Wreckfest Review

One of my favourite Playstation 1 games was Destruction Derby. It was one of the first games I bought for my brand new console and it was really groundbreaking in gameplay and vehicle damage. I really liked the mode when you just had to survive as long as possible with every other car trying to smash your car into pieces.

I reckon Wreckfest is a good spiritual successor to my PS1 favourite. It has car damage, plenty of devious opponents and some seriously wacky races. I’m running it on an Xbox One X and it looks lovely. My favourite level so far (although I can’t do it) is one where you are placed in a Reliant Regal three wheeler and asked to take on 24 school busses in a battle for first place. I’ve only managed to get as far as 11th so far, but I’m enjoying working on it. Apparently I’ve got combine harvesters and lots of other things to look forward to in the future. I’m not a fan of the racing couches though. Very hard to control.

There’s lots of customisation available. The cars in the game are not licensed but it’s pretty obvious what each is modelled on. The only criticism I have is that the loading times are a bit on the long side. I actually started to worry that the word “LOADING” would be burnt into the screen I spent so much time staring at it.

However, the good news is that if you want to restart a race (usually because someone sneakily sent you into a spin or off the track) the restart time (the one you really care about) is pretty much zero.

I’ve not actually gone into a shop and bought a physical copy of a game for a while. In this case I’m glad that I did.