Wreckreation 2 preview: A turbo-charged second chance at capturing arcade racing's road rage

There I was, in the summer of '08, right a few years after their release, eight-year-old me enthralled and obsessively playing both Burnout Takedown and Revenge on the PS2. From jamming out to the absolute peak soundtrack of both titles to just constantly hitting multiple Dopamine spikes by performing takedowns or partaking in those exhilarating Crash Events, you just couldn't get enough of them.

Criterion Games truly had an extraordinary sauce palette when making these games, and part of the immeasurable praise for Burnout is owed to the series' veteran, Fiona Sperry. See, Fiona would later go on to band together a familiar group of people to create Wreckreation, a playground arcade title that was all about creating your own custom theme park of racetrack madness. Although that didn't pay off so well, the game still had a cult following who knew these devs wanted to etch something new into the Arcade Racing scene.

Why am I telling you all of this, you ask? Well, because it's time to pull out an MP3 file of "Lazy Generation" by F-Ups, because Fiona and her team of veterans have gone back to the drawing board to reveal Wreckreation 2. And no, it's not just a sequel. The game is rebuilt from the ground up to be a true arcade racing experience, one that is wholeheartedly reminiscent of the Burnout series' DNA.

And as someone who's a casual car enthusiast yet also a huge fan of the arcade racing games genre, the childhood Burnout fan in me instantly pounced at the opportunity to get a first-hand look at Wreckreation 2 and its reveal by the team. After spending a healthy amount of time digesting what it had to offer, they're definitely turning the tide here.

Learning From the First Wreckreation

So with everything set aside on the table, I was eager to jump in and check out what the team was cooking. The only difference was that it wasn't just Fiona and her team envisioning everything from scratch again. This team of eager veterans actively monitored what their players wanted, what made the arcade racing genre's previous golden-age works stand out. And with everything from the first game in place and collaboration with some hardcore players, the cards were aligned for the sequel.

Despite its very early presentation, Wreckreation 2 genuinely feels like an ode to the Burnout series. The preview build that I got to experience was merely a bite-sized experience, throwing me into a gated section of Heartbreak City with a handful of different events. Thankfully, each event did a perfect job of conveying the ambition these guys have for this sequel.

The foundational pillars that comprise this game include delivering a world built for battlefield-crashing mechanics, a driving model that feels physical, a roster of different cars that feel personal, and, at the helm of it all, a driving model that feels physical. You have a player-led creative community that's actively engaged in behind-the-scenes development. Everything's a recipe for success, but does it pay off with the tasting platter on display? Spoiler alert: absolutely.

An Heir to Burnout's Throne

Right out of the gate, Wreckreation 2's driving model feels stiff, but the promised potential is evident in the tactile steering and cornering. And that truly gets put to the test with the racing events on display. I had the chance to experience eight different kinds of events, including the usual races, Face Offs, Road Rages and Wreckonings.

The races are your standard laps or sprint in the city, and this is where you truly get to feel some of the slingshot action that the game is trying to convey. The tracks were pretty simple, but I hope that with the full release, or maybe a playable demo later, there is some variety in track design or in how other players manage to create epic-scale ones. The Face-Offs are this game's version of 1v1 duels, which mainly gave me opportunities to unlock upgraded variants of my two available cars.

And then there's everyone's favorite included here, the Road Rages, based on the event type of the same name from Burnout. Road Rages is where you need to achieve a specific number of takedowns within a time limit, and oh man, it is a thing of beauty. Obviously, it's still in a rough state, considering the messy AI Pathing and map limitations of the preview, but the core elements of traffic takedowns, double takedowns, wall takedowns, heck, even Aftertouch made its way here along with its Takedown feature.

Finally, Wreckonings are basically time trials where you need to score a specific time to earn either a bronze, silver or gold rating, and truly test your cornering and speed. One crash and that's your overall time shaved by seconds, so precision is key here. So you've got both the racing-focused events like this and the chaotic ones that make it a collision-course battle, a pairing that's fit for success.

But the biggest takeaway here is how, unlike Burnout, where it felt like an on-rails experience in each event, the AI racers here actually fight you head-on, provided you play on the harder difficulties. You'll need to constantly be dueling them in nudges and ramming for Takedowns while simultaneously pushing up in the race and also being mindful of your incoming sight lines.

That, and I mean, you have smaller things like the ability to import custom music in-game and a detailed photo mode to take stylized pictures of your ride. The game's own soundtrack is already pretty cool, for sure, but c'mon, I can't even describe how freaking cool it is to blast My Chemical Romance or Deftones in this game while racing or performing takedowns. Welcome back, 2000s.

Putting Fun Back in the Driver's Seat

Replicating a formula that worked so well back in the day is never an easy task, especially when you consider that the budget for games has constantly swelled, and the ones that actually care about this formula are only being worked on by various indies and/or other small-time studios.

I genuinely mean it when I say it applies to an arcade racing game like Wreckreation 2, especially when it looks like a completely different game from the original entry. The sample offering here was still in its experimental stages, but the nostalgic vision is clearly present, making this feel like a love letter to all Burnout fans.

The full game will have over 30 different cars to choose from, each tailored to a specific driving style or as an upgraded variant of the base car, giving you, the player, total freedom in how you want to approach the game and its events in the Career Mode or just the quick play scenarios.

A particular event here called Find Your Own Way flipped everything into full-throttle chaos since it pitted you against a dozen other cars in a race where you were only given a finish marker on the map—shortcuts, backstreets and map memory all get tested here. The fact that I had to run this back a couple of times to achieve the optimal finish makes me excited about the variants of this race they could create in the future alongside other creative players.

I still have some personal gripes here that I hope the devs reading this will take as feedback, including adjusting the kickback animations for cars like the Huntsville when they're shifting gears, and adding more intensity to the boosting animation. And speaking of animation, it would be lovely to iron out the crash-detection physics, because there were times when I ended up (hilariously) crashing my car just because of a slightly raised curb or surface on the sidewalk.

I'd want to feel like I'm soaring through the streets at exaggerated speed, and yet the feeling was almost there, even with the sense-of-speed options like Motion Blur and Camera Shake set to the highest settings. And to make the car crashes feel more pulp-like, like decimating the whole vehicle.

But again, these are things they can clearly refine closer to the full release or with the version that's fit to be given to audiences. Until then, Wreckreation 2 still has plenty of work to do before it reaches the finish line, but what's already here has me more excited than I expected when I first checked it out.

More importantly, it feels like a team that understands why Burnout left such a lasting mark on arcade racing fans, rather than simply trying to imitate it. If they can keep refining the driving feel, crank up the sense of speed, and polish the rough edges, Wreckreation 2 has every chance to become the modern arcade racer that Burnout fans have been waiting nearly two decades for.