Wreckreation Review
It’s been 6,496 days since the original release of Burnout Paradise, not that I’m counting. With the Burnout series clearly consigned to the same storage cupboard EA has been hiding the corpses of Westwood, Black Box, Pandemic, and all the other studios it shut down over the years, I completely understand the motivation for developer Three Fields Entertainment to craft Wreckreation. It’s an unapologetic Burnout Paradise clone in a stack of very clear ways, built for a ravenous audience that’s been starved of one of arcade racing’s heaviest hitters for too long. After all, if you want something done, sometimes you need to do it yourself. Unfortunately, the one core component of its spiritual ancestor that Wreckreation couldn’t recapture was its overall quality, and the result is a janky, unrefined, and often unsatisfying racer that I don’t have much desire to keep playing.
Wreckreation’s resemblance to Burnout Paradise runs surprisingly deep, even for an independent studio that’s spearheaded by former Criterion Games bigwigs – the home of the Burnout series. In fact, there are times when it borders on self-plagiarism, such are the similarities – from the digital information ticker at the base of the screen to the familiar tone of a successful takedown. As such, Wreckreation often seems more concerned with recreating entire segments of Burnout Paradise’s identity than establishing its own unique one. I’m conscious it’s trying to do this with a fraction of the budget and a sliver of the staff of Criterion’s classic, and that’s admirable in its own way, but comparisons are unavoidable when the parallels are this blatant.
Crashing Out
From the opening race it was evident things were awry, from the framerate stutters when I hooked into a drift to the actual sliding itself – which feels a little more cumbersome than I typically like. Arcade racers live and die on their handling, and Wreckreation’s driving dynamics aren’t the best by any stretch. Its brake-to-drift brand of handling is straightforward enough, but it’s not the type of drifting that lets you effectively alter your angle throughout a powerslide. It’s almost as if the throttle has no real impact on your drift angle once you’re sideways. I became accustomed to the handling, but I certainly can’t say I ever warmed to it. I especially dislike its idiosyncrasies, like the fact that cars will screech to a quick halt when braking in a straight line, but stomp on the brakes mid-drift and your car will simply continue to hurtle onwards – even if you’re completely off the accelerator. There are also occasional moments of severe understeer, but I can’t figure out what’s triggering it. It may well be a combination of road surface and car type, but there were times when I just craved more responsiveness and needed my cars to snap back into a drift, and they wouldn’t. There’s definitely a lag to the steering that blunts that zippy, arcade feel.
After a brief race across Wreckreation’s elevated stunt tracks, the next event was a stunt challenge, where I was required to accumulate a certain amount of points within a very basic arena of jumps and loops. Unfortunately, while my car could easily make it around the skinny loops during free roam, the moment I tried to take them on during the stunt challenge my car was instantly wrecked for no apparent reason. This wasn’t a one-off thing; it was consistently repeatable and happened every time I tried to drive the loops during the challenge. That’s a bad bug to hit five minutes in.
Pivoting my approach, I stuck to the jumps in order to build up the points I needed to progress. It wasn’t particularly challenging – and the simplistic approach to auto-leveling cars in the air means the stunting is all rather superficial and shallow compared to something like Wreckfest or Hot Wheels Unleashed – but nonetheless I’d earnt more than six times the necessary score when the time limit expired. At this point I… failed the challenge. I had, in fact, scored zero points – because points don’t automatically bank at the end of the session if you’re still accumulating them in a combo. They just vanish.
This sort of thing leaves a terrible first impression, and nothing I subsequently encountered was strong enough to affect a course correction.
Wreck Yourself Before You Check Yourself
After the stunt-centric opening minutes, Wreckreation quickly settles down into its largely Burnout-inspired groove. The bulk of what’s on offer here are standard races (where the goal is to finish first), ‘Takedown’ races (where the goal is to wreck a set number of vehicles), plus the occasional time trial and ‘Shutdown’ event (where you must perform a takedown on a special, marked car while exploring the open world, in order to add it to your garage – sound familiar?). You can progress through all this content however you see fit, hitting events in any order as you uncover new ones around the huge map. Unfortunately, this flexibility doesn’t disguise how familiar every race rapidly becomes.
The size of Wreckreation’s massive map is almost certainly a major culprit in this. At a reported 450 square kilometres, it’s an environment larger than a lot of contemporary open-world racing games. It makes for a great bullet point, but the reality is that this huge size brings with it major caveats. Its primary problem is that it’s extremely generic. It’s a large, square island, with no towns or cities. It’s just ribbons of tarmac and dirt draped over vanilla countryside, where one side of the map feels no different than the other. There are no obstacle-filled alleys or bustling urban centres; it’s just a big green slab with a lot of trees and rocks. I haven’t encountered any memorable races, because there are no memorable areas. There’s very little to distinguish one race from another, so ticking them off became tedious pretty quickly. There’s also a bug I encountered semi-regularly when selecting “restart race” from the pause menu that removed most of the HUD and made it impossible to open the map. The only fix was to restart the game, which was equally tiresome.
Races occur against just five other opponents, which is low by modern standards, and rely on some pretty egregious catch-up AI to stay tense – but they’re better than the Takedown races and Shutdowns. Takedown races began as a major frustration, with awful AI spawns that placed fresh takedown victims too far ahead. Unlike Burnout’s Road Rage events, which effectively inject opposition around you at all times to smash and bash, Wreckreation messed up massively by making other cars a total chore to catch within the slim time limits. Hell, sometimes they were impossible to catch because they spawned on an adjacent road you couldn’t reach thanks to the guardrails.
A patch released this week addressed this, and now opponents quickly streak into the picture from behind – just as they do in Burnout (although they still occasionally spawn on nearby roads you can’t get to). But I have to wonder how it was released in its previous state at all? How thoroughly was this game tested? At any rate, I’ve always maintained that the Burnout series fumbled when it added time limits for Road Rage events in Burnout Revenge. Burnout 3: Takedown was better without them, with the limiting factor simply being how much damage your car could take. I wish Wreckreation had cribbed from the latter in this instance.
Wreckreation also introduces a new spin on its off-brand Road Rage mode, which adds cars you’re not supposed to take down, lest you receive a time penalty. I don’t find this is a fun twist, and I actively dislike competing in these. The penalty cars don’t just chop precious seconds off your time limit – they don’t even count as takedowns if you shunt one off the road accidentally. The worst penalty takedown events have two marked penalty cars you can’t crash into, meaning every batch of opponents will only have two cars to take down. It makes chasing some of the high takedown totals extremely frustrating, and doubly so when it’s being stingy with attributing them to you in the first place. I lost track of the times multiple AI cars crashed out during a slo-mo takedown clip, but I was only rewarded for one of them.
Chasing the unfairly overpowered AI during Shutdown attempts is also extremely frustrating. That is, being barely able to catch a pickup that was supernaturally staying out of my grasp by perfectly matching my top speed is a cheap trick. I know speed stats are a bit of a meaningless metric in arcade racers with rubberband AI, but discovering this truck was actually doing at least 40km/h more than what it’s literally listed as being capable of was pretty annoying after chasing it across the map for 10 minutes.
Temu Trackmania
As close as Wreckreation sticks to its Burnout family roots, it admittedly does bring a whole new pillar of play to the party in the form of its customisation and creation tools, dubbed Live Mix. This gives us the ability to do everything from renaming vehicles, to changing the weather and traffic density, to even plonking down massive track pieces to create huge, skybound stunt courses.
The track creation suite should speak to me. 1990’s Stunts from Distinctive Software, with its pioneering track building tools, is one of the most formative racing games I’ve ever played and I’ve adored this sort of thing ever since. However, Wreckreation’s track builder has completely failed to inspire me.
There are some elements here that I find quite neat. I admire how most of the track modules automatically generate the necessary support structures beneath them to secure them to the ground, regardless of their elevation. It gives the tracks a feeling of physical presence, like the skyscraper-sized feats of engineering something like this would be. There are some clever considerations baked in here too, like how the scaffolding will handily delete itself if you place new track pieces beneath established ones. However, after clipping together a whole bunch of track segments (and one complete game crash as I tried to add the last piece), the net result is that they’re nowhere near as thrilling to drive on as they look. It just feels significantly out of date compared to the incredible depth and fine tuning available via the track builder in, say, the Hot Wheels Unleashed series.
Live Mix ultimately proved handy on occasion for dropping down a jump or platform in the right place to reach a smashable billboard, although I’ve since wound back on that. Tracking down and crashing through the many collectables quickly became rather dull thanks to the fact the world just isn’t very interesting to explore. This is a non-insignificant hurdle considering a lot of these collectables are additional pieces and modules for the stunt tracks. It’s hard to argue the juice is worth the squeeze here. I’d say Wreckreation’s residents would be happy to see fewer obstacles strewn all over the roads, but they simply clip straight through them in a shower of sparks, anyway – like the props are invisible.
