Review: Wrecked: Revenge Revisited

Posted by Ben on April 10th, 2012 | 0 Comments | Tags: Wrecked: Revenge Revisited

The most fun I had with Wrecked was hammering the square button in order to get my driver to spill out a quite frankly nonsensical number of taunts. The voice acting in the game is mind numbingly bad, and when your driver is blurting out the most ridiculous phrases, its hard not to crack a smile. But the fun has to end at some point, and when the taunts eventually repeat themselves, you’re going to find yourself once again playing Wrecked. It isn’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination, but when a game like Motorstorm RC just came out on PSN and offers a great amount of content for half the price, and with better implementation of said content to boot, Wrecked is a hard sell.

When you’re playing Wrecked with 4 other people, its a blast. Unfortunately, the solo experience leaves a lot to be desired. It all starts off well enough, you throw yourself in to a race of two, and you have a good time. The enemy AI knows the courses well enough, and they put up a decent fight without overwhelming you with rubber band AI and a desire to ram you off the road. The tracks are well designed, and the controls are smooth and simple. They should be, the developer of Wrecked has spent long enough making top down racing games to know what they’re doing in this department, having worked on the vast majority of Micro Machines games in the past. So, Wrecked at least gets the core elements right.

Where it all starts to go wrong is all the window dressing. From top to bottom, Wrecked is a quite frankly sub-par effort. The graphics are unimpressive, with chunky car models and flat textures everywhere you look, the sounds are flat and lifeless, and the game has an overall feel of malaise. Its almost as if the game is completely uninterested in putting its best foot forward, especially when it comes to trying out an event that isn’t all about racing. You’ll drive carefully around a track with a bomb strapped to your car, with the thought in your mind that a single nudge against a wall means instant failure. At least the restart times are nigh on instantaneous, which means the game at least doesn’t keep you waiting before throwing you straight back into the fun.

While I’ve mentioned the local multiplayer, the online is a different matter. I tried over 50 times, and yes, I counted, to get into a match, and each time there was nobody there to respond to me, a simple error message booting me back to the mode selection screen. I managed to get in to a game, race for about a minute before my opponent quit out, so I can at least confirm that the online works, and is even stable when you’re playing. Best of luck trying to find somebody to play with though. At least you can create lobbies and invite your friends to play with you, so you can get together online and race to your hearts content.

Wrecked feels like a PS2 game that has been dragged kicking and screaming into the HD generation. Dull, lifeless, and above all uninspired, Its sad to see a developer with such a great track record for top down racers sully their name with something so distinctly average. You’ll find some fun here with friends, but if you try to go it alone, I fear you won’t enjoy a second of it.

A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here. This review is for the PlayStation 3 version of the game.