Racing games come in all shapes and sizes, from the hyper-realistic to the simple arcade-style. Some recreate well known tracks from around the world, while others have you piloting sci-fi craft and barrelling around neon-lit speedways at 500mph. The only constant in this diverse genre is the thrill that comes from successfully navigating your way around the twists and turns, ultimately beating your opponents and earning yourself a gold medal. This makes me wonder how Wrecked: Revenge Revisited, a game full of weapons, challenges, and varying locations, manages to be so dull.
To call Wrecked a racing game is actually a little inaccurate. For you see, despite the number of different challenges available to play, simply racing other cars to the finish line isn’t one of them. I suppose you’ll be racing against the clock, and possibly racing to your shelf to grab any other game nearby instead of suffering through this one, but traditional races are mysteriously absent from this title.
The challenges, spread across a measly six tracks, will instead test your skills in other areas. There are the Speed Challenges, which are simple time trials; Weapon Challenges, in which you must take out your opponents using Mario Kart-style pickups littered around the tracks; and the odd Skill and Elite Challenges, in which you’ll be dragging a caravan behind your vehicle, trying to avoid barriers in your bomb-loaded car, or simply collecting as many coins as possible while driving around the track. While some of these may sound like fun, the sad reality begins to sink in once you actually start playing.
So what makes it bad? The main reason is physics. The cars just don’t feel like they have any weight to them, and don’t handle how one would expect in a racing title. I know there are multiple ways to implement physics into car games, but Wrecked feels like a title made over 20 years ago, when the simple novelty of video racing was enough to sell many copies. Those were the days when Nintendo could release games called Golf and Soccer, that played nothing like their real-life counterparts, but were the best non-athletic types could enjoy. We’ve come a long way since then, but guiding the cars around the tracks in Wrecked, with little skidding, sliding, or speed, could easily fool you into thinking we’re still in the 1980s, albeit with better graphics.
The strange-feeling control is made worse by the badly-designed camera. Instead of simply keeping your car center-screen at a decent distance away, it insists on constantly zooming in and out, especially when you employ your turbo booster. You’ll also find it drifting upwards and occasionally twisting around, leaving you with an impaired view of the turn you’re about to hit. Oh, and did I mention that falling off the track means instant death, forcing you to restart from the beginning? I didn’t? Well, bear that in mind when you’re blinding approaching a cliff edge and the cameraman seems to have other things on his mind.
Even the Weapon Challenges, which I was sure would be the game’s saving grace, fall flat. I pictured Wipeout-style races, with multiple pickups available, and enemies battling for control of the lead. The reality is that there’s often only one weapon type available at a time, and you’re simply tasked with destroying three other cars in less than two laps. This mode also highlights another old-school convention - serious rubber-banding. When trying to escape from gun-toting opponents, it’s impossible to get far ahead. The moment you lose sight of the other vehicles, they miraculously overtake you and begin laying mines in your path all over again. I know it’s not fun to get too far ahead in a racing game, but when tasked to escape an explosive end, it’s frustrating to see good driving get you nowhere.
Things are a little better in multiplayer, but unfortunately, there are some serious bugs that hamper the experience. The mode is simple - get too far behind the pack leader and you’re out of the race. The physics are no better, but at least you can pick up various weapons during the races. That is, if you can even find a game. I spent about half an hour clicking on Quick Play before I actually found myself in a lobby. Up until that point, I was given the message “Cannot connect - The game has already started”. Well, connect me to another game, I thought to myself, before considering that there weren’t any other games going.
Once an online match finally began, I found that in half the races my accelerator didn’t work, ending the round in a matter of seconds. The camera is also worse than ever, often leaving your view of the track completely obscured - believe me, racing towards the camera, instead of away from it, is just as fun as it sounds. There was even a time when the race started and all I got was the view of a mountain, with the track far down below. Clearly, I wasn’t the only player suffering from this issue, as the host terminated the game moments later. I know it’s tough to test for online bugs during the development process, but until they patch this mode, I would consider it completely unplayable.
Thankfully, there was one element in the game that made me smile - the truly terrible voice acting that plays whenever you hit your taunt button. With sound quality that made me wonder if it was recorded over the phone, you’ll enjoy classic insults such as “Pond life”, “Shelf stacker”, and my personal favourite, “I Googled ‘loser’ last night - guess whose picture came up?”. Also, did no one tell the developers that the word “retard’ isn’t politically correct anymore? I guess not. The laughs also come in thick and fast during the caravan challenges, as an awfully-acted senior citizen constantly berates your driving skills. The humour may not be intentional, but this was the only part of the game I actually enjoyed, as cringeworthy as it is.
So if you haven’t gotten the message by now, Wrecked: Revenge Revisited is a terrible game. It has some nice ideas, but just isn’t fun to play. The physics are strange, the controls jerky, the camera movements weird, and the multiplayer broken. The only part I really enjoyed was the laughable voice acting, and this is what saves the game from getting the lowest score I can possibly assign. I Googled “loser” last night and guess whose picture came up? That’s right - mine, for wasting my time with this truly dreadful title.
