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Note: Summary above, in-depth review below. Follow my Curator for more!

Introduction

Cars, crashes, and carnage – sound interesting? Then this game has your name on it. The best rally-racing, total-wipeout style reckless driving simulation game there is for all except the hardcore enthusiasts, but even they could enjoy it if they don’t mind its lack of complexity.


Reasons to Buy
Reasons to Avoid


• Fantastic carnage simulation.
• Achievements - medium difficulty to 100%.
• Screenshot mode for the artists.
• Sandbox mode offers great replayability.
• Multiplayer also adds replayability.
• Lengthy single player campaign with good mission variety.
• Several difficulty levels cater for different players.
• Good performance with minimal bugs.
• Great graphics.
• Satisfying gameplay.
• Steam Workshop support.
• Extensive cosmetic vehicle customisation.
• Still updated with new content and tournaments.
• DLC is good and doesn't contain content that should be in the base game.
• More arcade-y than BeamNG.drive (BeamNG)




Gameplay:

Wreckfest offers all you’d expect from a racing game. You can use handbrake turns to good effect to negotiate tight corners but otherwise it’s a case of going as fast as you can around a track like any other. One thing I liked about Wreckfest is that it’s not completely mindless, though. Racing off at top speed is not always smart as you'll fail to respond to hazards. Neither is it the case that slow and steady wins the race. You’ll have to be smart, taking corners carefully, gaining back on the straights -all while fighting the other berks that keep ramming you up the arse. Filth.
Championships:
This is the single player campaign part of the game. Here, there are dirt-rally races, deathmatches, demolition derbies and more, offering a nice variety to keep progression fun. Each race has optional objectives to complete adding an extra challenge for those who want it, but they do not affect career progression, which I’m glad about.
You do not need to get all the points in the career to move to the next championship either, which I like. The game feels clearly like it was designed with fun in mind, with the degree of challenge optional. You can lose quite a few points across a championship and still finish with enough to progress to next.
Multiplayer:
An online mode gives a choice of servers to race against real players, adding both replayability and challenge to the game. Multiplayer was easy to navigate and offers all the same stuff you get in single player, with some custom server rules shaking up the gameplay a bit.
Sandbox:
You have freedom to pick whichever cars you like in sandbox mode, tweak timers, how many laps and opponents there are, and much more besides, allowing you to set up races to your liking if the career mode isn’t scratching that itch for all-out chaos.
Complexity:
Customisation isn’t too intricate in Wreckfest though. You can upgrade components of your car but it is basic, like engine, tyres, exhaust, etc. For those who enjoy tweaking every minute aspect of their car to tune it perfectly, Wreckfest will not offer this level of complexity, and you will perhaps prefer BeamNG. Wreckfest is a middle-ground between realistic simulation and arcade, designed, it feels, to appeal to a higher number of players, which I think was a good choice. It manages to be fun without being so serious that it alienates a more casual player base.
Controls:
I played Wreckfest briefly with a keyboard and it was a fine experience with cars responding well to input, but it was nevertheless much nicer to play with a controller, just for that finer control over stopping, steering, and acceleration since keyboards are either 100% or 0, which is never optimal for racing games. Crashes and skidding/drifting vibrate the controller and give a satisfying tactile response to what the car is doing on screen.

Graphics:

General
I really liked Wreckfest’s visual style. It’s more photorealistic than competitors like BeamNG, though perhaps not as nice as Forza. Either way, it does look great, and you can fully realise its artistic potential with a useful built-in photo mode.
Carnage:
One of the selling points of Wreckfest is its damage simulation. You can customise this between realistic and less realistic options which I assume affect vehicle handling. I always played on realistic, and the more damaged a vehicle becomes, the harder it is to drive. If you lose the wheels, which I was surprisingly good at, it’s game over.
Damaged cars do dump debris on the road (these don’t seem to collide with you, unlike cars) which sometimes glitch. I’ve seen parts of bumpers just floating casually mid-air lap after lap, but this is the only visual complaint I have. Damage models are otherwise intricate and satisfying, well-reflecting what a bad driver I am as I smash into a wall and the bodywork explodes all over the track, rapidly falling to 24th place in the race.
HUD:
Interfaces were not too hard to navigate, which is really all that matters, but they could have been nicer. There’s a ‘top layer’ of sorts where you chose your car and upgrades, and then you move to a new section to pick a scenario, and a new section to tune the car pre-race. I found it a bit annoying having to go back through several layers of menu to change my vehicle pre-race – I wish all of these things had been on one screen, or at least in tabs that could be switched between, without having to keep jumping back and forth between different layers of menus.
HUD largely feels like it was designed with a controller in mind as it’s quite big, wasting some space at times that isn’t really needed for a PC – perhaps why they work in layers as mentioned above. By no means was it awful, but it was something I thought ‘damn it’ more than once about.
Performance:
I ran the game on two systems, the weakest of which was a GTX 1660Ti, i5-9300H CPU @ 2.40GHz, RAM 8GB. I ran it off a 7200RPM HDD and while loading screens were a bit on the slow side, in-game performance was fine.

Audio:

Music:
This was what you’d expect from a racing game and is fine for what it is, but I personally didn’t like it (just not my thing) and opted to listen to Spotify instead.
Sound Effects:
Sound effects were serviceable, but I don’t think they were amazing. Take this lightly – I know nothing about cars to judge their accuracy – but they sounded a bit ‘cheap’ to me and I opted to turn them down to focus on my music. Impact sounds felt like they lack the power that you’d hear in real life. Again, I’m no expert– I don’t go about crashing cars, it gets pricey – but I have heard a car crash from a few streets away and it was pretty loud.

Conclusion:

The only bad thing I can think of about this game is that it’s more arcade-y, like Forza, perhaps, than the in-depth simulation you could expect from BeamNG.
Wreckfest offers fantastic visuals, performs well despite the carnage and fidelity, and is easy to play thanks to a fairly good UI (though not perfect) and easy controls, working fine on keyboard or controller. I can’t comment on its use with a wheel as I don’t have one to test. It offers a good amount of single player content, a screenshot mode for artists and achievements that are challenging, but not impossible to 100%.
Wreckfest is brilliant for short-burst adrenaline-pumped reckless racing gameplay and finds itself perfectly suited to most types of petrol-head out there with the exception of the hardcore simulation fans, but even they might find some light enjoyment here.