Recent reviews by Pheex

I was skeptical at first, but after trying it out myself, I fully recommend Wreckfest 2.

The game looks fantastic, sounds even better and is a lot of fun to play. Performance is excellent on my aging system.

Looking at YT video's I really didn't see too many improvements to warrant a sequel, but, well, I do now.

Crashes really are more detailed than in Wreckfest 1 and the added detail to tracks really shines in the destructive gameplay.

Not much content, but being a Wreckfest 1 early access owner and seeing how well that game turned out I have absolute confidence in the delivery of much more content from the team.

I consider the price of 24 bucks an absolute STEAL for what this game WILL end up becoming. An absolute banger.

First off: This is not a polished product at the time of writing.

There are annoying bugs, the open world could be described as a basic Unreal Engine map template, the UI looks like it's from a pre-Alpha state of the game and modding is kind of a pain to figure out since file structures and menus have changed during it's development so you will run into outdated tutorials online.

It feels rough, janky and unfinished at best.

Yet, it has some strong features regardless. Interesting tools, a good amount of vehicles, decently varied missions including Ambulance work, multiple maps, airport fires, plenty of customization for your outfit and trucks once you figure out how it all works.

In a genre like this with small teams and budgets, I stilll have to give the game a positive review. There is fun to be had here, and the game is very cheap.

Objectively this is a decent, even good-ish game.

BUT pretty much only if you really, really like casual rockcrawling or have never played Snowrunner.

It's straight up Snowrunner with less variety and WAY less content.

The concept of scout based wilderness exploration is great; but the content at this time does not justify it's existence alongside Snowrunner for the price. Especially the amount of recycled content is just painful.

The missions are exceptionally boring, the little minigames come straight from a phone game.

It's buggy too, I could look through the terrain below the map in places and the game softlocked itself TWICE during a loading screen in a single evening. And there are a ton of spelling mistakes in the in game text everywhere.

The maps are pretty bland. It reminds me of Smuggler's Run maps but without the roads and towns. They are pretty for an hour but then you realize there is just nothing, NOTHING interesting there to actually explore or find besides a few checklist collectibles.

Finally the physics are not refined enough for actual authentic rock crawling. Physics are way too bouncy and cars feel too arcadey to have any actual rock crawling simulation going. Normal offroading is identical to Snowrunner. Well except you can toggle tire inflation, which is a decent addition but along with the laughably restricted drones, are not enough to warrant a stand alone game or differentiate it enough from Snowrunner.

The only really unique positive I can think of is the new roof camera view. It's actually good during climbs.

I accidentally went past the 2 hour refund window when I paused the game when I got unexpected visitors at my door.

So I will extract the drops of fun I can from this game and put some hours in, and at least there are very skilled modders out there blessing us with more variety in this game. With mods you can have a pretty good time. But I'm not going to give this a positive review because modders made a near asset flip into a more unique and fun experience.

Yeah, no. I can forgive a demo for having bad performance and being buggy, but this is the same game they sold to 200.000 people in Early Access 7 years ago then abandoned the project. Now they are rebooting the same game but without the MMO part and it's plain boring. It's Palworld and Ark, but with it's own little flying ship twist. You've seen this type of game a thousand times before.

Additional note, They are firing all the people that built this game right before it launches, while deflecting blame saying 'oh it's the industry changing' meanwhile their studio director has 8 million in assets with a net worth over 12 million lmao

Higher ups have been sharing their demo release on their Linkedins and actively encourage their social network friends to rate this game positively on Steam.

This is not some feel good indie studio. These people let down 200.00 customers with an unfinished paid product without a word and hide behind their indie status to collect 'awwws' and cheers for support. They are NOT empathy worthy.

It's technically highly impressive, it's kind of fun in bursts, it has great potential but is also slightly disappointing at this moment.

The good: Tracked vehicles are fantastic. Vehicles that have actual functions beyond driving are fantastic. Some of the graphical and technical aspects are very impressive. Terrain deformation, tracks, how relatively jank free it is to park a heavy dozer on a truck, making the truck feel heavier to drive but not tumble backwards from a decent incline.

Basically the game concept and the technical aspect are absolutely first class.

The bad: Some aspects are a a bit *too* oversimplified. Many jobs like tree cutting, asphalt placing, cable laying only have a SINGLE button to activate and deactivate the vehicle function. There is NO other user input. Tree cutting with a massive machine? Just drive to a tree press X and everything is done automatically. No need to position your claw around the tree, the entire claw arm controls are totally useless as you don't need to engage with it at all. You can auto complete a tree cut from 5 ft away. The auto complete range needs to be reduced massively, and some vehicles desperately need some more interactivity beyond pressing 'x' to activate whatever the job entails.

Even though there is no fuel mechanic, you now also can't turn off your engine even though you switch and park vehicles constantly, you can't turn on or off vehicle fog lights or beacons even though this game has active weather hindering your sight.
No damage, no fuel, no gear switching which I don't mind TOO much but in a perfect world would be there as a hard mode option. Heavy vehicles tend to bounce way too much making them sometimes feel weightless and floaty. World objects like debris, rocks all feel like weightless plastic props. When you drive over fallen trees they explode but if you fell a standing tree there is not a sound of breaking wood.

There's not even a visible driver in the seat anymore, you're controlling ghost vehicles.

Performance is also worse than I expected, but that can be forgiven due to this being a demo.

Finally the UI is pretty ugly with big colorful intrusive icons, it's kind of unintuitive and really needs an immersion feature like SR had to hide all the useless infodumping on your screen 24/7 that you don't need at all.

Despite the shortcomings I will keep my preorder, I will extract at least some fun from this game, I will probably continue to support this game as long as not more aspects are going to be simplified and maybe some immersive features are added back in from SR.

Happy birthday Lara.

It's fine. It's kinda fun and it looks -mostly- good.

I can't shake the feeling that the series might be playing it a bit too safe though.
Especially for 60 bucks plus almost 60 more for the DLC's.

Take away the graphics and dramatic story cutscenes and you still have a nearly identical game to the original Air Combat from 30 years ago. Just with some special weapons, a cockpit view and a hard turning move. Ground targets like buildings, tanks and navy destroyers are still scale models half the size of your plane. Thirty years ago that was necessary for performance, sure, but 30 years of technological advancement later and still using this just feels lazy. No new gameplay elements besides the hard turn and special weapons have been introduced, no skirmish missions to bolster replayability, no added functionality in any aspect of the game. I'm not sure if that's worthy of 30 years of video game progression we see across all other genres and series.

But maybe it doesn't want to innovate and just give the fans exactly what they expect, a simple, arcadey air combat videogame. And I guess that's ..fine at the end of the day. At least you know what you'll be buying.

If GTA 6 released tomorrow I would just keep playing Motor Town.

Mechanically there's so much to like and the presentation visually and auditory are amazing.

The problem is the horrible presentation of your objectives. The interface and tutorial do a terrible job at keeping players invested and oriented.

At this point I understand how the game works, but I can see how so, so many people stopped playing or even refunded this.

When you do understand exactly how the game works, it becomes fun again for a little bit, until you start getting bored of repeating the same maps over and over, sneaking or blasting past enemies with constant loading screens.

The game 'loop' ends up not being very fun when put in practice.

On paper this game should be great.
Open maps, fluid movement, coop, skilltrees, many weapons, decent story and good dialogue, bosses have decent mechanics to dodge.

But in practice I got too bored after about 8 hours, the missions and combat felt so, so extremely tedious.

Maps are mazes, the path indicator is terrible, there is waaay too much micromanaging inventory and stats, weapons aren't fun or satisfying to use, during combat the entire screen becomes a chaotic visual blob of elemental status effects and numbers, the interface is annoying, maps lack variety, objectives are tedious and repetitive, and so on.

I shelved the game for three years. Kept it installed but never felt like finishing it.

Today I decided to just go for it, skip all side mission and run through just the story missions to at least see the end. Even that was a huge chore because skipping side missions your power level falls behind the enemies you're fighting.

I've never been a fan of looter shooters and I played this solo, maybe this would be better with friends but this seems like the type of game me and my friends would get bored of regardless if we cooped it.

Maybe if you're with friends and both really into looter shooters.
Otherwise I can't recommend it.