Wreckreation Review: Burnout Love-Letter Needs Proofreading

We’ve been crying out for years for the return of Burnout. With its original developer, Criterion Games, now mothballed into EA as a support studio for Battlefield, our hopes of that coming to fruition have pretty much been reduced to nothing.

So, when its original creators introduced Wreckreation to the world, we had a glimmer of hope. Nothing but Burnout 3 vibes mixed with the open-world goodness of Paradise, and a creative track creator to boot – surely, it’s onto a winner? Well, we’ve had our hands on the game, and we’re feeling pretty mixed about it.

Does it feel like a Burnout game?

This question, we suspect, is going to be on the minds of many fans of Burnout's past. With former Criterion devs Fiona Sperry, Alex Ward and Paul Ross at the helm of a 10-person team producing the game, there’s certainly DNA to inject in there.

A lot of that does come out in Wreckreation pretty much immediately from the get-go. It handles very akin to early games in that series, with an arcadey-understeery tone to it that can be quickly switched to full-blown drifting with some aggressive braking input.

Then you’ll notice the boost bar, close enough to that from Burnout 3: Takedown, and much of the same terminology. Smashing an opponent to pieces is a Takedown. You’ll be able to do Aftertouch when you wreck yourself, flat spins make a return… You get the picture.

That carries through to the core of the gameplay, particularly if you’re familiar with Paradise. You’re immediately thrust into the world after a tutorial race with little instruction other than to do what you like.

Events are limited to races, road rages (Takedown enough opponents to hit a target, as seen in Burnout's past) and stunt runs. Smashable billboards are present, albeit with a twist that some require particular stunts to claim them – think 180-degree spins, barrel rolls, opening your doors mid-air as an air-brake.

You’re also able to compete with your friends' list to set various records like the time taken to drive up a road, drifting, driving in oncoming traffic, etc. And that pretty much covers the core of the game.

What’s missing, then?

General chaos. For us, what made Burnout so good wasn’t just the core gameplay, but the chaos that erupted around you. The linear closed-course games would switch between narrow country roads and dense cities with lots of traffic, have things to jump across and generally a lot going on.

Wreckreation doesn’t have any of that, at least not right away. The world is vast and empty. There are no major built-up areas, the roads are pretty much exclusively wide highways save for the odd attempt at making a race circuit, and it leads to races being “Hold the throttle down and occasionally turn at a junction”. It gets dull, fast.

It’s not like road rage events do much to ramp that up, either. For a start, you have at most five other cars to smash into at one time, and ‘smash’ doesn’t really apply. The collision physics are inconsistent and frustrating – you can hit a car 10 times over and not move it, then you’ll be hit back once and wrecked massively. That leaves you dramatically behind the pack, and unable to catch up, as you’re simply barrelling down a straight, flat, wide road.

Does the track creator do anything to save it?

In theory, yes. ‘Live Mix’, as it’s called in-game, allows you to bring the world more to life with various props, with its key element being ‘Sky Tracks’. These feel very akin to GTA stunt races with lots of elevation and wild obstacles available. Throw a giant hammer in the middle of the track, a loop-the-loop, or a poo emoji if you really want.

You can use Live Mix online too, which we suspect will be great if you’ve got some particularly creative friends to play with. We hadn’t had much chance to test that out for ourselves, given the limited pre-release playerbase.

Though that did highlight the system’s biggest problems – it requires far too much patience and thought, which we suspect most players won’t have out of sheer frustration.

It’s not an intuitive tool to use, particularly on a controller. Pieces do snap together, but placing them in the first place is fiddly, and nonsensical camera controls make it hard to place anything more intricate.

There’s no real form of tutorial either, and trying to find the pieces you want relies A) on finding them in the empty open world in the first place and B) endlessly going back and forth through the d-pad mini menu to find them. If the first point does bore you, the second one will.

The result is you mess around with it for an hour, realise you can’t make a cohesive track and give up. A few will master the format, but without any way of sharing those creations beyond joining someone’s session for a little bit, it doesn’t feel enough to carry the game. Some system to download other creations would’ve done a lot to help that, but it doesn’t exist at this stage. You can download other player-created events, at least.

Worth picking up, or should I give this one a miss?

That’ll depend on how creative you or your friends are. If you’ve got a bit of patience and the creativity to fill a blank canvas with some mad race tracks, Wreckreation has something to offer.

For a pick-up-and-go arcade racer, you’ll find so many better options out there. Including just replaying old Burnout games. Right now, it’s one we’d probably give a miss.