Whenever you hear anyone talk about the heyday of arcade racing, they’re talking about the Burnout franchise. The series, developed by Criterion Games, which was acquired by Electronic Arts before the 2004 release of Burnout 3: Takedown, has inexplicably been left to wither (regrettably, along with Criterion itself) for decades. These games were massive hits in their time, and some of the folks behind them have gone onto try to recapture Burnout’s magic in the years since, to differing levels of success. This next attempt—Wreckreation 2, from the new studio When Tides Turn—is focused on nailing those fundamentals that Burnout understood so well.
When Tides Turn is based in the U.K. and led by Fiona Sperry, who worked on every Burnout installment as well as Criterion’s first spin on the Need for Speed franchise, 2010’s Hot Pursuit reboot. The previous Wreckreation released in 2025 to middling reception; while the Burnout roots were clear, some buggy behavior and a focus perhaps more on user-generated creativity, rather than the arcade racing basics of environmental design, physics, and visceral moment-to-moment action, seemed to hold it back. Not so for the sequel, which The Drive was briefed on last week, where we heard as much about what goes into a great handling model, or satisfying crashes, as we did about goals for the game’s community.
On the surface, Wreckreation 2 appears to be more of an evolution of the first entry. Naturally it’s built on the same codebase, which is just how game development works in an era when making anything from scratch, especially for a small team like this one, is simply a non-starter. But plenty of problem areas are apparently receiving attention from the When Tides Turn crew. For example, drifting in the first game was somewhat scripted; initiate a power slide, and you’d kind of lock into an invisible track on the road, in a late-era Ridge Racer or OutRun 2-type way.
This time around, drifting is intended to feel more free and dynamic, and work better in a city environment, like Wreckreation 2 has. Having been offered the opportunity to sample a very early, pre-alpha build of the game, I can’t say that Handling Director Ben Smith and company have quite achieved that yet. In Burnout, you always knew when a drift was starting and ending, but as it stands in Wreckreation 2, it feels 50/50 whether a quick brake-to-throttle transition will actually kick the tail out, or leave you understeering through the corner.
Crashes and vehicle contact in general are other priorities for Wreckreation 2. New visual effects and camera work combine, naturally, with the physics, to lend a weightiness and therefore believability to every shunt. This feels pretty good even at this early stage, though the trigger for what elicits a Burnout-style capital-C crash, where you’re briefly removed from the action and your card deforms in slow motion, versus a simple bump or check haven’t quite been ironed out yet.
When Tides Turn also hopes to make the game’s environments more memorable, as they were barren and rather unimaginative in the previous game. Beyond the predictable city map, the final game will include new urban districts, as well as a dockyard, some highways, backroads, and an airport, for more varied experiences. This was something that Burnout used to do particularly well, especially in Paradise, when Criterion packed a ton of verticality and diversity into what would now be considered quite a compact open world.
Playing Wreckreation 2 at this extremely young stage—the studio says it represents all of three months of work—is a strange experience. There are flashes of Burnout in there, but the polish obviously isn’t yet, so moments that you can recall feeling more satisfying long ago just kind of fall flat. The studio is at least saying all the right things. The final iteration will have at least 30 fictional cars, which sounds like a small amount for 2026, but they will be deeply upgradable, which is personally more exciting to me. An improvement to opponent AI has been promised, while longtime fans should appreciate that familiar and addictive event types, like Road Rage and Marked Man, are returning as well.
We don’t yet know when Wreckreation 2 will launch, but you can wishlist it on Steam starting today. At a time when gaming feels suffocated by an unending corporate desire to bleed players of all of their time and money, the spirit of games like Burnout feels depressingly foreign. Hopefully, the masters of the art can finally deliver it back to us.
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