WRECKREATION

This exhaustive construction kit may lead to Burnout

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For those who've spent the past 17 years paying repeat visits to one of Burnout Paradise's many iterations, blitzing around its open world and daring to contemplate what a modern equivalent might look like, Wreckreation may have some answers. This game from Three Fields Entertainment, a team formed by members of Criterion (already responsible for spiritual successor Dangerous Driving), quickly convinces us that every effort has been made to recapture the petrol-fumed highs of its inspirations. And if the racing sparks nostalgia as soon as we hit the asphalt, there's an added layer of creativity to dig into as well: as the name implies, this is a game of building and destroying.

Constructed around a sprawling fictional state divided into four counties, Wreckreation begins with a vast play area: 400 square kilometres of map with 450km of roads to race and build upon. At the core of this playground is the 'Game DJ', a popup menu offering you full control of the world and everything in it, including the placement of ramps, structures and thousands of objects, such as trees, dinosaurs and giant rubber ducks.

Crucially, this is all part of general play: born from the team working collaboratively in-engine during development, the feature evolved into a core component. What started with the simple dropping of a ramp for a friend to jump over became the driving force of Wreckreation: collaborative online play. It's about asking what we can build together, Sperry says, “but most importantly, what do we want to do together?”

During a fairly brisk demo session, we get through a lot of mileage. There's a startling amount to see in Wreckreation, with much of our time devoted to perusing the Live Mix, an impressive array of customisation features that enables us to build on top of the prefabricated environment. Taking a page from