Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions

"A game with great graphics that is held down by bad controls"

When I rented this game, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't have any hopes of it being good or bad, fun or boring, long or short. I rented it out of curiosity, not to mention the fact that Metroid Prime, Star Fox Adventures, and Pikmin were all rented out to people who got them before me. ;) What I ended up getting was a game that looks like it has a good amount of potential, but ends up falling on it's face.

Wreckless takes place some time in a rather messed near-future. You are some special ops people or some cops, I can't be to sure. You are given various jobs of either destroying cars, getting some place without being destroyed, and occasional race, etc. Outside of that there isn't much else to say about the plot, what little bit of it this game has. On to the categories.

Story: 1/10
Not much of a story here as I said. Just some quickly thrown together excuse to drive around wrecklessly(pun intended)

Music: 8/10
I'm rather indifferent in this category. In a game like this where violence, destruction, and screaming by standards take up most of the focus, the music generally isn't a factor. Though the music in this game doesn't take anything away from it, and it's rather effective.

Sound: 10/10
I've rarely seen a game on next-gen systems that screws up here. All the sound effects are fairly real sounding. Explosions sound like real explosions, breaking glass sounds like breaking glass, gun shots sound like real gun shots, women screaming as you run over them sound like....well, you get the picture.

Graphics: 10/10
This is where I was most impressed by this game, it's graphics. I've seen my share of games on the Gamecube where many of the figures and characters look very polygonal and they can be seen though some times. This has been strangely true of racing/racing type games (see Need for Speed 2 as an example) especially. No, a lot of detail was put into making this game look as good as possible. All the various vehicles look almost real. When they move around, the shadowing and light is done perfectly. Even various objects in the background and foreground look really good, including the people. To bad they spent a little to much of their efforts on the graphics alone......

Control: 1/10
I was disgusted with the controls of this game. Controlling your car is damn near impossible half of the time. There's no problem accelerating or braking, It's all in the turning. Unless you start turning from about a mile back from where you intend to, you're gonna miss it and usually hit a wall. It's quite hard to beat a game when you can't stay on the road.

Fun factor/replayablity: 3/10
This game was unreasonably short. Once you beat the game on one player you won't want to again. Two player mode is lacking originality and fun. Practically every one of them is player one chases/out runs player two. If this game had a ''destroy as much you can'' mode, this category would go up 3 points......

Rent/buy
Rent it, most definitely. It might entertain you for the weekend, but it's not worth 30 bucks or whatever this game costs. Once you beat it this game will collect dust on your shelf.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/21/02, Updated 06/30/03