Wrecked: Revenge Revisited

Several generations ago, Micro Machines was undoubtedly the big daddy of multiplayer gaming. The racing mechanic was unique, requiring you to outrun your opponents in toy vehicles to gain enough ground on them to destroy them and earn yourself a point. A refreshing change from the usual first-past-the-post approach. Micro Machines V3 was launched early in the PSOne’s lifespan, but quickly become one of the finest titles to grace the console. Introducing 3D graphics, its top selling point was the inclusion of weapons, further adding to the vehicular carnage.

It’s a real shame, then, that the series’ greatness diminished over the following years.

But then Mashed came in.

The easiest way to describe Mashed is basically Micro Machines with real cars. It brought the mayhem to proper vehicles, affixing weapons to a host of vehicles including sports cars and drag racers. Its most unique addition, however, was the ‘down-but-not-out’ system. If you had at least three people playing and you happened to be wrecked, you didn’t have to wait to respawn to wreak your revenge: a crosshair appeared on the screen, allowing you to fire homing missiles at the surviving racers, adding tension and excitement to already thrilling races. Nothing felt better than knowing you could still influence the outcome of a race even when you’d been eliminated.

In short, it was damn good fun.

So it’s excellent that Wrecked: Revenge Revisited, the spiritual successor to Mashed, has slammed its way onto Xbox Live.

Wrecked is basically the exact same as Mashed, but with a few tweaks. The first thing you’ll notice is the ability to customise your car. By earning XP via winning races, you can unlock different models, paint jobs, wheel types and liveries for your vehicle. Although the options are modest in number, it adds some much welcome customisation to the game. Also modest are the number of tracks open to you, being stripped down from Mashed’s 15 to only six here. It’s understandable for an XBLA game to be less packed, but considering the calibre of the tracks in its predecessor, it’s a little disappointing to have the entire tracklist fills up less than one screen here.

Your first port of call will probably be the single player, which turns out to be a massive disappointment. Rather than the expected regular gameplay just with bots instead of people, instead you get a series of ‘challenges’ of different types, requiring you to do certain things, such as picking up a certain number of collectables, surviving a lap with your throttle stuck open or placing mines in certain areas of the track. It’s pretty dull: why would you ever want to set a laptime against an AI ghost car when you could blow up your competitors instead? It’s a strange and disheartening design choice.

So you’ll go online, which thankfully retains all the best bits from Mashed.  You’ll soon be having tight competitions with other racers, smashing them off cliff tops, blowing them to pieces with the bolstered selection of weaponry and zooming forward to take the lead…

Assuming you can actually get into a game, that is. Despite its awesomeness, not many people seem to play Wrecked, which means that you’ll be spending a long time trying to find a match and not caring how numerous or skilled your opponents are when you finally get into a lobby. Even worse is the fact that online races are pretty laggy. It doesn’t make it unplayable, but it’s mighty annoying when your finely-aimed attacks miss or – even worse – go straight through your target or your opponents unfairly gain a speed boost, rocketing them ahead of you. It’s just not a patch on the experience the offline multiplayer of Mashed had to offer.

Which is why, just like in the golden days, Wrecked is best enjoyed in the company of others in the same room as you. Get a full game on the go and the experience is brilliant. Friendships will turn to rivalries and back again over the course of a lap; players will yell as they thwart one another’s attempts to gain a crucial few points; you’ll be in stitches as the underdog somehow manages to spectacularly pull ahead and win the race in a blaze of glory. Even if you’re playing with only one other person, the joy to be had when playing with friends is hard to mimic online or indeed with any other games. In short, Wrecked is simply sublime.