Wreckfest Review (DevilMcSheep)
This is a review purely about the singleplayer experience.
Great handling, good music, well designed, fun-to-learn tracks, and physics perfectly suited for full contact racing and epic crashes!
Though environment destruction is much weaker than what we had with Bugbear's old FlatOut games (tyre bundles, cones, and advertising boards is pretty much all you get - no crashing through barns, sheds, or shopping malls here), it is still great fun to see tracks get littered with more and more wrecks & debris each lap!
(Hats off to the janitor :D)
Love the 'aggressor wins' physics! You'll take much less damage when doing the ramming, and much more when rammed.
Rewards via boost mechanic are not required, when crashing into things is worth it for such fun of destruction alone!
I love how I can finish 13th, say I've had a great time, and then proceed to still win the championship by doing better in the other rounds! This is such a simple thing, but I absolutely love how you're racing for points, and it's not just 'first place or GTFO' like in so many other racing games! Means that every position you gain matters, and you're racing the entire grid, not just whoever of the opponents is the fastest! It also means you can strategize who to crash into :D
Though not quite aggressive enough when it comes to overtaking, the AI are great fun to race against! Just don't overdo vehicle upgrades to keep it challenging :)
At least- that's true until you get into the top tier of cars, which become too fast for them to handle :(
It is fun to watch them crash, but the mixed race results make for trivial championship wins, yawn.
Talking about max difficulty, of course.
Speaking of which, a classic blunder WF makes is giving additional rewards for racing at high difficulty.
I select high difficulty because I want a challenge, don't then "reward" me with less challenge, WTF :D
Because of this, the XP mechanic was basically completely irrelevant during my playthrough.
Maybe it works better for those playing tourist mode, but as far as I'm concerned, should've just given a summary of damage done after every race, and dropped that whole mechanic entirely.
Whatever, not a big deal. A bigger deal is that installing any DLC is pay-to-win cheating, for the game grants you the new cars & parts for free, with zero consideration for in-game economy, progression, or immersion.
Just ignore the DLC, there's plenty of stuff in the base game already :)
Finished everything in about 30 hours, with some hours of self-imposed challenges along the way.
A mild inconvenience is that you need to delete/move your savefiles to go for a fresh re-run, with no apparent in-game save management. Strange, considering seemingly decent replay value, but not a big deal.
Overall, does this dethrone FlatOut 2 as my all-time favorite racing game? No, not even close, but it's not trying to! WF is something much more grounded in reality, with arcade elements exactly where they're needed and almost nowhere else!
A game more for those who loved the first FO game, rather than something over-the-top aimed at mass appeal, which I do hella respect, even if it's not my favorite thing in every way.
8/10, great time!