Wreckreation 2 Promo Shot
Image: When Tides Turn

Whatever you might say about Three Fields Entertainment (now reformed as When Tides Turn), they're a fast-moving studio. Fitting, given their ongoing efforts to recapture the spark of Criterion Games' classic Burnout series. Some would argue they're possibly moving too fast, as yesterday they just announced the Burnout Paradise-inspired open-world racer Wreckreation 2, less than a year after the patchy, threadbare release of the original Wreckreation.

As maligned as the game was for being a bigger, less active sandbox, being a Burnout successor was never fully on the cards for the original Wreckreation. This is according to When Tides Turn's studio head Fiona Sperry, speaking with Rock Paper Shotgun yesterday. Sperry explains that Wreckreation was an experiment in giving players an "enormous amount of freedom", and building on ideas the studio was toying with ever since the launch of Burnout Paradise.

Regardless of whether that worked out in the end, Wreckreation 2 feels like it's working to a better-established template, visibly closer to the original Burnout games. Wreckreation 2 has only been a few months in development, mere weeks after the studio turned its attention from updating and patching Wreckreation. It's the same team as the previous game, just reformed as a new business entity and free of previous publisher THQ Nordic, and even partially funded via Patreon.

Sperry cites the likes of recent indie hit Far Far West as an inspiration for the studio going forward, and a major example of what a modern independent studio can do on Steam, reacting quickly to player feedback. When Tides Turn hopes to make this the start of a closer relationship with their players, aiming to start with public playtests and time-limited demos relatively early in production while gathering feedback and aiming to make the end product closer to what fans of Burnout Paradise might be envisioning.

It's a laudable goal, but it's worth noting that as fancy as the screenshots and trailer below are, and experienced as the team (many were original Criterion developers working on the Burnout series), they are a small UK-based indie outfit working within financial and mechanical limitations. Burnout Paradise was produced under EA, the most megalithic publisher at the time, with all the resources they could bring to its dense open world. With the original Wreckreation's open world feeling more like a blank canvas, doubts as to whether the rechristened team can recapture that Burnout spark.

There's no release date yet for Wreckreation 2, but you can wishlist it over on Steam now. Sign-ups are already open for the game's first public playtest event, with a minimum PC spec of a 3060 Ti with an i5-12400F (or equivalent) needed to get in on the ground floor. In the meantime, check out the exuberant debut trailer below.