Wreckreation melds Burnout’s anarchy with GTA Online’s airborne marble runs, but it needs a lot more polish

It's often pointless to want a game series to return after it's been abandoned on a huge pile of dormant titles. I try and fail regularlyto stop yearning for the new Midnight Club, the new Motorstorm or the new Burnout.

Mainly because it means that when the game is like Destruction it's tempting to go into it with high expectations, inflated by a rosy longing for something the game most likely isn't. Despite its many anarchic arcade racing elements and the credits of developer Three Fields Entertainment at Criterion, Wrecreation isn't Burnout coming home after all those years of killing in the wilderness.

This is fine. The problem is that, until now, I've struggled to enjoy what this is – the open world metamorphosis of Burnout and GTA Online.Trackmania-The hallmark of customizable airway racing. This idea has the potential to unite fans on both sides of the tread coin. At the moment, due to many hang-ups, delivery is not possible.

Starting from the ground up, the bones of modern Burnout are present here, from classic road rages to racing and even Paradise-style rules of the road. The rush they offer is not as enjoyable as it could be. It all starts and ends, as in all racing games, with the car's control model.

This was my main stumbling block in the latest arcade racer, Three Fields. Dangerous drivingand so it remains. Instead of the expertly tuned smooth-but-heavy ride that made Burnout's machines so addictive, Wrecreation's rides handle more tightly than the corpse of a man who swallowed an entire wad of Viagra before snorting it.

They feel good and have a great sense of speed when moving in perfectly straight lines, but other than the odd acceleration at top speed, they don't tend to drift more than a few yards at a time. Things seem to have gotten a little better now that the “unnatural speed bug” in the game has been fixed. first patchbut I still wouldn't call it as intuitive as it needs to be. Be that as it may, the car customization may be suitable for more straightforward racers for people who care about tire wear, but the best fun-oriented arcade games Wreckreation strives to place among the racers in style as well as speed.

The problems extend to an even more important aspect for any racer looking to harness a bit of Burnouty's appeal. Colliding with other cars is awkward. A side kick and a sluggish bounce pushes them back a few inches, usually leading to a takedown only after two or three bumps push them to the edge of the road. Killing traffic is still possible, but I haven't been able to pull off any of the classic kills in Burnout yet because Wrecreation's physics don't seem set up to allow two cars to rub against each other long enough.

This is made even more striking by the hilariously short-lived nature of many of the road rages – events in which you have to destroy a set number of hostile vehicles by running them off the road or onto obstacles – hand in hand with the fact that during these events a maximum of three enemy vehicles spawn at once. Some of my fights gave me a minute to get eight takedowns. It takes about ten seconds to catch up with the three cars that appear from this bat, and naturally, once you destroy them all, you will have to catch up with new enemies that appear. Despite my well-honed Burnout muscle memory, I regularly hit a wall of failure with rage unlocked barely halfway – if that's it – up the difficulty curve of Wrecreation's driver's license-based leveling system.

I'm also not a fan of the rage variation that Wreckreation offers to try and spice up a relatively small number of event types. These are penalty road rages in which a car that you are not allowed to remove buzzes around you like a wasp. Take it away and you'll lose 15 precious seconds from the time you have to commit a regular road rage, making the main problem with regular rages an even bigger problem.

As a result, I got most of my enjoyment out of the regular racing and crashing – the latter is the name the game slaps on Paradise's burning routes, which are time trials that give you customized versions of cars you already own. Except for some sections that feel like 2010s magic. Need for Speed: Hot PursuitDirected by Three Fields' Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry, the sprawling map of rural roads suffers from a fair amount of visual dullness in terms of the vistas you can drive past. I found a junkyard and an airfield that were fun exceptions.

The reason for this is almost certainly the trajectories of the sky in the game. Instead of just driving through courses designed by the developers, Wreckreation gives you the tools to fill the world with your own races and stunts. Each session features a unique world controlled by the lead player, with the ability to create it with friends if you connect online.

This sounds good, but in practice there are some problems. Making a standard point-to-point road race or an off-road race on the terrain designed by Three Fields works well. On the other hand, I have yet to create a sky track race where the game will allow me to race or save. Laying out the track itself using the game's “live mix” building mode works, then you need to add the start, end, and breakpoints in between. That's all I understood. With standard race creation I should be prompted to save or try out my race when leaving the live mix, but instead I just lose everything.

Watching the written tutorials in the game didn't help me figure out what I was doing wrong, and there seem to be options to either save or force the game to trigger the error while you plot your route. It's possible it's an obvious hangup I'm missing, but the fact that it seems pretty easy to get stuck in Wreckreation's brightest draw is far from ideal. It's a shame because it's a lot of fun just throwing around what turns into a pretty diverse roster of cars with some decent surface level customization options around the sky track pieces I've collected.

I've spent six hours with Wreckreation so far – mostly in single player, given that I couldn't join an online session I wasn't running without the game hitting a constantly freezing loading screen. This could be something great with a lot of work and polish, and I can't help but think that given all the moving parts of the game, Three Fields might have been better off opting for the same type of gradual build through Early Access as Rackfest 2 is currently running.

In fact, I think a lot of the people who might end up liking what Wrecreation might become will be long gone by the time it reaches its full potential, if it ever does. Some may stick with it and wait, but many will quickly decide it's pointless.