Wreckfest 2 is ramming through the barricades of early access next month and I will be waiting there patiently to get run over

Hoo-eee! The sequel to the rootinest-tootinest gassiest-guzzlingiest racecar rasslin’ game is launching into early access in March this year. Wreckfest 2 is the follow-up to smashing racer Wreckfest, which came out in 2018 but which I only discovered last year while listing our best racing games. My friends, it got on the list. Developers Bugbear say they have “overhauled its physics engine to deliver the most intense crashes, deeper component damage, and absolute vehicular mayhem.” We can see a little bit of that in a new trailer below, which also gives us an exact early access release date.

March 20th? That’s soon! Immature drivers? That’s me! At launch the game will have its usual multiplayer racing (my favourite), single player racetrack ruckusing, demolition derby modes, and car customisation. We aren’t told how limited the pool of cars will be at launch but the devs say “new cars and other vehicles will be added as the game evolves”.

They plan to add other cogs and bonnets as the early access trundles along, including: tournaments, a career mode, a skill-based matchmaking system, more car customising options, challenges (funny smash-ups like the first game’s chaotic “lawnmower fights”) and server queues. This last one being a basic online comfort the original sadly lacked. The one feature I would like to see is the ability to customise and tweak your car while spectating the final laps of a race after you’ve been knocked out. In the first Wreckfest, you have to quit the race to do that. A boy can dream!

I’m jazzed, even if it does look like the early access will be lighter on fun stuff than the previous game currently is. As I said in my Space Engineers 2 review, early access sequels can be a hard sell when the previous game already does so much. Recently the developers had to remove some of the game’s features from its Steam page, because those features wouldn’t actually be present in the early access version, and will come later. “Long awaited features like mod support or additional languages will come throughout the Early Access progress,” they said, “or with the 1.0 full launch at the latest.”

I’ll slam the brakes on my judgements until I play, but know that I can forgive a lot if the cars feel good to swivel and smoosh satisfyingly into my enemies. I am the literal definition of their immature driver. After decades of casually enjoying the motoring machines of Burnout Paradise or the upside-down antics of Grip, I finally learned how to drive in real life only last year. It is both less fun and far scarier than video games have led me to believe. But Wreckfest weirdly helped with that.