RELEASE DATE: 28 Oct, 2025
DEVELOPER: Three Fields Entertainment
PUBLISHER: THQ Nordic
Audio Transcription
Wreckreation comes from ex-Burnout developers Three Fields Entertainment and should be their homage – their love letter – to the games that preceded it. This is now Three Fields Entertainment’s fourth, I believe, attempt at recreating the Burnout series in some guise, starting off with Dangerous Golf which tried to… which is a proof… definitely a proof of concept type thing.
Dangerous Driving, which was also a bit proof of concept that they could do Burnout… it was all right but obviously it was clear it needed to go another step. So Wreckreation should be that game where they’ve taken their knowledge from previous efforts and made something that we go, “this is the spiritual successor to Burnout”. Now to some it might be controversial to go with Burnout Paradise rather than, say, Burnout 3 Takedown or Burnout Revenge or even Burnout 2.
I get it, why some might not be too keen, but I’m personally a massive fan of Burnout Paradise and its extension Big Surf Island. I really enjoyed the concept of it so I was really looking forward to this one. The addition of elements such as being able to put down your own objects like ramps and loops and different kinds of attractions so to speak didn’t really speak to me, but I thought it was an interesting concept if they get the main game right. It could be something that might add longevity a bit like a Trials HD and the following games in the series, where the community can really make something special to carry on the game.
There are issues. First of all we’ve got to look at Burnout Paradise is 15 years old now
um and was a… an absolutely fantastic game of its time, still holds up today actually as i’ve played it recently whereas this unfortunately it feels like it’s obviously been built in a new engine and it doesn’t… it just lacks something.
Burnout paradise felt breezy, it felt bright, it felt weighty during accidents but it had like inertia to it you felt like you could zoom around the map. This feels a bit sluggish in places… um… and it feels weighty throughout so the impact of crashes isn’t really there.
The layout of the map is… I get it, it’s… you kind of go, you uncover the map and so on and so forth and you discover new roads. I get that, I like the idea but in turn it’s got no character to it, whereas in Burnout Paradise, when they made that game, there was character – you immediately knew your spots you kind of go, right, you’re going to race towards the stadium or the observatory you kind of got told… you learned where those were.
Here there’s no real landmarks on which to to really focus on and the decision they’ve
made (and the one decision i think i disagree with completely, and i don’t know how they can recover from this one) is they’ve gone completely open world. So Burnout paradise is open world, however you are restricted to the roads. Here they’ve unlocked the entire map so you could go on the road or you can go off the road, you can go through wooded areas and everything, and I don’t think a Burnout game needs that.
It doesn’t need for you to be traveling off in different directions and taking your own made shortcuts; that’s not what Burnout is all about, for me anyway, um and again you’ve got things like the road layouts have been done in such a way where you might find an event halfway down a normal road rather than at
junctions. It’s fine I get why they might have done that and you’ve got the usual… you’ve got your races, you’ve got your your road rage, your stunt events or all of that is in there but therein lies i think another problem at the moment with the game is… let’s… let’s take a road rage for example:
In previous Burnout games you do a road rage, you… you might take down a couple of the cars immediately, others go in different directions. Within seconds they are back on you and giving you more… more vehicles to battle with to take down. Here on more than one occasion i found that i’ve taken down the first couple of cars and then i’ve got to go and hunt for the other ones against the timer, and by the time you get there if you make even the slightest mistake or miss or you crash, they’re down the road again and you’ve got to really work to catch them up and it kind of takes you out of the moment; it kind of takes the fun out of it. That it becomes more of a chore.
And again, previous Burnout games had it that if you made a mistake you were still in the race. Rubber banding was… was something in there and i felt the
Burnout games needed rubber banding in many ways, because if you did make a mistake you don’t want to be completely out of it. You don’t want to take a car out at the start and then that’s it, that’s over, you’ve won the race.
The part… the fun of Burnout was the running races – was to take other cars down. So to have the rubber banding works here it doesn’t feel like it’s there as much. There’s a like… the best race i found was a closed circuit one, off the beaten track where there was no
other traffic there, because the traffic here as well it’s not easily recognizable. I found myself
crashing into cars that i just did not see such is the camera angles and i think the lack of color in the world compared to sort of like what you expect from a Burnout game.
Wreckreation does not have that, it… it feels very less cartoony which doesn’t work for this game because it’s cartoon violence, is Burnout, it always has been um and so it needs that. I just didn’t find that this had any of the… the characteristics of those games, despite it being from the developers.
You can see where budget comes from with these now i don’t know what the case is with the engine they’re using at the moment, but i would have happily seen them take the engine that they’ve used in previous Burnout games and just remade the game, because all those games still hold up visually in many ways.
So Burnout 3… sorry, Burnout 3 Takedown, you could get HD textures for it and it looks good today. Burnout Paradise, the remastered version looks good today. I’d rather not give EA my money, um, but it is still the best way to play a Burnout game in today’s world. This really should have been it and it’s disappointing in many ways for me because i really want to like it and i can see through the few… the many hours actually i’ve played through this the many hours i’ve got is that there’s something there and it’s the same i felt about Dangerous Driving & Dangerous Golf: was that there’s something there but it’s proof of concept, it’s not it’s not ‘THERE’ there. It’s not a game that I can go “this is it this is the spiritual successor and we need”.
And the added bits they’ve got the… like the Trackmania style (i suppose) added bits you could add, so ramps and loops and so on, and sky tracks, it’s cumbersome to use and it… I felt like it didn’t add anything to the game as I was playing it.
Now what becomes a shame is when you first place eyes on this game, on Wreckreation, you go “This is Burnout”. Everything about Burnout is there – about Burnout paradise is there – with the… with the… you’re pressing the buttons on your d-pad to bring up the menu so you’ve got live menus and so on and so forth, it’s got nice ideas like you can remix the time, you can remix your car and loads of other little bits. You can decide how much sort of (I believe) traffic is on the road and so on and so forth but it just lacks that little bit that… i don’t want to say this is it, this is done and this is the end of the road for Three Fields Entertainment… end of the road for Wreckreation, because despite all my misgivings with this game at the moment, there’s still something I kept going back hoping that what was missing might be… might be captured.
So it’s even got the things like the the billboards you could get to and earn someone and they’re now in Burnout they’re bright they’re red you see them from like far away in the ramps you go there’s a ramp now… here it felt like every board I was seeing too late, and it turned out that the ramp i needed to get up to it was on the other side of the road or i had to double back and i don’t really want that. I don’t… I want to go up there, it’s it i’m going to just aim for this and see where it goes.
And then you’ve got some more the puzzley-based ones where you’ve got to work out the best way to get to it. It’s just every element is there but not quite, and it’s an unfortunate takeaway for a game that I really want to like for one of my favorite all-time series there’s been. You know, the Burnout series is… is a classic and i, for me, that’s what i’d show off the next gen.
It was like, this is like Burnout 3 on the… on the Playstation 2 and then Revenge into like the… the Xbox 360 era was like, this is just amazing. What I wanted from the game was next like what can we do more with the crashes? Can we get more and more?
New engine has probably not helped them you know not having the original engine,
so they’re building from the ground up again. Um, I don’t know what’s needed. I don’t know that this isn’t… as if this is a new developer who’s trying to do this it’s not a solo developer. It’s the team that have experience, and for whatever reason they cannot capture that magic at the moment and I feel horrible.
It’s just at this present moment I can’t recommend it. There’s not enough for fans of the series and those coming in new. I don’t think it does a great job as a first impression. The added bits aren’t needed, the open world needs tightening. I get why they’ve done it; they’ve tried to do something different but it’s just unfortunately, it just does not work in its current guise and i… I wish I could say something more positive.
Keep an eye on it! I do hope maybe one day they can continue to work on the
game to develop it, maybe a few patches here and there, maybe get something with it but at present unfortunately. Not… not… not even fit to be you know up there with the best Burnout games. Unfortunate.
