Brendan Caldwell
“That’s okay,” I say as my car somersaults into the hot dirt and loses a wheel. “I still have three tyres left.” My right fender hits another driver and dissolves into splinters, like rusty confetti at a wedding for metallurgists. “No big deal,” I remark, and keep driving. I veer into a shipping container and the entire engine bay flattens against me like an empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon squashed in the hands of a frat boy. “A minor setback,” I say, and reverse back onto the track, before trundling on in glorious last place. Wreckfest 2 is further evidence of a truth long upheld by non-serious racing games: a car is funnier the more fucked up it gets.
The slippery sequel is out in early access and – to spin up the car metaphors I shall be using throughout this article – it is a reliably powerful engine that runs hot and loud and is quickly exhausted. That doesn’t mean my time with this heavy-hitting racing game has been bad. I’ve enjoyed almost every minute of jostling for position and ramming opponents into trees. But it is a bare experience so far, and even the developers understand that.
There are only four cars, for example. Players of the first Wreckfest will recognise the nippy “Rocket” and muscular “Roadslayer”, respectively reminiscent of a Ford Mustang and Pontiac Trans Am. But there’s also an aerodynamic and modern drift machine, and an adorably boxy European banger that looks inspired by the 1980s Volkswagon Golf.
They’re offered to players as-is, with none of the first game’s customising, armour-welding, or differential tuning yet included in the menus. You can paint your vehicle a new colour, with some limited options, but aside from that, you pick a car, and you drive the car. They all handle very finely, with a thrumming sense of weight and power. Until, of course, you are smashed into a roadside barrier at 50 miles per hour. At which point, you need to pay more attention to your wonky handbrake and misaligned wheels.
The point of Wreckfest is to race with a health bar. These demolition derby chasedowns are as much about keeping yourself alive as they are about crossing the finish line first. As in the first game, little messages pop up in the corner of your screen with every shunt and slam. But they now seem to be even more comically specific. “Radiator leaking,” it says, as if I care a jot. “Engine damaged,” it warns, to my complete dismissal. “Head gasket blown,” it says, a sense of panic finally sinking in.
“Suspension damaged”.
Um…
“Gearbox damaged”.
Well, maybe it’s —
“Wheel detached.”
Oh god.
Every failed mechanism in your hot rod affects your driving in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I have laughed and cursed as my car starts to track uncontrolably to the left and right because any number of components in my suspension have become utterly banjaxed. And yet it takes a surprising amount of punishment for your car to become totally undriveable (although this can also depend on the difficulty and damage settings you race with).
But yes, only four cars to gleefully destroy, and only four tracks to do so upon. There’s an asphalt circuit that doubles up as a free-for-all wrecking bowl, and a cracking scrapyard full of tire heaps and rustbuckets piled high. There’s also the Savolax sandpit, an industrial mining ground with sneaky bumps and harsh bends that transition from gravelly dirt to hard asphalt. The first game made players think about how their car will travel on loose and solid surfaces, letting you tune your vehicle before each race to better match the track. It looks like the sequel is gearing up to do the same, although those choosey features aren’t yet implemented.
These tracks do have some variants, but they’re all quickly explored. They’re best enjoyed with multiplayer opponents via a very rudimentary server browser. As much as CPU foes seem eager to spin you out, it’s your fellow humans who turn the races into mischievous melees and petty pile-ups. It is forever satisfying to catch up to the tearaway who shunted you into a telegraph pole and fishtail them on a critical bend. It remains a game I would play to vent some actual road rage.
Then there is the fourth track, the “Testing Grounds”, which is basically a developer whitebox for messing about with cars. Oh boy. This is a playground of loop-the-loops, ramps, and obstacles. There are spring launchers that fire you fifty feet into the air, wacky climbs that ascend 200 metres into a piercing blue sky. There are stacks of oil drums to ram through. There is a car crusher that will turn you into a cute cuboid of squashed metal still somehow capable of driving. A rolling pin machine that will flatten you like a pancake so that only your driver’s knees stick up in cartoonish folly. Visit the car-sized basketball nets, have a go in the “car cannon”, orbit the thunder dome, toss your vehicle into a giant pachinko machine and win nothing but shattered glass and laughs. It is a delightful place.
Still. As much as I adore this playful realm of wrecking, it doesn’t fully mask that the game as a whole is, well, very light on actual stuff. There’s not a lot to get through, and a lack of any vehicular ladder to climb or customisable bits and bobs means that you just have to get your dopamine from the purity of racing for racing’s sake. It’s also hard to see from this early stage – apart from the visual fidelity and new damage physics – if the sequel is going to do anything truly different.
“The game will be in a far from perfect state,” said a PR representative in an email to RPS, “a lot of content will be missing, and features need to be added down the road of Early Access. Our experience with Wreckfest 1 back in the days led us to this decision – while we do have a lot of ideas and a lot of content already planned, we really want to include our community.”
I feel about Wreckfest 2 how I recently felt about Space Engineers 2. In that it has an impressively strong frame and wonderful motor, yet really requires some seats and mirror dice and maybe a leather wheel guard to make it truly capable of holding your attention. I like it, and yet I cannot honestly recommend that you buy it. Early access games come in all shapes and sizes. But at the end of the road, one of my jobs (aside from going full throttle on automobile analogies) is to guard your wallet somewhat. Though I like the feeling of Wreckfest 2 in my mitts, I wouldn’t shell out 25 quid for the limited hours of bouncy, crashy fun it can grant you. Some view money splashed on something like this as a buy-in cost, an investment, the ultimate act of pre-ordering. I’ve never been one of those people – when I fork over my lunch money I do want something approaching a game. Wreckfest 2, even with its horsepower, heft, and hellish good looks, doesn’t currently offer me more than an evening of messing about.
Hopefully, that will change over the next couple of years. The first proper update is two months away, we’re told, and will bring two new cars and two new tracks. As for the roadmap after that? I don’t know. I lost the glovebox in a slam three laps ago and everything in it has been turned to brilliant dust.
This review is based on a review build provided by the publisher.
ranzware
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