I’ve never learned to drive, but every so often a well-meaning friend tells me I’d be good at it, because ‘look, Edwin, you play all those driving games, surely they’ve taught you the basics’. Friend, here is what driving games have taught me: traffic lights are there for regional flavour; drifting is the same thing as cornering; other cars exist to serve as bumper cushions when overshooting a turn. Certainly, nobody wants a guy whose ideas about automobiles come from 2018’s Wreckfest to be involved in the school run. On which note: THQ Nordic have just announced Wreckfest 2 – a fresh helping of destruction derby with fancified visuals and newly animate drivers who flinch and gesticulate when other drivers smash into them. Witness the carnage in the announcement trailer below.
Ah, you can almost smell the burning rubber. Real cars involve rubber, correct? The trailer is a mixture of live-action shenanigans and in-game footage of horseless carriages despoiling each other. At a THQ Nordic preview event earlier in the week, I also got to see a bit of the game’s car customisation – a “big new feature”, which lets you paint individual car pieces and adorn them with decals, impact damage and rust. Goodness knows I’d hate to get wrecked while piloting a shabby motor. As for modes, expect a single player career, multiplayer, tournaments, regular challenges via game update, and modding support.
The game runs on a new version of developer Bugbear’s ROMU engine, which appears capable of more elaborate vehicular deformation effects – doors and exhaust pipes flapping loose, tyres unhooking and bounding away like rats fleeing a sinking ship that is actually a truck with a ludicrously elevated ride. It’s all enjoyably madcap, but I don’t get the sense the racing experience will differ excessively from the 2018 game, which John Walker (RPS in peace) thought was Top Work.
“There’s so much fun in this, and it manages to make failure an entertaining element of racing, which is a trick all too rarely pulled off,” he wrote. “Wreckfest is a splendid antidote to the po-faced severity of the current crop of Need For Speeds, Crews, and so on. It holds its own in that competition, while delivering something far more specifically its own.” I’d argue that Wreckfest 2 has less competition – both the Need For Speed series and The Crew are on the backburner, giving this juiced-up road-rager a clear run at our affections. Learn more of its wanton car abuse on Steam.
