Wrecked Revenge Revisited Review

Too bad your insurance won’t let you write this one off.

Is it bad that when I went looking for more info on Wrecked: Revenge Revisited that I couldn’t find any mention of it on the developer’s website? Maybe they were busy finishing the game, I thought, so I head on over to the publisher’s website and find nothing there either. Is this a sign? Are all parties involved really trying to cut and run before the game is even released? If they have any sense, that’s exactly what they did as this combat racer couldn’t be any more appalling if it tried.

Single Player

Wrecked: Revenge Revisited is a combat racing game that tries to add some original ideas to the genre but completely fails everywhere else. Instead of racing to see who finishes first in a series of laps, Wrecked tasks you with wrecking your opponents in a series of heats or stages and gaining points doing so. The first driver to ten points wins.

One of many camera angles that you don't get to choose.

Each stage goes until only one car is left standing, that driver receives two points, the runner up gets one and the bottom two have a point taken away. It is an interesting formula that could have been fun if anything else in the game had worked. At all. What you’ll notice right away is that the camera doesn’t take up the typical follow position that it does in most racing games, instead the camera angle changes based on the action. This would be alright if the steering controls weren’t contextually linked to the direction the camera is pointing. The result is you steering your car off the track or into a wall because the direction you’re trying to turn is no longer the direction you want to be turning in thanks to a camera change. The camera also likes to zoom out drastically and unexpectedly to keep all of the cars on one screen. Even in online multiplayer where there is no need of this.

If you can managed to keep your car on the track there are a number of weapons available for pick up such as machine guns, mortars, tazers and barrels. All but the tazer, or shocker as they call it, are incredibly hard to hit anyone with and it’s always due to their design. For instance, the barrels are supposed to roll off of your  trunk and hit the car behind you but what happens instead is that the barrels fly way up in the air first, clearing anyone who is within three or four car lengths of you. This usually includes everyone in the race.

Getting lost in this jungle would be a lot more fun.

Your only real strategy for success is to try to stay on the track and let the camera take everyone else out. With only six maps across single player and multiplayer you don’t get a whole lot of content for your $15 but you won’t really want to stick around for very long anyway.

Multiplayer

Wrecked: Revenge Revisited does offer four player local and online multiplayer but the online system is almost as annoying as playing the game. When trying to find a game it only tries once, giving you a messaged that the game is full, or not found, in which case you have to manually back out and tell it to search again. During online matches my Xbox 360 hard locked twice (something it never does, it’s in perfect health) and three times everyone in my game was inexplicably booted. Good luck.

Closing Comments

Wrecked: Revenge Revisited is apathy at its finest; Supersonic Software obviously don’t care whether their game is any good or not. This game is broken at its core and a shoddy multiplayer system only adds to the frustration. Not to mention that it is on the Xbox Live Arcade for an insulting $15. I couldn’t recommend this game for one dollar, let alone fifteen.

Score: 2/10