Wreckreation Review - A Licence Return To Paradise
The death of the arcade racer has left quite a void in my heart, and I’m sure I’m not alone, considering its past popularity. So Wreckreation arrives to not only bring those vibes back, but also adds a bit of a twist with the ability to create your own courses for you and your friends to wreak havoc in.
Before crafting the race of your dreams, you’ll have to spend a bunch of time in the single player mode unlocking both parts to fuel your dream course, and game modes to challenge your friends in.
I’m genuinely impressed at the size of the open world Wreckreation takes place in, and having full freedom to explore it from the outset means you won’t be waiting long for something to do. Whether it’s smashing gates or billboards, or launching into one of the many events dotted about the place.
Though there are only a few main event types, I do love the variety on offer. There are races in both point-to-point and lap variants, which are the most straightforward ones on offer. They’re joined by Road Rage events, where you’ve got to take down a number of rivals in a certain amount of time.
A simple set of combinations – time of day, weather conditions, location and more results in some thrilling races to take part in, something that impressed me a lot. It also gives way to a dynamic sense of difficulty with everything being available as soon as you discover it, as if I stumbled onto something more challenging, I could leave and return later, hopefully with a newer car to even up the odds. Getting newer cars is done in a few ways – completing events earns points towards upgrading your license, and each new license gives you a sweet ride as a reward.
Others will spawn randomly in the world. I appreciate this challenge, as the surprise of seeing the indicator pop up on your radar whilst cruising about can be enough to shock you before you need to chase it down and ram it off the road to add it to your fleet.
If those two methods were the only way to get new cars, then I’d say the unlock process is a slow one. Thankfully, each vehicle has an upgraded variant to unlock, too, requiring you to complete a special time trial event using the base model.
Each car is part of a group – Bruisers are great for ramming rivals in Road Rage events. Race Cars are zippy, making them great for races, with Hyper Cars offering greater speed, at a cost of being trickier to wrangle. Finally, you’ve got Off-road trucks for those dirt roads and events. They all offered a good degree of coverage for what you’re dealing with, with favourites for each coming up as I discovered those that suited my particular driving style.
I found them a joy to drive without worrying about the serious side of things. Part of this is in the ridiculousness of pulling off epic jumps, performing barrel rolls and flat spins, tricks you’ll need to master when going billboard hunting, as some carry conditions that need to be met to clear them off your checklist.
So they can be thrown about with little regard and can survive a lot of punishment. Whether it’s scrapes with rival cars, or bashing through fences, gates and barriers. Plus, it doesn’t impact their performance, which brought a chuckle or two to my face based on some of my race experiences, believe you me. My only issue with the races is that the game doesn’t give you a relative idea of difficulty when looking at them on your map. I found myself on plenty of occasions running into an event that was convenient to try, but didn’t have a car capable of beating my rivals. But again, coming back once you’ve gotten a new car or two helps alleviate this, to a point.
The core of Wreckreation offers plenty to get involved with and enjoy. Whether smashing gates or billboards in one session, to finding hidden roads and locales in the next. Part of me feels the island you’re racing on might be too large, though parking lots (where you can change your current ride), can be used as fast-travel spots, which speeds things up if you’ve only got time for a quick session.
Most of Wreckreation’s longevity will come from your friends, and it’s got two main ways of supporting this. Firstly is the Wreckords feature, which tracks a bunch of statistics over each distinct road and region in the game, comparing with any friends playing. So if you’ve got the most records in a region and a friend beats you? Well, the game is on as you fight to take it back. I love it as a means for a simple and passive way to engage in some friendly competition with your friends. Especially if you can’t coordinate a regular session for racing each other.
Multiplayer is where Wreckreation’s biggest feature comes into play – the Live Mix mode. Pressing the right thumbstick activates the editor, letting you create your own obstacles and play arenas. Not only on the ground, but also specialised “Sky Tracks”, which let you construct courses that remind me of Trackmania, of all things.
Though there are only a few pre-built “Sky Tracks” in the map, finding the space for them is cumbersome. Which is a bit of a shame, as the interface for building tracks is quite friendly for a gamepad setup, with a simple menu for selecting part categories, and a button to cycle pieces.
There’s just the problem of needing to explore the world to find the parts to unlock both track pieces and game modes, as this restricts what you can do when running events or creating courses in Live Mix mode. I can’t help but feel that if you don’t happen to have someone in your group who is really into this side of things, then it’ll be hard to get the most out of it.
Wreckreation is a wonderful throwback to a certain style of arcade racer. It’s easy to pick up and get into with tight handling for all the cars, making it a blast to drive around its expansive island. It’s sadly not entirely smooth sailing, as I feel it really needs a little more polish to get it over the line.
I had a few moments where car inputs would get confused, locking myself into a constant turn or not being able to accelerate to full speed. Other times, the camera would stop tracking my car, meaning I had to fight it to keep track of what was coming up ahead.
To be honest, I’m more concerned about the readability of things. Not just with the UI, but the game itself. At least when I was playing it from the comfort of my couch, as when boosting, the camera’s relative position to your car, and its field of view, made it tough to spot upcoming traffic, which didn’t help with the frustration in some of those races. It’s something I feel was amplified when racing at night, which is where many events happened to be set.
Thankfully, when I had my PS5 outputting to my PC monitor, it wasn’t as much of an issue, but this is more of a couch game than a desk one, so it’s worth keeping in mind. If you’re patient enough to tolerate some of those issues, then you’ll find it a thrilling racer and a worthy contribution to an underserved style of racing game.
Wreckreation was reviewed on PS5 with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
