Wreckreation review: it’s like having Burnout back, with all the cheat codes on

You remember the Burnout games, of course. At one point in history, which coincided with emo fringes and Von Dutch hats and the widespread adoption of drinking Jagermeister as a personality trait, Burnout’s trademark blend of zippy arcade racing, bombastic crashes and frequent stunt diversions turned our heads away from Need For Speed and showed us how fun driving could be on our PlayStation 2s when it threw away the physics textbook and took itself less seriously.

It’s exactly that same philosophy which has birthed Wreckreation, developed – would you believe – by a team including key figures behind those aforementioned Burnout games. The big idea here is a kind of rebirth for the modern age; for a generation unfamiliar with Von Dutch hats. The same handling style, with its most passing of nods to Isaac Newton’s laws, but this time set in an open world where you can mess about with the road layouts in real-time using a powerful creation tool. You can even build new tracks up in the sky.

This is, fundamentally, a good idea. It’s good timing, too - this year we’ve been treated to a great many driving games of uncommonly good quality, but they all share a straight-faced approach to racing. Not Wreckreation. Here’s a game that can’t go more than half a kilometre without placing a tantalising ramp or a billboard to smash through, and that treats high speed collisions as core gameplay, not game over scenarios.

It’s here that the tone changes, sadly. Because as great a concept as this is, and as welcome a sight as it may be, the specifics of how Wreckcreation goes about its mission to paint a maniacal grin on your face are flawed.

Firstly there’s the open world map itself, which is as vast as it is featureless and forgettable. It’s set in the kind of ‘America’ that straight-to-DVD movies take place in, bereft of landmarks or culture. One square kilometer looks suspiciously like any of the others, so it’s not really a big selling point that there are 400 of them.

And then there’s the feeling of being behind the wheel of its roster of endearingly cheeky fictional vehicles. While the cars themselves dance bravely across the tightrope of IP law, letting you know exactly which real-world models they’re imitating, the sensation of their handling feels… well, probably a bit too faithful to the decades-old Burnout titles.

Times have changed since 2008. Tastes have refined. So to be back behind the wheel of something that feels like it’s adhering to those old tenets is actually quite a flimsy, unsatisfying experience. Bashing into rival AI racers should be liquid catharsis, but Wreckreation fails to really sell the brutality of impact or the transfer of weight.

Luckily it has an ace up its sleeve in the form of a powerful track creator tool. In any event, you can pause the race and start dropping objects onto the route ahead. You might choose to add some verticality with a few ramps and hoops to jump through, giving you opportunities to fill your boost meter and thus go faster down the next straight. Or you might add some obstacles just for the hell of it, like pneumatic hammers to dance through at 150mph.

Building above the existing roads, you’ve got even more to play with. Entire tracks can be built up in that elevated real estate, and it’s here where Wreckreation shows just how powerful the creation tool is. Our imagination, on the other hand, turns out to be some way short of Hermann Tilke-grade.

Unlocking more of these objects for the creator is a big incentive to work your way through the events, and there’s a real kick to having something like the classic Tony Hawk skate park creator in a racing game setting.

Does it magically make the handling better? Alas, no. Does it make the world map less boring? Well, marginally. You’d have to put considerable hours in to fill all that space with imaginative, thrilling routes. But it’s a valiant effort nonetheless, and you’d have to be hard-hearted to condemn Wreckreation for simply being over-ambitious in its desire to achieve big things with a small team.