Wreckfest is a Racing Game developed by Bugbear Entertainment and published by THQ Nordic. It is a Spiritual Successor to the FlatOut series, featuring a return to the series' roots as a more realistic racing game (though possessing a prominent silly side with a number of joke vehicles and bizarre challenges).
The action in Wreckfest is inspired by real-life amateur motorsports disciplines, including banger racing, Scandinavian folkracing and rallycross, fused with the chaos and destruction of FlatOut.
Rather than driving a glitzy, nitro-fueled supercar, the player will usually have to make use of a fresh-out-of-the-junkyard clunker with the interior stripped out and a roll cage welded in, and rather than punishing the player for racing in an unsportsmanlike manner, the game heavily encourages wrecking other drivers in the most brutal ways possible.
The game features a singleplayer Career, a singleplayer Tournament mode (which features randomly-generated events that pit the player against AI, sometimes also scoring them relative to the scores of other players), robust online multiplayer and the ability to create a custom event against the AI or alone, for Time Trial purposes (with per-track online leaderboards tracking your best times).
Tropes featured in Wreckfest include:
- Abandoned Mine: A couple of tracks, such as Boulder Bank Circuit, Sandstone Raceway, and Savolax Sandpit, are based out of the access roads of a disused mine.
- Absurdly Short Level: Mudford Motorpark is the shortest track of all at only 419 yards, where the typical lap time is less than twenty seconds.
- The Alleged Car: Given that the game revolves around competitions that involve heavily damaging your car, this is expected. Most of the cars in the game qualify in one way or another, with visibly missing lights or grilles, crude welds and heavily dented body panels and garish demolition derby slogans (depending on the player's customization).
- Special mention goes to the vehicles available to players just starting out, such as the Killerbee, a tiny Fiat-inspired rear-engine compact which has unruly steering and a terrible top speed, and is the cheapest vehicle in the game.
- Several of the vanilla and DLC joke vehicles also count, with even their status as 'cars' being somewhat questionable. In addition to what is advertised as the 'world's fastest Bumper Car', there's the Lawnmower, which is essentially just that- a small riding mower souped-up so it can function as a go-kart- in addition to several homemade vehicles like the 'Pocket Rocket' (a Power Wheels-esque small electric kid's car with a real engine installed), the 'Honeypot' (a go-kart with a wooden outhouse used as the passenger compartment) and the 'Sofa Car' (a motorized sofa on wheels).
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Several special events will reward you with cosmetic liveries and parts for certain vehicles. In addition, completing the career gives you a gold "number 1" livery for the Speedbird.
- Many smaller Tournament rewards are additional liveries and other cosmetics for cars, as well.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Of a sort. If you lose two wheels, your car is immediately declared wrecked, which does save you from having to limp around the course and ensures you aren't left totally helpless after losing both steering and/or drive wheels.
- Artistic License – Sports: While both banger racing and folkracing involve full-contact vehicular mayhem, Wreckfest's take on these forms of racing permit (and encourage) incredibly dangerous driving that would realistically put everyone involved in the hospital or a coffin, or at least get the aggressor banned from the sport. Of course, these lax internal regulations make for much more exciting races.
- Driving the course backwards at top speed, using excessively heavy weaponized cars (or alternatively, removing your roll cage for extra speed), and doing things like "cornerbombing" (cutting a corner while someone else is taking it to T-bone them) would get you disqualified or even arrested in real life, but they're an everyday sight on servers that don't specifically ban it.
- You would also most likely never see American muscle cars, Japanese subcompacts, and European sedans all sharing the same track even in a demolition derby.
- Ditto the go-karts and oversized vehicles like buses and big rigs which can only race vehicles their own size during special events (the upgraded variants of the heavyweights, featuring ludicrously heavy snowplow ram attachments, would probably never be allowed to race anywhere).
- Big Badass Rig: The Big Rig is actually a race-converted version with lightweight bumpers and a giant rear spoiler.
- The Tournament-unlockable Doom Rig is similar, but replaces the race-spec mods with a giant skull and Spikes of Doom on the back, and features a heavy ram on the front.
- Bowdlerization: The Carmageddon tracks initally had zombies that you could run over for points, much like the original game. (Though that itself was bowdlerized compared to the versions of the game that had human enemies.) The zombies were abruptly patched out a month later, leaving the maps feeling fairly barren as a result. Reasons aren't fully known, but it's easy to assume someone complained over what was previously a family-friendly game getting violent (if heavily pixelated) content added. A mod for the Steam release
does exist for adding them back, at least, with the option to use humans instead thrown in for good measure. - Car Fu: Wholly encouraged; smashing up other cars will get you points which earns you more experience. This is also the entire point of demolition derbies.
- Character Roster Global Warming: Wreckfest has a lot of bulky, slow cars in the base game. The first season of downloadable content added only two wagons (Wardigger and Vandal), and the second season included a single large vehicle, the Step Van; all other downloadable content vehicles (and most Tournament reward cars) tend to be fast and agile muscle cars or coupes.
- Combat Breakdown: In many a last-car-running demolition derby (and a few races on particularly dangerous tracks like Big Valley Speedway's Outer Oval Loop), the constant crashes will wear everybody's cars down until only a few barely-running cars remain.
- Company Cross References: A stage from Rally Trophy appears in the list of maps. Be warned: a single lap takes about six minutes. The Firefly and Boomer RS also get tournament cosmetics to make them resemble how they looked in that game.
- Construction Vehicle Rampage: The drivable Harvester is an extremely heavy, but slow combine harvester. It's considered a 'Special'-class vehicle and so is not usable in the vast majority of singleplayer events or multiplayer servers, but in any event where you can drive it you can expect to take out more than a few other cars due to its sheer bulk and durability (unless that event happens to be a race event, in which case the best you can do is try to blockade the road- it's so slow that you have zero chance of catching another car in an open environment, let alone winning a race, unless your opposition consists solely of other Harvesters). A large enough hit can also flip the combine and throw the rider. There's also the Hellvester from the Tournament Mode, which has all the durability of the vanilla Harvester but with significantly upgraded performance, making it much more viable for racing.
- Cool Car: Several vehicles have race-modified variants available that look much smoother and well-kept compared to their rusty derby counterparts. This is especially true of many vehicles in the Tournament store. However, many of these vehicles are also exceedingly fragile, making full-contact tracks and demolition derbies far more dangerous.
- Creator Cameo: A large balloon in the shape of Bugbear's logo hangs over Drytown Desert Circuit.
- Defeat Means Playable: Want your own Killerbee S, Roadslayer GT or Big Rig? You'll need to unlock their corresponding events in the Career and beat them in a race to get them added to your garage.
- Inverted with the Boomer RS, where you have to beat a highly customized base Boomer in the RS to unlock the latter for general use.
- Design-It-Yourself Equipment: Aside from painting them, you can customize your vehicles with a wide range of performance parts and body armor, with downloadable content expanding your cosmetic options even further.
- Discard and Draw: Taking off armor and removing a vehicle's roll cage will make it lighter and easier to handle, though it will be more fragile and susceptible to being wrecked by opponents. Investing in armor will make your vehicle slower and harder to handle, but make it hit with greater force and increase its ability to survive collisions.
- This can be Downplayed by investing in performance parts as well, but the relationship will still be present; stripping your car's armor will always make it go faster, as it will increase its power-to-weight ratio dramatically.
- Don't Try This at Home: The start-up screen implores the player to keep their destructive driving within the game:"All events depicted in this game are fictitious. We do not condone reckless driving or rude driving manners. Always adhere to the traffic laws, be mindful of the road users and drive safely. If you want to race, take it to the track."
- Double Unlock: Several vehicles available for purchase in the market are only available after reaching a certain player level, and you still need to have the credits to buy them once they're unlocked for purchase.
- Downloadable Content: Vehicle packs are added every so often, which grant new cars for you to drive and wreck.
- Those who don't want to buy the packs aren't left out; new tracks are added as well, which are free for all players alongside the earnable Tournament vehicles and cosmetics.
- Everything's Deader with Zombies: Pixelated zombies (and zombie cows) roam around the Carmageddon themed maps, which you can always run over to splatter. They don't appear on any other maps and have almost no effect on normal gameplay.
- Fauxrrari: All over the place. Apart from a few of the joke vehicles, which are homemade go-kart like constructions, every car in the game is a fairly faithful recreation of a real-life car, none of which are explicitly named-probably because real-life auto companies would be reluctant to give their licenses to a game that involves cars getting smashed up with reckless abandon, even if the models depicted in the game have been out of production for years. Some vehicles have names that allude to their real-life counterparts, such as the car on the cover art — the "Speedbird", which is based on a 1970 Pontiac Firebird or the "El Matador", itself inspired by the Chevrolet El Camino .
- Fragile Speedster: Many banger racers (such as Boomer and Bulldog) have great power-to-weight and fast acceleration, but suffer from being flimsily built and take major performance hits when armor is applied.
- The Raiden DLC car is an even better example, being a fast and nimble mid-engine sports car that disintegrates in a heavy collision.
- Gang Up on the Human: While the AI don't exactly ignore each other while racing, they especially target the player, focusing on wrecking them over their fellow computer drivers.
- Guest Fighter: The Eagle-R from Carmageddon: Max Damage makes an appearance as a special Tournament reward car, complete with two additional stages from the original Macintosh release.
- The Firefly and Boomer RS also have tournament cosmetic bundles that make them resemble their licensed counterparts (the Saab 96 and Ford Escort) as they appeared in Rally Trophy.
- The Hilarity of Hats: There are a variety of silly hats you can put on your car available as purely cosmetic downloadable content, including a jester's hat, a missle, and a pile of crap.
- Hot Paint Job: Available for a vast selection of vehicles as a livery.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Done with damage settings, which change how cars are damaged by each other and the enviroment, altering things such as the severity of collisions. These difficulties are Normal, Intense, Realistic, and Extreme.
- Improbably Cool Car: There are numerous vehicles available that you would never expect to see in a demolition derby or banger race, including any of the well-maintained Tournament reward cars like the Rocket-RX and Super Venom. This also extends to some of the cars available in the core game and downloadable content, include the Sunrise Super, Razor, and Stellar.
- In-Vehicle Invulnerability: Nobody is ever injured when they're involved in horrific collisions in cars with no rollcages screaming down tracks at ludicrous speeds - the worst that happens is that they're flung from one of the smaller vehicles.
- Mighty Glacier: Any kind of vehicle in the Wagon class is just about guaranteed to be this, being exceptionally heavy and slow to accelerate and turn. Many American muscle cars available are this as well.
- Almost any vehicle can be made into one of these by giving it full derby armor, which will incur a major performance hit in return for being able to survive most major collisions.
- This status is especially true of the Harvester and School Bus, which are among the heaviest vehicles in the game but require great care to drive due to their awful handling.
- No Communities Were Harmed: Many tracks are based off of an existing one in real life. For example, Rosenheim Raceway is based off of the Estering in Buxtehude, Germany.
- Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: There's an event that requires you to use the Muddigger exclusively. Completing it unlocks a round of parts that are presented as cosmetic... including a special pair of heavy-duty tires that actually increase the vehicle's top speed, as they are significantly wider than anything else available for it.
- The Dirtshot and Dragdog Tournament bundles also provide non-cosmetic parts, especially the powerful engines and the Dirtshot's off-road tires.
- Power Levels: A car's Performance Points represent its power to weight ratio and dictate which class it belongs to, from D to A.
- Retraux: The Carmageddon stages are more-or-less ports of the original stages from Carmageddon's 1997 release, complete with the same blocky buildings and roads.
- The Rally Trophy stage is also a direct port of one of the routes from the game.
- Rice Burner: Can be induced by the player through cosmetic exhaust systems, rear wings, front lips, the occasional widebody kit and more. Lampshaded by some descriptions;Rear Spoiler Description: "A rear spoiler is useful in that if you have one fitted, everyone can see that you know how to go seriously fast. Depending on the size, it can also provide migrating birds a nice place to rest."
- Pimped-Out Car: As above, this can be induced with the game's vast customization options and the livery editor. This is especially true of cars that have unique cosmetics available to them, such as the RebelRat.
- Secret Character: Several vehicles are only available in later sections of the Career with no hints that they exist aside from occasionally being driven by computer players. Vehicles of this ilk include the Boomer RS, the Roadslayer GT, and the Venom.
- Shows Damage: Aside from the Subsystem Damage described below, cars can have paint scratched off, their bodies dented and mangled, various parts loosened or lost, and even have wheels completely torn off.
- Silliness Switch: A good few options are available to make Wreckfest significantly sillier, but the most extreme of these is Extreme damage, which cranks up the visual damage to truly ridiculous levels - cars can be flat as pancakes and still run just fine!
- Soundtrack Dissonance: Some of the songs are dark, brooding, and/or gloomy.... while some of the events can be really silly, like riding on a lawn mower, bumper cars, "sofa car", school bus, or even a Power Wheels-esque kiddy car.
- Subsystem Damage: In addition to a standard 100-point healthbar, car damage is tracked across four different armor sections (front, back, left, and right) and five different performance components (engine, brakes, suspension, and transmission, and each individual wheel). Taking damage to a body panel reduces its effectiveness as armor and subsequent hits to that area will do more damage.
- Damaging one of the performance components will reduce its performance- damaging the engine reduces your power, transmission damage slows your shift speed, suspension or wheel damage screws up your handling and damaged brakes reduce your braking ability.
- Armor can be strengthened by installing heavier parts at the cost of performance. This also decreases the damage taken from hitting other cars in general due to Newton's second law, though using the 'realistic' damage setting causes heavier cars to take more damage if they hit static obstacles, for the same reason.
- Zig-Zagged with Extreme damage; subsystem damage is still active but cars no longer have health and can be damaged with no performance hit at times... until they're reduced to two wheels, in which case they'll spontaneously cease functioning.
- Unnecessary Roughness: The game's points system rewards extremely aggressive driving, with the damage dished out to opponents translating into points that impact the experience awarded for races. Even the AI gets in on the fun, spinning out each other with reckless abandon.
- Wacky Racing: Some Career and Tournament events feature these, such as events where the player is given a Big Rig against a field of Lawnmowers or the January 2021 Tournament event, which puts the player in the Pocket Rocket against a field of real cars... but gives them the ability to launch car-sized giant snowballs.
- Several vehicles also allude to real-life examples of this, such as allowing the player to race Hearses, 'double-deckers' (cars with another smaller car welded on top) and agricultural equipment like the Lawnmower and combine Harvester.
- Wearing a Flag on Your Head: Several cars have paintjobs that give you the ability to do this. The starting vehicle, the Rocket, comes with a rather ostentatious Old Glory paintjob by default.
- A Winner Is You: Beating career mode gets you an achievement and a message saying "Congratulations! You have completed the career!". That's it.
- What a Piece of Junk: While many cars present the opportunity to look terrible and run-down, especially if the player elects to remove components like bumpers, grilles, and windows and use a worn-out paint job, the vast majority can be very fast if the player also installs the best performance-increasing parts. In fact, removing all armor components (which includes bumpers) from the cars actually makes them faster, since it lowers the weight.
- Wreaking Havok: Half the point of the game is the extremely robust physics engine, which allows for a great degree of realistic car deformation, which features into demolition derbies but also into Banger races (where damage will more-or-less realistically impact the car's component performance). Also features in various track decorations such as tire stacks and wooden fences which can be crushed and broken apart by the player's car.
- Exaggerated with the Wrecking Playground, a remake of Wreckfest's original physics demo designed specifically for goofing around with the game's damage modeling technology.
