Wreckfest (PS4, 2019)
I recently had cause to go through all of the video games I own for consoles I no longer regularly play. Of the 23 PlayStation games I still own, 14 involve driving or racing. My theory is that as a child it was easy for my mother to buy racing games without having to worry about the suitability of the content. I'm sure if I still had all the PlayStation and PS2 games I've ever owned that this theory would hold up, and if anything the ratio would be even higher.
One of the games in that pile is Demolition Racer, a game based around demolition derby contests and races. You have a range of cars, you have some tracks, you have a speed metal soundtrack and you get points for doing damage to your opponents which are multiplied by your finishing position to give you a score. Thinking back, it's a perfect formula. This is why I so closely followed the development and release of Wreckfest, which was on PC before console and which looked to carry over the fun and general sense of carnage I remembered from my childhood. The name of the game itself has even entered the modern sim-racing and real-life lexicon, with a pretty self-explanatory reason.
The result is a game which contains everything I could want it to and more. There's a range of tracks with dirt and tarmac surfaces. There are bottlenecks on several of those to facilitate close-contact. There are tracks that are a figure of 8 or feature sections where cars can be moving in two directions at once. There's a wide range of feasible and not so feasible vehicles, with ordinary cars as well as a lawnmower, a schoolbus, a combine harvester and a sofa, and that's even before the DLC options available. There are closed arenas too where the objective is just to wreck your opponents, and there's a level of detailed destructibility in the vehicles and the environments which is genuinely impressive in its depth.
The vehicles themselves are great too. There are several available for you to buy, upgrade and customise. The livery editor is a bit unintuitive but you can usually get the result you want. Each vehicle feels unique and there's a surprising amount of depth - in my limited expertise - to the handling and tuning models. Cars will behave differently on different surfaces, so there's a fair bit to think about when you're in a race. The upgrades also make a significant difference to your car's performance and can be added/removed when you want, so there's a lot of variety available. It would be nice to have saved setups, especially online, but once you understand how it works it's easy enough to navigate.
Why, then, am I so underwhelmed by a game I've followed for so long which has so much of what I could want in it? I'm still not entirely sure. There are plenty of gameplay options. For single-player you have a career mode where you can progress through various different championships, with the quality of vehicles you're up against increasing the higher you go. There are some special challenges thrown in here too, mainly including the special vehicles like the school buses and lawnmowers. They're great fun. There are a lot of events and if you play enough to earn credits you can buy a wide range of your own cars and upgrade them as you progress, so there's a definite sense of reward for your efforts.
The biggest problem with the single-player content is the difficulty. It comes in three levels - Novice, Amateur and Expert. To me, there's at least one step between being an amateur and being an expert. It would seem that way in the game too, with the first two levels being easy regardless of your car and Expert featuring a single rabbit at the front of the pack which you will not catch, no matter how good you are or how good your car is. You don't need to win every race to progress through the career since there are bonus targets for you to hit and you get rewarded with XP for causing damage to other cars, but it's still demoralising for a racing game to have such poor options for actual racing.
In online content there are daily, weekly and monthly challenges where you compete against the AI and amass a score which goes on to a leaderboard against other players and gives you rewards depending on how you do. From the few I tried they're on the more contact-oriented tracks, so this is great fun regardless of how you actually do. The regular online offers any race you want to create or can find. Winning here seems to be a complete lottery. Most of the time, even if your car is fully upgraded you'll be in a lobby with people who have DLC cars which are faster, so actual circuit racing won't produce any results. Any joy you might get from wrecking people in a game as detailed and as this is lost when it's random people you don't know and you're fighting over 8th while the leader is a minute up the road and crossing the finish line.
Aesthetically the game is good. Almost too good, and I think I know where my biggest problem with it is. I think my perception of the game before I played it is from watching streamers playing it with lots of friends and enjoying the inevitable carnage that ensues. You don't get that on your own. You get incredible detail. There are piles of tyres dotted around and each tyre is an object that will move. Most of the environment is destructible, and cars lose plenty of parts in crashes as well. The main downside to this is noticeably large loading times, but I can get over that. The problem is that for all the detail in the destruction and for how pretty the cars and tracks and various times of day you can race in (no weather), it somehow all feels a bit too clean. A bit too... inconsequential. I don't care about wrecking people I don't know online. Am I too used to games as a completion exercise? Am I too good at racing games now to view this as fun and get enjoyment from finishing mid-pack while breaking someone else's car in half? Does it matter when I can just start again anyway, and when nobody else is around to see what I do?
Well, that's what I think of Wreckfest. A game which has everything I could have wanted in it, but was underwhelming. Perhaps this experience has just taught me that I don't want to play a game like this, I want to be Jimmy Broadbent.
