Introduction

One cup of Runabout
A dash of Crazy Taxi
One teaspoon of mouth watering graphics
Simmer and serve!!!

Sounds like a recipe for a great game. Activision will be your chef for the evening, and they have prepared Wreckless. How is it? It’s great on the way down but leaves a bitter aftertaste....

Presentation

Wreckless gets off to a good start. The menus are bright and easy to read. The controller setup works well for the game.

One thing you will quickly notice is Wreckless has one of the cheesiest stories you will ever see. However, rather than try to hide it like some games, Wreckless presents to complete package, including weird voice acting straight out of a Van Dam movie, and cut scenes that really drive the concept. Before and after each mission you are usually treated to one, and it helps break the repitition this game has. While presentation here isn’t as great as other action games like GTA3, it’s obvious what the developers were trying to do and they succeeded.

Graphics & Sound

Wreckless is to XBox owners what MGS2 was to PS2 owners. If you’re looking for a game showcases the power of the XBox, Wreckless is it. The city is huge, and there are civilian and CPU cars everywhere. Each crash into another car or even a food stand creates a beautiful explosion. Best of all the game stays at a steady 30 fps.

Animations are also great in this game. The cars flip and twirl and spin. Get t-boned and your door will fly off. Take enough damage and you’ll lose even more parts, like hoods, trunks, tailpipes etc. Each person in the cars are fully animated. Take a sharp turn and watch as the passenger is flung around like a sack of potatoes.

As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock "filters". Each one presents a different type of eye candy, from cel shaded gameplay to blurry. There isn’t a prettier game on the XBox.

Sound wise, it is no F355 or GT3. Tires can squeal, and each car does a good job of sounding different. The voice acting is way off, but that might be good or bad depending on how you’re following the story. The sound effects are pretty good. Glass shattering sounds great. It’s all been done before though. Nothing new or breathtaking like the graphics, but not a letdown either.

Gameplay

Basically, the object of each mission is to smash something before time runs out. It can be a huge dumptruck, or 8 enemy cars. Or, a chase mission, where you must chase down enemy cars and touch them to "steal" a certain thing from them. There are also a few "point a to point b" missions where you simply get from one spot to another, avoiding enemies and soccer moms along the way.

Sounds good eh? Well, it’s all good for awhile. Later into the game however, it gets very dull very fast. The game lacks any mission balance whatsoever. One mission can be very easy. The next could be hard. Then easy again. Back to very easy. It is like that throughout the entire game, which is only 20 missions.

The gameplay is tedious also. One mission has you chasing down two enemy cars. You have to hit them multiple times, and steal what theyre carrying. You also have to avoid traffic and other enemy cars. Sounds great, and it is. Until, you look ahead and see a tank coming at you. It fires and hits you. You are then forced to watch your vehicle rock back and forth with the physics, until the next shell hits you, and so on and so forth. Wreckless is full of sections where you’re thinking, "what moron thought this would be fun?". Throw in shoddy collision detection that has you doing a 900 after hitting nothing, then SLOWWWLLYY rocking back to driving position, and your thoughts change to "Didn’t anyone play test this?"

Lastly, the game is ridiculously easy. On "hard" difficulty and "heavy" traffic on, I only had to replay a handful of missions, maybe 4 or 5, more than twice. Most of the others I breezed through on my first try. Great gameplay can’t work if you aren’t challenged.

Some missions rock, most do not. It’s pretty much that simple. With more time to add better missions, better and harder AI, and time to clean out the bugs, this game couldve been great.

Lasting Appeal

This games replay value has one flaw. The game is over way too quickly. I’m no master or anything, but I beat the game, got all but one secret car and checked my time. Just over 8 and a half hours. For $55, that is absurd. Once you beat 90% of the missions, you will not want to go back to them because they were too easy. I can honestly say out of the 20 missions in the game, there was ONE I felt the need to replay a few times to beat my score. Only one.

Where are the multiplayer modes? In this day and age on a system as powerful as XBox, if you have such a lackluster single player mode, there better be a darn good multiplayer mode. That is not the case here. Wreckless has zero 2-4 player options. It’s a real shame, too. Tag or something wouldve been great in these environments. Or even a co-op mode, anything.

So what it basically boils down to, is how much you enjoy the missions. The chase missions are ok. But the complete lack of challenge handicaps the replay as much as lack of modes.

While other games of this type, like Crazy Taxi, are fun to pick up even months after you bought it, this game is too shallow for me to recoomend anything more than a rental.

Conclusion

Great graphics, mixture of great and boring gameplay and mediocre replay value, Wreckless is a purchase for hardcore action fans and graphic whores only. All other gamers will want to sample this dish first.