games / Reviews
Wreckreation (PC) Review
Image Credit: THQ Nordic
Loading...There is a lot to talk about when it comes to Wreckreation both from a conceptual level and then what is actually in the game. On a fundamental level I can see what the developers were really trying to do and I almost admire them for it. However, once you actually play the game and see what is in it, all of the problems start to get noticed.
Wreckreation is a game by Three Fields Entertainment, started by Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry, some of the folks who used to work at Criterion Games back in the day. They struck out on their own in 2014, forming Three Fields Entertainment, with the eventual goal of making a spiritual successor/sequel to the Burnout games. Their prior attempt, Dangerous Driving was more based on Burnout 3: Takedown. Wreckreation, by contrast, is more modeled after Burnout: Paradise, by it being an open-world racing game with an emphasis on exploration and player customization. The idea is sound but it is the fundamentals that need work.
To get it out of the way first, the absolute biggest problem with this game is the opposing driver AI, it is busted. In any race you are in, from the start line, you will be first, even without boosting. The game pretty much has you at the start, in first place, for about 14 seconds. Then the AI hammer will drop hard on you and at least three cars will zoom past you at breakneck speed, even without boosting. This doesn’t happen with one or two races, this happens with EVERY race, when there are other cars along with you. There are a few race types where you are alone, so it obviously doesn’t happen there but if there are other cars on the track, this will occur.
More to the point(s), you can never get too far behind or too far ahead in a race either. This game has some of the worst examples of rubberbanding AI I’ve ever seen in a game, if you are far behind and are trying to catch up, you can literally see the other cars stopped on the mini-map until you get close enough. I imagined the other AI drivers taking a smoke break in their cars until the warning light turned on that a quarter mile away. They put out their butts, turned their engines back on and got back to racing.
This AI behavior cripples this game, because it makes the racing seem far less fair than even prior Burnout games. There are also a lot of other factors that hamper this experience.
Along with rubberbanding AI, there is “unpredictable AI behavior”. This deals with bugs in AI programming or wonky car behavior. The included video below is what I mean, you can see the rubberbanding at 0:14, and then 0:25, after I takedown a car in front of me, the second place car glitches out, magically despawns and jumps ahead, but manages to spin me out before doing so. Often times, if you take down another car, the takedown camera will screw you because it doesn’t work correctly. I’ve gone from first place to last place, due to this nonsense.
I’ve also been spun out numerous times in this game. While it could occasionally happen in past Burnout games, you kind of had to manually do it, and even then, the game really tried to stop you. Here, it just kind of happens in spots, and is not pleasant because you feel like you don’t have control over your car.
Wreckreation also has the weakest boost system ever, both in concept and in practice. It tries to lift the boost type system from Paradise where certain cars had boost types like “Bruiser” or “Drift”, only here it doesn’t mean much. The “Racer” system lets you do Burnout chain, where if you max the boost system then use it all in one go continuously, you can do a boost chain to get a refill of your boost meter. However, boosting doesn’t make you actually seem to go very fast, at least in most cars. It also has the most pitiful boost sound ever, half the time it doesn’t even make one. I have very specific aural memories from Takedown, hitting the boost button sounded like your car launching like a rocket ship, and holding it down had a deliberate “fire burning” noise. This doesn’t have anything like that and it really suffers for it.
What also suffers a bit is the types of events you participate in. There are basically only three types of events: regular races (either point to point or circuit), Road Rage (takedown a certain number of cars in the time allotted) and basically “sprint” races, where it’s a time trial, and you are trying to pass through checkpoints as the timer runs down.
Regular races, like I said above, are completely busted. Road Rage events, are semi-busted.
There is this thing in the game called the “Sky Track”. This is basically what you’ve seen in trailers and such that make it look like a Trackmania game, with a big racing track, suspended in mid-air, with loops and such. It looks cool, the problem is, I only ever found two or three Sky Track races at all.
In a more baffling move, the game pretty much starts you out in a stunt arena. This area has a bunch of ramps and jumps you can do, which reminded me of some of the stunt arenas from San Francisco Rush 2049. There is one event you can do in the arena, basically “Score 5,000 points within the time limit”, which is brain dead easy. And…that’s it. Like, I found no other stunt areas or arenas in my time exploring the world, it’s literally just this one zone. It made me think that they built the arena out for testing purposes in a beta build then said “Eh, we can put it in the game also?” and did it, but forgot to populate it with anything else to do.
A lack of different settings or scenery also hinders the game. Everything looks like it takes place in the Pacific Northwest, amidst various forest areas and lonely highways. There’s no “big city” for you explore or even a lot of buildings to see. At most, you’ll run into a gas station at the end off a T junction, which is flanked, inexplicably, by two parking lots which have the same gameplay purpose, allowing you to change cars. There are a few interesting bespoke areas, like a dinosaur exhibit or some of the outlying areas but about 95% of this game just looks the same.
So, on the whole, the “racing” experience in this racing game is fairly busted. Is the game, then, entirely devoid of fun or value? Actually, no, just not entirely as a racing game. I actually had a lot of fun just trying to explore the game world and collecting unlockables and stuff.
Like with Paradise, there are red gates you can smash into, and also billboards for you to crash into. One set of billboards just requires you to wreck into it, while the other, more annoying type, requires you to be doing a trick while driving into it, to complete it. There are also collectibles for you to find in the game world that unlock additional parts for the “Live Mix” mode.
Live Mix is the mode that allows you to customize your specific gaming world. You can put down ramps, loops, props, walls, bridges, etc. Let’s say there is a collectible on top of a gas station roof, you can enter the Live Mix mode to plop down a ramp so you can then get up to the roof to get the item. This is actually a lot of fun, at least for me, and the game does let you alter a fair amount in the regular game world.
In the “Game DJ” mode, which is how you access the Live Mix portion, you can also change traffic density, time of day, weather conditions and customize your car. The car stuff is mainly about paint or other visual stuff but it’s nice that you can do it almost anywhere you want.
Wreckreation does have three notable improvements over Burnout Paradise, however, which I’ll list below:
1. When you boot up the game, that god-awful Guns N’ Roses “Paradise City” song doesn’t play. More importantly, because Axl Rose’s nasally wailing isn’t present, you don’t want to throw your computer or console out the window to make it stop.
2. When you gain a new license level, the races you did before don’t reset. That always bugged the hell out of me in Paradise, because it’s like “Hey, here is your reward for getting a new license rank, a reset of your game progress so you get to do it all over again!” Uh…thanks?
3. Lastly, because this is more of an actual open world, it’s not beholden to Paradise’s weird “compass city” system where races would start on one direction of the compass and the race would basically be to get to the other side of the map. It was really weird/awkward that all races in that game just ended on the same 8 compass points that correlated to the city.
