Wreckreation

Wreckreation feels like a breath of fresh air, or rather, exhaust in a world of overly serious racers, giving player agency and fun the top priority with its robust set of tools and activities that let you tailor how you play the game.

Three Fields Entertainment delivers a creative open-world racer with satisfying crashes, intuitive controls, and a fun building system that channels Burnout’s spirit, but its vast empty map and slow progression dilute the tension and excitement that once defined the series.

While Wreckreation still needs work to get the remaining kinks out, there's still a hugely entertaining racer once you get used to the fact that there's no reasonable way to expect Burnout Paradise-levels of polish. It's the kind of game you can spend half a day listing its flaws and the other half having a great time playing, bashing opponents into scrap metal while seeing what kind of trouble you can find or create. Wreckreation shoots for the stars and doesn't quite make it, but it's hard to complain when drifting a mountain road's switchback at two hundred miles per hour or building a series of ramps up a mountain just because you can. It's a lovely peaceful world in the countryside of Wreckreation, but with a little bit of creative mayhem, that's a problem it won't have for long.

Wreckreation is a flawed but charming arcade racer that successfully resurrects Burnout's spirit. The innovative LiveMix editor offers creative freedom rarely seen in racing games, while solid destruction physics and exhilarating speed deliver memorable moments. However, a lifeless open world, unfair AI difficulty balancing, and numerous technical bugs prevent it from reaching greatness. For players hungry for arcade racing thrills and willing to overlook its rough edges, it's a worthwhile investment. The small ten-person team deserves credit for coming this close to recapturing the magic of 2008.

Wreckreation is a more than decent open-world arcade racing game. The driving system works well, as does the editor that lets players create custom events and tracks. Unfortunately, the game feels somewhat bland in terms of visuals and, beyond the editor, does very little to set itself apart from its competitors.

Wreckreation wears its influence in its presentation, mechanics, and throughout many other aspects of the gameplay. It retains some of the bad aspects, sticks a bit too close to some of the good, and is missing maybe a little of both, all at the same time. Ultimately, the act of driving and crashing feels pretty good, but the awkward fast-travel and menus, which feel close to carbon copies, are in dire need of modernization. While the large map has enough variety for a bunch of open, mountainous spaces, the lack of a dense city feels like a step backwards in just about every way, and gives the entire world a more empty feeling. There are plenty of tools at each player's disposal to create tracks and events, but relying on a social experience focused directly on friends means that larger scale multiplayer is hamstrung before it has a chance. If Wreckreation has the opportunity to grow, the foundation is solid, but if it can't or won't, it risks feeling like a knock-off of its primary predecessor to some, and simply an awkward experience to others.

Ultimately, it feels like Wreckreation tries to be too many things at once. An open-world setting allows for a lot of room for players to create events using the Live Mix tools, but driving between events gets dull quickly. As a conventional racing game, the rubber-banding AI makes me lose interest quickly, and the game doesn't emphasize the Live Mix content as strongly as it arguably should. It's a fun enough game, and it's smaller in scope since it was made by a smaller team. It lacks a defining feature of its own that it really focuses on, and it ends up making the game feel more like an imitation of other games.

Wreckreation captures flashes of Burnout’s celebrated, high-speed chaos, but too often crumbles under the weight of its own ambition. Its playground of racing and destruction can be stimulating in short bursts. But underneath the hood, technical hiccups, uneven design, and the lack of crash junctions restrain any high-octane potential.

As much as we appreciate the idea of ​​putting ourselves, for once, not in the shoes of a budding driver needing to prove his worth, but in the cloud of a "Deus ex Machina" who can literally call the shots, build courses, drive, race, and destroy everything, without having to worry about driving techniques, gear changes, road conditions, and so on, Wreckreation takes arcade "simplification" to extremes. The result is not, as the developers likely hoped, a "eat and run" title, where you can enjoy extreme speeds and environmental (and car) destruction freely and without consequences. Crucial details and spectacularity are missing, car customization is extremely limited, and the absence of a certain feeling is felt. Whether the most dedicated players will be able to create courses and flying circuits so insane as to be worth the (albeit modest) price of entry to this enormous, yet empty, playground, we cannot know at this point. For now, if you're willing to bet on Wreckreation, it's certainly not a bad game, but it's not as exciting as it seemed before we started it up for the first time.

So, what would a game combining Forza Horizon, Burnout and Trackmania look like? Exactly like Wreckreation. It's not revolutionary, but it's a well-executed and fun mix with a strong sense of speed.

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.

If nothing else, I guess, it’s quite possible that Wreckreation becomes a meme game with random explosions like that. But you’d have hoped that after ten years trying to recapture the brilliance of Burnout, Three Fields Entertainment would be further along than this. Wreckreation is better than anything they’ve done so far, true, but it’s still very far from the kind of racing game that anyone will want to play.

There's little variety in the 400-square-kilometre American midwestern locale where everything takes place, and roads rarely feel optimised to test your handling skills. [Issue#418, p.112]

Overflowing with ambition but ultimately plain and with no style to call its own, Wreckreation feels like a supermarket brand homage to a series of better arcade racers, built with the user-generated content tools of another game. While slamming into my opponents rewarded me with snapshots of an arcade racer that’s fast and engaging for seconds at a time, any buzz I gleaned was quickly snuffed out by unpredictable handling, a dull open-world map, samey event structure, and an assortment of annoying design choices and bugs.