreation is fine for the most part; the textures of the world around you might not be the best, but you go past so fast that you often won't notice. There are no people in the world, but that’s probably for the best. However, the sense of speed is really good, and the noises as you narrowly miss another car is just the perfect endorphin hit. While the world might not be the peak of graphical power, the crash animations look awesome, which is what we’re really here for, isn’t it?

Is Wreckreation the greatest racing game I’ve ever played? No, probably not. The races are pretty basic, aside from the sky races. There’s not an enormous difference between a lot of the cars, while the open world often feels less like somewhere I want to explore and more like an over-complex map screen. However, I find myself going back to the experience constantly because destroying things is fun and doing it with a friend is even more so. Sure, beating your mate in a race is one thing, but shunting them off a road that’s a hundred feet in the air, then watching them spin down in a fireball, just adds to the experience.