Wreckreation PS5 Review. Three Fields Entertainment has put together an open-world sandbox where you drive around, exploring and crashing your way across the island. This dev team consists of ten veteran developers who have worked on many different racing games in their careers. As such, Wreckreaction almost feels like the culmination of all of that experience put into one product.
Wreckreation Review (PS5) – An Ambitious Concept for A Small Team
Very Familiar Territory
For your entire experience in Wreckreation, a narrator dictates how things work and what you need to do in order to succeed. In the opening hours of the game, this is great simply because it allows you to keep your eyes on the road and in the game instead of throwing a ton of tutorial menus at you along the way. However, these tutorial statements continue throughout the life of the game. Unlike a little tutorial blurb in the corner of the screen, it’s harder to ignore someone talking to you.
If you have ever played Burnout Paradise or Need for Speed: Most Wanted, then practically every major element of Wreckreation will feel familiar to you. You drive around a map, looking for races or challenges to complete. Then, you also seek out and destroy red fences and billboards. You even drive through gas stations to repair your car as well as park in parking lots to switch vehicles. Finally, you use the D-Pad to on-the-fly change your radio, find races, change weather conditions and time of day, radio, and car color. These elements are all pulled directly from Most Wanted.
One big difference from Most Wanted is being able to create your own content through Live-Mix. This covers creating races for yourself and others to run, but also adding in obstacles and ramps and challenges onto your game session. So, you can add a series of ramps or looping roads in your game session, for instance, and everyone who joins can use them.
Customizable Experience
Throughout the map, you find spinning gears to collect. These are additional pieces of content that you can apply to your maps and races. This contributes to the need to explore the map, granting you more options to customize the look and feel of your racing space.
When utilized outside of organized races, customizing the map starts to feel more like a novelty than an engaging function. The biggest benefit to using them is making it easier for you to collect even more of these utilities. Early on, you have nothing and need to rely on what the game gives you. After that, you can just open up your D-Pad menu, apply some stunt ramps or loops, and then use what you applied to the map to collect even more of them.
These collectibles contribute strictly to the creative side of Wreckreation. If you like the idea of not only creating fantastical races for people but also playing what other people come up with, then there is a lot of lasting potential in this game for you. As long as the player base sticks with it, there will be a lot of fun things to do in this game. It’s also important to mention that you can play everything completely on your own. You do not need to play online and risk the possibility of people placing troll obstacles everywhere in your game world.
Crash, Crash, Crash
The influences from the Burnout franchise come in during specific matches that focus on takedowns. In these, you still race the clock, but your objective is to make a certain number of other racers crash before time runs out. Each crash you create also comes with a little cinematic of the collision, showing you front-and-center the results of your actions. Very satisfying indeed.
Apart from the general spectacle of it all, this ends up creating a very interesting benefit. During the duration of a cinematic, it is impossible for you to take damage or fail during that time. So, if you are careening toward a barricade when the cinematic starts, you automatically end up on a safe place on the road while also going perfectly straight on said road. This even holds true when facing a 90-degree turn and causing a crash. You take control again past said 90-degree turn and continue straight on the road. It’s weird, but it compensates well for the cinematic.
While on the topic of crashing, collisions are weird and kind of relative to what you hit. When hitting other races, you can hit them at practically any speed and from any angle and not crash. However, if you hit a car on the road or a tree, then you instantly crash, even if your speedometer only reads 30 mph. With each crash, you get a cinematic similar to the ones that appear when you take out another racer. This takes at least five seconds to get through.
Watch Out For That Tree
When you regain control, you are stopped on the road, and all the other racers are far ahead of you. This results in you spending the rest of the racing time trying but unable to catch up, ultimately forcing you to restart whenever you crash. Yes, you can try and catch up, but by that point you’re so far behind that you catch up with your opponents when the timer runs out. This makes for cumbersome pacing in a game that’s presented more like an arcade game than a simulation.
Another thing that happened occasionally is that ramps would see me hit a bump before actually hitting the ramp. This results in a couple different outcomes, like either slowing down so badly that I barely get airborne on the jump or even getting a bump over the ramp itself. Then, I need to turn around, pick up speed again, and try the jump one more time, hoping that the ramp behaves properly.
Burnout-adjacent
Wreckreation takes a very specific direction. For what it’s worth, it’s still a fun time. Regardless, it still feels more like a reimagining of Need for Speed Most Wanted with elements of Burnout and Hot Wheels rather than a full-on open-world Burnout game. The game includes its fair share of issues, such as pacing, rules around crashing, and general oddities when interacting with objects in the world. Having said that, there’s definitely fun to be had here; it perhaps just needs some extra attention that a ten-person development team may not have the resources to apply. $40 is a bit of a hard sell for what’s on display here unless you are craving another Burnout Paradise or Need for Speed: Most Wanted clone.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.