Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions

A reckless driving adventure.

NA release: 20th November 2002
EU release: 22nd November 2002
JP release: N/A
Developer: Bunkasha Games
Publisher: Activision
NGC Magazine Score: 51%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

Drive a car, smash into things, blow stuff up, run over people at will. A silly vehicle game like this should, at the very least, be mildly amusing and distracting, but Wreckless manages to make all of this incredibly dull. Bizarrely, there’s also a full city to explore, yet you pick missions from a menu and can’t deviate much from the set path that the missions require, something made even worse by how the large arrow showing where you need to go ignores this required path and instead constantly tells you to go the wrong way.

Part of the problem is that steering is extremely unresponsive and the cars are all very slow. You do have what the game claims to be a “boost”, but this is actually a “slo-mo” feature, which is hardly needed when the game is so slow in the first place. The missions are also boring and made worse by the design of the city itself, as little thought was put into how it would be used by the missions. Most vehicle games exaggerate the size of streets to accommodate for exciting racing and dodging, but in Wreckless, you have to just smash through everything.

But when you do smash into things, it’s immensely unsatisfying. Some objects just crumble into dust, while others just don’t move at all – you just phase right through them. If the game was speedy, it might be something that could be overlooked, but when the game is slow you notice it constantly. The strangest thing is that some objects you have to smash are behind objects that you just phase through, which suggests that very little thought was put into how the map was made and how the missions were designed.

Wreckless takes what could have been a short but thrilling little game and turns it into nothing but tedium. There’s a strange feeling like the game was originally supposed to be a GTA clone with little focus on driving before they ran out of money and only had the city and some poor driving mechanics to try and make a game out of.