Wreckfest is truly one of those feel good stories of the late 2010s in terms of games stuck in the purgatory of development hell.

Bugbear found modest success in the destructive arcade racing series Flatout, responsible for the first two entries in the franchise plus Ultimate Carnage (and HD version of Flatout 2 complete with some additional content) that have since become cult classics for their impressive levels of vehicular destruction (especially for the time) and personalized AI -each with their own levels of aggression, speed and behaviour, also impressive for its time- and just general audiovisual spectacle of crashing into other cars, causing explosions and hearing the screams of your victims amidst the crunching of metal on metal violence.

Then Bugbear lost the rights to the franchise that had gotten them the attention they deserved, and the series has been in the doldrums ever since. Flatout 4 was a competent but boring entry, and there was no 3rd entry. Trust me, it's better that there wasn't. But Bugbear still had a penchant for destructive racing games, and after a few years, were ready to take a crack at a brand new project.

That project was, of course: Next Car Game. Somewhat generic title aside, the title promised a lot. It had a fantastic damage model that looked spectacular. Perhaps not quite as sophisticated as BeamNG.Drive would be, but unlike the sandbox driver, Next Car Game was intended to make full use of the damage model by building the game around it, with the Wreckfest suffix added to the title to prove it. It was going to be a fantastic spiritual successor to Flatout, made by it's original team, with brand new technology to boot it.

But big ambitions rarely go to plan, and sadly, Next Car Game was no exception.

Bugbear did not have the money needed to fully realize their ambitious new entry after losing their old publisher, and once their original Kickstarter failed to meet its original goal, they turned to Steam's Early Access programme to try and raise funding, which got them an extra $1million in funding. But in an era of increasingly expensive development, that proved to be insufficient, and after the coffers ran dry, development slowed to a trickle, and the game would remain dormant for a few years.

And that would have been the end of it, in most circumstances. Another game lost to the development hell of abandoned early access titles, brimming with promise but unable to be sustained into an official release, with many fans and early buyers losing faith and others turning on the project entirely. A sad end, or at least it would have been, had they not found a saviour after a few years out in the wilderness.

That saviour turned out to be the revived THQ, now going by THQNordic after Nordic Games acquired everyone's favourite published of sixth-gen licensed tie-in game. With a new publisher and a fresh injection of much-needed cash, the project was rebranded simply as Wreckfest, and to the surprise of many (myself included, as I hadn't followed the development closely), a completed game launched in mid-June 2018, with console ports following the next year.

And oh boy, did we get a complete gem of a game.

Remember how I said this game was the spiritual successor to Flatout and shared parallels with BeamNG.Drive? Well, Wreckfest strikes, in my opinion, a wonderful balance between the two. It is definitely more serious and grounded than it's arcadey predecessor, with weightier physics, meaty collisions, and a wide plethora of cars and tracks that wouldn't be too out of place in a racer of this genre. You've got your beaters, from hatchbacks or dinged up coupes and muscle cars, you've got big land barge sedans and vans, and tracks ranging from short tarmac ovals and twisties to dirt tracks.

Pretty tame stuff, even with the inclusion of derby arenas and demolition derby modes, you would think. But the game stays true to its routes by knowing how to have fun with itself. What I haven't mentioned are the sheer variety of zany vehicles. This includes such oddities like:

-a big rig
-a motorhome
-a double-decker car
-a bumper car
-a lawnmower
-a combine harvester
-a school bus
-a big rig
-a motorized sofa
-a motorized outhouse
-probably a few other weird inclusions, it's 2AM as I'm writing this and don't have the game open

And it doesn't stop with the vehicles, some of the tracks are equally nutty, with exaggerated figure of eight courses that just invite you to smash into your rivals, courses with diverging routes, courses with big jumps, courses with rollercoaster levels of banked corners, hell there's even a course with a gosh dang loop-de-loop in it.

And it never stops being fun. Sure, the campaign can be beaten in a few hours and it's much like Forza Motorsport where you do a bunch of invitationals and cups with specific vehicle requirements, but that's just fine when the core gameplay is as good as it is. The sheer delight of wrecking your opponent into a wall, flipping them over or T-boning them at full speed at a crossover is as exhilarating as desperately trying to keep the smouldering remains of your nearly totalled car from being finished off by much beefier, much angrier opponents.

And regardless of whether or not you're done with the campaign, you can customize the quick events to your hearts content. Want to keep your dinky bumper car from being flattened by a 23 angry buses on a short oval? You can do that! Want to do a down to earth race on a twisty half-dirt half-asphalt course with beaten up American muscle? You can do that! You want to completely randomize all your opponents on the deathloop and throw complete and utter disregard for everything and everyone, yourself included? You can do that!

Your event choices are as varied as your vehicle customization; sure it's not the most varied but you've got plenty for tens of hours, whether you want to do it in long durations or if you want to pick the game up for 20 minutes of wanton wrecking.

And that's about the best way to sum up the game, I feel. The core is so good you can do whatever you want with it, and the game is constantly adding new content to keep your choices varied. Sure, the season passes aren't my cup of tea, but it helps fund the extra content and the ports to both the Switch and the newest consoles, so as long as more people get to enjoy the game then really, that's all I ask for.

So go have fun with this fun bit of simulation vehicular violence. It's less than 30$, which isn't that much more expensive than attending a demolition derby at a local fairgrounds or short track. It's also much more fun.