WRECKREATION (2025) – Road Ragequit

Wreckreation
Developer: Three Fields Entertainment
Publisher: THQ Nordic
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Reviewed on PC)
Release Date: October 28, 2025

I was struggling to come up with a good way to start this writeup for quite some time, but eventually I decided to quote the opening part of the old F-Zero GX Story Mode Chapter 7 rant someone posted on Something Awful in ancient times, with some minor editing (it was posted in 2003 and much of the language is… of its time) and the names changed to fit my current predicament. Okay, here goes…

*ahem*

Dear Three Fields Entertainment and THQ Nordic:
YOUR PRODUCT HAS REDUCED ME TO A GIBBERING MAN-APE WHOSE ONLY RESORT TO DEALING WITH THE ALMIGHTY FUCKING GRIEF IT’S BESTOWED UPON ME IS TO SCREAM AND HURT MYSELF.

I had a whole big review planned because I’m a huge Burnout fan and enjoyed my first few hours of Wreckreation, but now as I stare at the WordPress editor, I’m completely at a loss as to what to say. It’s crazy. I don’t remember another game that went from “This is obviously rough around the edges and low-budget, but I still quite enjoy it for what it is” to “I need to stop playing this before I give myself an aneurysm or a heart attack out of sheer rage” so quickly and so dramatically.

I’m writing this in the immediate aftermath of a Wreckreation single player session that had me throw my controller multiple times and make a variety of noises that probably caused some concern among my neighbors. Now, I do have a tendency to get mad at video games at times, but usually that’s just because I’m bad at them and I’m generally frustrated by my own skill issues rather than anything in the actual game. But this? This is me getting angry at the game because the game doesn’t function as expected, something that only really becomes obvious as you progress to the more challenging races later in the game.

What is really disappointing here is the fact this could easily be a perfectly solid dollar store (or perhaps Poundland, since Three Fields Entertainment are a British studio) Burnout Paradise, and it would only take a whole bunch of relatively small tweaks to the gameplay. I didn’t expect this low-budget title made by a dozen people to match Burnout Paradise, which was a huge release back in 2008 and had a gigantic dev team, with funding from EA. There wasn’t gonna be a big sprawling city or dozens upon dozens of cars and events or Guns N’ Roses on the soundtrack. That, I could live with. What I can’t live with is a game that is either fundamentally broken or designed in such a way that it feels broken.

Before I properly start dragging Wreckreation through the mud, I do have some positive things to say about this mess. First off, the actual driving feels quite good. It’s certainly not the best arcade racer ever or anything, but the cars handle basically like I remember them handling in Burnout. One of the big complaints I had about Dangerous Driving, Wreckreation‘s 2019 predecessor, was that the car handling was overly twitchy and everything lacked heft. That is no longer the case, although the cars do still catch more air off ramps than they used to in the Burnout days. The crazy sense of speed is there, the drifting feels quite nice, it’s all quite solid.

Of course, Burnout was never just about the driving. Crashes were a big selling point since the very beginning, and that was where Dangerous Driving faltered. The crashes in Dangerous Driving looked weightless, a bit like the wrecks in the Sylvester Stallone “classic” Driven. It also lacked any kind of vehicle chassis deformation, so the damage was extremely lackluster. Wreckreation mostly fixes these issues. The crashes themselves can still look a bit odd, but at least the cars actually deform properly now. The damage modeling is nowhere near as detailed as BeamNG.drive or THQ Nordic stablemate Wreckfest, but it’s perfectly adequate for a Burnout-style game.

Possibly because the team knew they wouldn’t be able to match what Criterion did with Burnout Paradise, Wreckreation needed something to set itself apart that wasn’t just “let’s do a Burnout Paradise version of Dangerous Driving“. That something is the creation (Kreation? Ckreation?) part of Wreckreation. You can build all sorts of crazy things like full racetracks in the sky or around a mountain, set up stunt parks or just set up ramps to grab collectibles in the open world.

You can create your own events, change the weather and time of day in the open world, and customize all sorts of things most people probably aren’t even interested in customizing. There’s plenty of potential here for online shenanigans with your friends, but since I don’t have any friends (okay, that’s an exaggeration for comic effect, but I most definitely don’t have friends who would want to play this) and I’m not really interested in online games in general, I’ve mostly been focusing on the single player component of Wreckreation.

And hey, at first glance, it seems like you’re getting a perfectly cromulent Burnout Paradise-style game, albeit with a rather bland open world consisting primarily of country roads and having a “Generic Unreal Engine” look to it. Surely, Three Fields could at least have put together a small town or two somewhere even if they didn’t have the resources to build a full city? Judging by the many asset flip “games” out there, Unreal Engine offers plenty of assets you can use for that sort of thing. Of course, you can’t exactly just plop those assets into your game and job’s a good ‘un, there’s still going to be a lot of work involved to actually make your town or city a proper environment to drive and race around in.

Unfortunately, the further you get in the game, the more everything starts to unravel. My personal breaking point came in the new Road Rage variants introduced here in Wreckreation – Total Road Rage and Penalty Road Rage. Now, I’m not entirely sure how Total Road Rage differs from a normal Road Rage, because it just seems like more Road Rage. Sometimes, the time limits are tighter or you get less bonus time from taking down opponents, other times there’s no apparent difference. I’d love it if they actually explained what Total Road Rage is supposed to be. Anyway, Total Road Rage is there and it’s not the worst thing ever. Well, we’ll get back to that in a minute.

Penalty Road Rage is the worst thing ever. For the uninitiated (I don’t know why you’d be reading this if you’re unfamiliar with Burnout), Road Rage is a game mode in which you’re tasked with taking down as many opponents as you can, or a certain number of opponents, before time or your car’s health runs out. Simple. Effective. Perfection. You’d think something like this would be impossible to fuck up. But Penalty Road Rage is how you fuck up Road Rage in style.

Penalty Road Rage introduces penalty cars. If you takedown one of these, you lose time instead of gaining it, and it also doesn’t count as a takedown for your tally (although you do get the bonus boost). Usually, there is one penalty car in the pack. This can be annoying at times because the penalty cars are hell-bent on crashing into you and getting in the way, but usually they’re a minor nuisance and you can easily make up any time penalties by taking down other cars. However, later events introduce multiple penalty cars, and that is when everything goes to hell.

While one penalty car is kind of an annoying pest but usually manageable, two of them at the same time break the whole mode. You can’t do ANYTHING without these assholes getting in the way, and trying to avoid both of them to focus on the two normal opponents is nearly impossible. So, a Road Rage that requires you to get 15 kills in 3 minutes and 30 seconds, normally a simple task as far as these things go, becomes a complete nightmare. I spent HOURS trying to get through this one Penalty Road Rage with two penalty cars (the only one I’ve found so far, but I’m sure there are more), and it was agony. I did eventually manage to eke out a victory, but no satisfaction was found in that moment. I don’t know how anyone thought this was a good idea.

With the two penalty cars in the mix and making things more chaotic than usual, the broken nature of Wreckreation truly starts to emerge. Sure, I’d had plenty of strange glitches, wonky physics, and questionable collision detection in my first 8 to 10 hours, but most of that was nothing you wouldn’t see in Burnout. But this was where Wreckreation really decided to show its true colors as all those minor inconveniences and annoyances combined into one absolutely horrific package, made all the worse by the fact the game was now demanding this precision from me that it is in no way equipped to handle.

How would I fix Penalty Road Rage, you ask? You didn’t ask? Well, I’ll tell you anyway. If “Don’t have Penalty Road Rage to begin with” isn’t an option, I have a couple of simple suggestions.

Number one: Just don’t have multiple penalty cars in one event. The game fundamentally doesn’t work with them right now. Having one is enough, especially when the penalty cars replace the normal opponents. I’m not actually sure why they couldn’t have just increased the number of normal opponents in these to give you a better chance to accomplish something, because the regular races support up to eight cars including the player.

Number two: Make the penalty cars more passive. As they are currently, they’re so aggressive you can’t feasibly avoid hitting them, so your options are to take a hefty time penalty or just get wrecked. Or both, because there’s a good chance they’ll crash into you after wrecking you, giving you the penalty anyway. If you absolutely insist on having these things in the game, make them non-aggressive so the player actually has some chance of avoiding them.

Number three: Make penalty car takedowns count towards the takedown score target. Sure, you get the time penalty when you take one out, but you also increase your score. This would introduce a strategic risk vs. reward element to the mode – do I try to avoid the penalty cars to maybe have more time to hunt down the others later, or do I take the points now and deal with the penalty? Simple, but I think it’d make a big difference especially with the other tweaks I suggested.

Despite all this, Penalty Road Rage wasn’t what drove me to ragequit the game and start writing this. No, that was actually a Total Road Rage event. This particular event on Dry Creek Road is so obviously rigged against you in every conceivable way that, while I’m sure I could eventually make it through if I just kept banging my head against this brick wall for a few more hours, I just couldn’t take it anymore.

This event gives you 45 seconds of base time and asks you to takedown ten opponents, and it even gives you the full ten seconds of bonus time per takedown instead of Total Road Rage’s usual five seconds. Sounds perfectly manageable, right? What could possibly go wrong?

The answer to that question is “everything”. First off, the event takes place in heavy snow on an icy road, so don’t even bother if you don’t have an AWD car in the Bruiser class. Weather and track conditions genuinely make a difference here and if you take an RWD car into a snowy race, you’re in for a bad time. Well, worse than it already is in this case. Visibility in this weather is also poor, which will become important in a moment.

Okay, so, we have some bad weather and an icy road but that can’t be so horrible, right? It’s still just ten opponents that need to get taken down, and a Burnout veteran like myself can do that in his sleep, right? You get ten seconds of bonus time per takedown, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that the AI opponent spawns are turbofucked. Even if you get through the first batch of cars perfectly and have about a minute on your timer, the next group is so far away that you can easily lose 25–30 seconds just getting to them. That’s if you don’t crash into anything along the way.

And right there is where we run into the next problem, head on at 300 kph. The traffic in Wreckreation is nonsense. In the Burnout games, traffic was never truly random during races and other events because it was easy enough to lose a run without cars suddenly appearing where there were none on your last attempt. So, naturally, traffic in Wreckreation is truly random during races and other events, making any kind of memorization or prediction completely impossible. There are even random parked cars on the sides of the road now, which obviously don’t have any lights on so you can just plow into one without ever having a chance to see it. The elevation and bends of the road don’t help matters, because there are many blind crests and switchbacks that make it easy for traffic to screw you over with no way to avoid it.

Oh! And speaking of which! Remember how the old Burnout games had traffic with big old glowy headlights and taillights you could see from a mile away? Well, Wreckreation sure doesn’t. I have crashed into countless cars in this game because I simply couldn’t see them in time. They flash their beams at you when you’re close, but by that point it’s usually too late because, again, you’re doing 200 or 300 kilometers per hour and there’s little time to react. Why not just give the traffic cars the big lights you can see easily from a distance in any weather?

But hey, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if Wreckreation didn’t decide to take the Burnout 1 approach to collisions with traffic cars and street furniture. For those of you who don’t know or don’t remember, that means even the slightest brush against anything will wreck you. Well, in the open world I seem to be able to traffic check cars out of the way at quite high speeds, which I assume is not intended, but ANY CONTACT WITH TRAFFIC OR OBJECTS will ruin you in the events. Am I carrying a fucking keg of nitroglycerin like it’s Castlevania on the Nintendo Bloody Sixty-Four? Okay, yes, you are still driving very fast and any contact at such speeds would probably have catastrophic consequences in real life, but this isn’t real life as far as I know. The Burnout games after the first one managed to deal with this just fine, and glancing a car or tree wouldn’t necessarily ruin your day.

And finally, we have all the assorted wonky collision detection where obvious takedowns don’t count and that sort of thing, as well as glitches such as falling through the world. The worst of these rough edges is probably the absolute state of the takedown camera, or rather coming out of the takedown camera. In Burnout, the game would cut to the takedown camera when you wrecked someone, and then it’d auto-steer you and also make you immune to crashes for a moment when coming out of takedown cam. At this point, I’m sure you can guess how well it works in Wreckreation. Entirely too often, it either auto-steers you into the shadow realm or you come out of it just to instantly crash into whatever’s in front of you. Sometimes both!

One of these issues I just outlined wouldn’t necessarily break the whole game. It certainly wouldn’t be ideal, but I could maybe live with it. But all of them combined and horribly exposed by this waking nightmare of a Total Road Rage event? Nope. I’m done. On Discord right after ragequitting, I called this the worst game I’ve ever played. That may be stretching the truth a little because I’ve played the likes of Carmageddon 64, but these specific events I mentioned are absolutely among the worst things I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing in a video game.

It’s a crying shame, honestly. I still love Burnout and want more games like Burnout even though the industry clearly doesn’t want to make them. Wreckreation seemed like a perfectly decent little game with quite a bit of that Burnout feel despite the massively reduced budget, so I was wondering why the reception had generally been so negative. I am no longer wondering, although I wouldn’t be surprised if my criticisms were very different from those who haven’t played as extensively as I have over the last few days.

I’m clearly not the only one with issues, as Three Fields Entertainment have stated that they will address Road Rage in a later update. The problems here go deeper than Road Rage for sure, but I suppose we’ll see how that turns out and I will give the game another go when they’ve implemented whatever fixes they plan to implement. If things change dramatically, I will update this post, but I doubt they’ll be able to address everything I highlighted here.

My original plan for the closing paragraph was to write something like “If you like Burnout Paradise and want something that feels a bit like Burnout Paradise, give this a shot if you can get it at a decent discount like I did.” However, my experience has now been so thoroughly soured that I’m not recommending Wreckreation under any circumstances. If you haven’t played Burnout Paradise, the remaster is available on every modern platform at half the cost of Wreckreation. If you have played Burnout Paradise and want more Burnout Paradise… just play Burnout Paradise.

Hm. It has been a while, hasn’t it? Maybe it’s time I took another trip down to Paradise City, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.

UPDATE (November 4, 2025): I did not expect to already amend this article, but Three Fields Entertainment released the second patch for Wreckreation about two hours after this went live last night. I am very pleased to report that the Road Rage AI spawns have been fixed, as the opponents now spawn much more frequently and much closer to you and far less time is wasted getting to the next group. That alone made the practically impossible Dry Creek Road event very beatable.

This particular event is still extremely challenging, and not entirely for the right reasons because all the other problems are still present, but just adjusting the AI spawns made a massive difference. Seriously, I can’t even properly express how much better Road Rages are now, at least the non-penalty ones (and even those should be more doable now). Hopefully, most or preferably all of the remaining issues will eventually be sorted out, but there’s a lot of work to be done and I still can’t really recommend Wreckreation in the shape it’s in.

I should note that the problems I describe here mostly raise their ugly heads in a few specific individual events, and you can get to the highest W rank without touching those events at all. I don’t know what happens if you complete absolutely everything in the game, and I’m not too interested in finding out either.

According to the roadmap posted by Three Fields Entertainment today, next week’s patch should address some of the problems I outlined with collision detection and the takedown camera among other things, which certainly sounds nice if they manage to pull it off. That being said, I would’ve happily waited another month or two for Wreckreation to be in a better state at launch, because the damage has probably been done by now. I sincerely hope Three Fields can prove me wrong because I absolutely, 100% want them to succeed at making good Burnout-style games. It’s not like anyone else is even trying. Who knows what Three Fields could do with a bigger team and an actual budget?

UPDATE (November 12, 2025): The aforementioned patch has hit. While I can’t say I’ve done extensive testing, battling with opponents now feels a lot better as they don’t constantly nosell your offense anymore (this was one of the assorted issues I didn’t specifically point out although I thought I did) and a few good whacks should send them right off the road. Several cars have had their handling characteristics tweaked to feel more responsive, some events have had their time limits adjusted to be less punishing, and so on.

Honestly, if the game had shipped like this to begin with, I would have been quite satisfied. I’m sure the overall response would still have been mixed at best because this is not a polished mass market title like Forza Horizon. This is a very specific type of arcade racer for a very specific subset of sickos who are really into Burnout and don’t mind some jank (as the original version of this post hopefully made very clear, the amount of jank we had before these last two patches was entirely too much, but this is totally acceptable now). The kind of sickos such as myself or Jeff Gerstmann. There are dozens of us! Dozens!

I still hope Three Fields Entertainment get an actual budget and more than a dozen developers.

UPDATE (November 20, 2025): I don’t know what they did with this latest patch, but Wreckreation now runs worse than it used to. It was never entirely free of Unreal Engine’s trademark #stutterstruggle, but the performance used to stabilize after some initial shader compilation stutter. This is no longer the case, and the game is now having these constant stutters that, in the worst case scenario, cause the frame rate to drop from 144 to below 60 no matter what resolution you’re running. If I had frame time measurement tools like Digital Foundry, the graph would probably resemble the electrocardiogram of someone having a massive heart attack.

Admittedly, I only tried 4K DLAA, DLSS Quality and DLSS Balanced, but since Balanced was just as stuttery as DLAA, it was clear the resolution wasn’t the problem. I have an RTX 4090 and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which should run an Unreal Engine 4 game maxed out at a locked or mostly locked 144 fps (or an even more consistent 120 fps) with minor drops when the screen is absolutely packed with alpha effects, and has done exactly that until this latest patch. Something’s not quite right here, so I guess we’ll wait for the next update to hopefully fix this latest problem. Exciting!