Wreckreation 2 is hardly the first attempt by ex-Burnout developers at reviving the spirit of one of the greatest – and definitely my favorite – arcade racing game series of all time. There was Danger Zone, and then its sequel. Next came Dangerous Driving, which was supposed to get a sequel that never came out and instead morphed into Wreckreation, which our racing game guru Luke Reilly did not take kindly to in his review. Is the fourth time the charm?
Based on the couple of hours I’ve put into the very early preview build of Wreckreation 2, I can, for now, at least optimistically say, “Maybe.” I don’t say that to hype this game up too much or judge it too harshly. Rather, studio head Fiona Sperry (herself a veteran of the Burnout days at Criterion Games) wanted to emphasize that this is an extremely early version of what they’re building.
With that in mind, I loaded up the demo and its dozen-plus events and a couple of upgradeable cars, expecting a rough, buggy mess that might have a kernel of greatness at its core that the team at When Tides Turn just needed time to build and polish into a pearl. And to my pleasant surprise, I instead found the section of the fictional Heartbreak City on offer to be pretty solid on my 5080-powered PC – completely devoid of the framerate hitches and bugs cited by Luke in his review of the first Wreckreation. Does that guarantee that the final version of Wreckreation 2 will also be polished and free of bugs? Certainly not; again, by Sperry’s own admission, this sequel is still early in development. But it’s making a really strong first impression on me.
Why? Just as with the first Wreckreation, which I confess I somehow completely missed when it came out, Wreckreation 2 is quite proudly trying to build what is essentially Burnout Paradise 2 in all but name. The shiny visual style is very similar, as is the pop-punk soundtrack. Heck, the flaming turbo meter in the bottom left corner is identical to the one found in Burnout. Even Heartbreak City itself feels reminiscent of Paradise City.
But of course, the play’s the thing, as Shakespeare once wrote, and the team at When Tides Turn recommended I leave the difficulty at its default setting: Hard. I did, and they were right: as I flew around the tracks staked out within the downtown area of the city at blindingly high speeds, I was met by equally aggressive AI drivers who could dish out shunts and takedowns admirably well. Meanwhile, the arcade-y handling of the cars felt instantly familiar and pretty dang good; the handbrake (on the Xbox gamepad’s X button) can get your car around a 90-degree turn pretty quickly if you feather it just right, while stomping on it too hard will slow your car down to a crawl. And slamming into other cars feels weighty, as it should. And if you do get wrecked, you’ve got aftertouch, just like in Burnout, meaning you can nudge your slow-motion-crashing car in any direction to try and take out any approaching opponents along with you.
The events in my preview – aside from free-driving around the city to smash barriers and gates marked on the mini-map – were instantly recognizable to any Burnout fan. My favorite of what was on offer were the two Road Rage events. These are ripped straight from Burnout, so you already know what you’ll be doing: takedowns of rival cars. Each takedown adds time to the clock and gets you closer to the next milestone. For instance, you might need three takedowns for a bronze medal, 7 for a silver, and a dozen for gold.
Everything else in my early build were races of some variety, be they lap-based circuits, single-lap sprints, or one-on-one matchups that would win you a new or upgraded car. Both cars available in the demo – the supercar-styled Dearborn & Schaeffer Nightranger and the ‘57 Chevy-like Huntsville Nebraska – have superior versions you can unlock for your garage. And they do indeed handle quite differently, with the Nightranger being quicker, faster, and lighter (and thus weaker against attempted takedowns) and the Nebraska being the opposite: tankier.
Admittedly, there wasn’t much to do just driving around the open world after I’d completed every event in this early version, but that’s just it: it’s early. And so I’m trying to give When Tides Turn the benefit of the doubt while also keeping my own excitement in check. There’s a long way to go here, by the team’s own admission, but what I’ve already spent a couple hours with is really fun. If Wreckreation 2 can clean up the mistakes the first one made while focusing on being a modern-day Burnout Paradise – with the reasonable caveat that this attempt probably won’t have nearly the manpower or budget behind it that Burnout did in its heyday at EA – then we might have the closest thing we’ve seen yet to a proper Burnout Paradise sequel. That’s the ceiling here. The floor is, unfortunately, another flawed and underbaked attempt like the last one was. But I’m genuinely optimistic that we’re heading for the better outcome here – particularly after the early preview version already addresses some of the criticisms of the first Wreckreation.
Wreckreation 2 will be developed “out in the open” for fans to see, so seek out When Tides Turn’s Discord to follow along. A PC release will happen first, with console versions planned to follow. Fingers crossed that the fourth time is the charm to finally, fully recapture the magic of Burnout.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. His favorite Burnout is Burnout 3: Takedown, because Burnout Revenge’s traffic-checking just didn’t work as well in his opinion. Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
