![]() ![]() On the other hand Bugbear has used rubber-banding as a crutch and this really lets the single player experience down. Wreckfest delivers on the feel of a (full-on contact) visceral, intense, life-like race. When the AI is involved in a crash with another AI car it feels completely spontaneous, not scripted. On the one hand the fact that the AI can be petty and incredibly aggressive is a faithful recreation of the online sphere. The AI veers between innovative and rudimentary. Vehicles are weighty and prone to sliding, and track deformation has a major impact on the gameplay. It would probably play a little bit like this as well. If EA DICE (of Battlefield fame) made a racing game it’d look something like this. All of this wreckage remains on the track throughout the entire race no mysterious clean-up duty is performed between laps, thankfully. Tracks fare little better tyre barrier walls can be smashed, causing tyres to fly into the air or trundle along the ground signs and billboards can be burst through, causing splinters of cardboard and wood to scatter everywhere (and on a couple of occasions even get stuck in the hood of my car until eventually dislodged in a corner) the ground becomes torn up in off-road locations, deforming the track and even parts of the metallic structure of, for example, the home straights can be destroyed. ![]() Cars become mangled messes, limping on like wounded mechanical animals. The carnage wrought by spectacular crashes leaves tracks looking little better than battlefields. This all makes for a great visual spectacle, not least thanks to Bugbear’s game engine, which shows superb attention to detail – those years of development certainly paid off on the graphical front. Add to that the fact that races contain up to 24 vehicles and it’s easy to see how chaos is the norm not the exception. That’s not just because both AI and human opponents are aggressive (AI opponents can even be vindictive at times, just like human opponents, and will sometimes go out of their way to ram you into the barriers even if doing so will hurt them and their chances of winning just as much as it does yours), but because most of the game’s 27 tracks double back or cross-over in some manner, often resulting in head-on collisions. Getting through a race unscathed and winning is virtually impossible, regardless of whether you race in campaign mode against the AI or online against humans, so tempering your own aggression and desire to claw your way to the front of the pack with the need to get across the line in one piece is crucial. In those cases debris from other vehicles involved in crashes, carcases from wrecked opponents, as well as tyres, cones and chunks of wood will end up littering the racecourse and act as obstacles you need to avoid lest you damage and ultimately wreck your own vehicle, which will inevitably be the worse for wear as you approach the finish line. In some respects races are quite tactical, especially when they involve 6 or more laps. But it is how I honestly feel about it now, after having played it extensively for the last week and a bit.Īt its best it’s an exhilarating, awe-inspiring experience a delightful smash-up of FlatOut, Destruction Derby, TOCA/GRID, Burnout, and MotorStorm, where racing is only one part of the experience and heavy emphasis is placed on vehicle combat (sans weapons) and survival. That’s not the fulsome praise I wanted to be able to give to Wreckfest - and I really did want to love the game, incredibly taken as I am by its core concept and the almost salivation-worthy attention to detail that Bugbear has put into the title’s damage physics, modelling, and effects. It’s remarkable then that Wreckfest has - seven years after it entered development and almost six years after it first became available in Early Access under the working title Next Car Game - finally released on consoles at all, let alone that it’s actually pretty good. Original release date pushed back to an unspecified date.By Craig Snow, posted on 24 August 2019 / 4,949 ViewsĮach of the following harbingers of a shoddy game applies to Wreckfest: ![]()
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