Wreckreation tries to be a lot of things and pulls inspiration from a lot of solid racing games. It has a clear lineage to Burnout Paradise in building boost by causing mayhem and slamming into competitors' cars. It has an open world and vibe like the Forza Horizon series, and it has a "Live Mix" feature that lets you make your own racetracks by adding elements to the in-game world. The problem is that while the game tries to be all of these things, it doesn't really feel like any of them are fully developed.

Wreckreation is very much an arcade-style racing game, and it clearly wears its inspiration from Burnout Paradise like sponsor logos on a livery. The game is set in a fictional open world of its own with highways, dirt roads, and various points of interest dotting the landscape. Events are some of those POIs, and to compete in one, you simply drive to it and hold both triggers (or gas and brake) to start the event.

Some events are simple races from point A to point B, with a variety of checkpoints to be passed along the way. Others are Road Rage events, where you must take down a set number of opposing cars before time runs out. Slamming into the rear or the sides of a car will cause it to lose control for a brief period, and if it veers into opposing traffic or an obstacle, you get treated to a slow-motion view of the flaming, tumbling aftermath. There are also Offroad events, where you avoid using roads altogether and race to the finish. Finally, Wreckoning events must be completed with a particular one of the game's 24 cars, but doing so permanently upgrades that car to a higher performance and flashier version.

The handling of the cars feels a little silly, even for an arcade game. It's fun to slam into other cars to shunt them to their demise, but the actual racing has a lot of self-inflicted errors. Wreckreation has some of the most egregious "rubber-banding" you can find in which AI cars are slowed down somewhat if you are behind them and dramatically sped up if they are behind you. You can hold down your boost button, maintained by weaving in between oncoming traffic to keep it filled, and the AI will be two car lengths back. It feels pointless to use skill and find any sort of racing line; just drive and periodically boost, and it'll keep the AI at bay.

Boosting skews the field of view of the game to give its sense of speed an artificial boost, but doing so also makes it more difficult to judge if you are alongside another car and can slam into it. It doesn't help that the speed at which you approach them varies wildly because as soon as you get close, the rubber-banding also makes them speed up. Finally, it looks nice to nail a shunt and send a competitor spinning into a guard rail, but the problem is for that same two to four seconds, the AI is controlling your car while your view is devoted to the carnage. Every time, it is an awkward transition back to your car because you are in a different part of the track and going at a different speed. In one instance, I went from sixth place to first place while watching the wreck of the fifth-place car I'd punted.

Wreckreation is at its strongest when it leans into the silliness that can occur because of the "Live Mix" feature. At first, you have barely any parts to use — just a single ramp (with three different sizes) and a floating ring to ramp through. You unlock additional parts by finding them in the game world, and some of them have variations, such as that first ramp you started with. When in Live Mix mode, you can place parts in the world however you want, but people will only be able to check them out if they join your session.

There is more fun to be found in the player-created events that you can occasionally find in the game world. A memorable event had me racing through a tunnel while Live Mix parts were set up to crush any cars passing through in a variety of ways. You can set up your own events and determine what type they are, where they take place on the map, the start/finish, and use any parts you see fit. It is even more fun when the Sky Track parts are used, which are basically life-sized Hot Wheels tracks suspended in the sky, complete with all manner of banked turns, massive ramps, loops, etc.

Still, it is tough to purposefully seek out and find the content that other people have created. You can occasionally find them on the in-game map, but it would be nice to look through a list of them, or a rating system to see which ones are most enjoyable. There's no incentive to make them other than as a creative outlet; even then, I'd wonder how many people would get to see it or if they liked it. This part of the game feels like a missed opportunity for Wreckreation to emphasize its strengths.

There are several other issues throughout the game, such as the inability to rebind controls. I couldn't get my Xbox One controller to work with the game until I turned on Steam's controller support. From Live Mix to changing graphics settings, the only in-game menu must be accessed with the "DJ Menu" on the left side via the d-pad or arrow keys on the keyboard. It took me longer than I'd care to admit that pressing right toggled options on and off, and I'd much rather be able to use a mouse to configure things.

Ultimately, it feels like Wreckreation tries to be too many things at once. An open-world setting allows for a lot of room for players to create events using the Live Mix tools, but driving between events gets dull quickly. As a conventional racing game, the rubber-banding AI makes me lose interest quickly, and the game doesn't emphasize the Live Mix content as strongly as it arguably should. It's a fun enough game, and it's smaller in scope since it was made by a smaller team. It lacks a defining feature of its own that it really focuses on, and it ends up making the game feel more like an imitation of other games.

Score: 6.3/10

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, 32 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4070 Ti