Wreckfest Beginner’s Tips: Career, Tuning, Challenges & More

"I'm gonna wreck it!"

Wreckfest

After being available on PC for a while, Wreckfest, Bugbear’s return to the destruction derby racing genre, has finally launched on PS4 and Xbox One, offering a fully fledged career mode, a fantastic car deformation engine and the ability to crush a group of 20+ lawnmowers while driving a combine harvester. Mine is bigger than yours.

For racing game players who might be more accustomed to the likes of Forza Motorsport or GT Sport, Wreckfest is a whole other beast, so if you’re planning on getting behind the wheel of one of Wreckfest’s assortment of battered bangers, we’ve got a few tips that should make your life a bit easier. A bit.

 

1. Be Aggressive, B-E Aggressive

Wreckfest

This is an obvious one, but one that needs stating: be aggressive. Wreckfest actively rewards you for getting stuck in and smashing your competition to pieces, so do that. If the car ahead of you slows down for a corner, rear end them, as you’ll get EXP and will often force them off the track while stopping short enough to take the corner with no problems.

The tagline “drive hard, die last” isn’t just a bit of snappy marketing, as the game’s mechanics support those words. The faster you are moving when you collide with another car, the more damage you do to them and the less you take. Also, if you’re moving faster, you’re harder to hit, so it pays to put the pedal to the metal.

It also pays to channel your inner Cobra Kai by showing absolutely no mercy. Vehicles in Wreckfest have an overall amount of health, along with armour on the front, back and both sides. If a car loses armour on one side, they take more overall damage, so in essence, you should “sweep the leg”.

 

2. Check Your Events

The career mode offers a wide variety of event types, including banger racers, destruction derbies, more traditional folk racing and special events, which we’ll get to. For derby events, it’s worth checking whether or not the event is a deathmatch or a last man standing affair. Deathmatches are point based and rewards constant destruction, while the last man standing events are only concerned with the sole survivor, which requires a slightly more careful approach to victory.

 

3. Special Events

Wreckfest

Special events and challenges are a frequent part of the Career Mode championships, and while they don’t offer much in the way of points you need to progress, they do offer rewards in the form of new vehicles. The special vehicles like the school bus are great for when you plan on heading online, but the events that unlock new versions of regular cars, like the Rammer RS, will save you from spending credits on a new B class car.

 

4. Tuning Is Necessary

Like most racing games, if you start tinkering around underneath the hood of your car, you can improve your performance immensely, and Wreckfest simplifies the tuning process to make things easier for all, while also providing an overview of the track you’ll be racing on so you can customise the setup on a race by race basis.

Suspension tuning depends on the road surface you’re racing on, as materials like dirt favour a soft suspension while tarmac requires a stiff suspension. Mixed road surfaces like somewhere in the middle depending on the percentages, which the game always tells you. Gear ratio affects your speed and acceleration. Longer gearing means high top speeds at the cost of acceleration, while shorter gearing leads to lower top speed but faster acceleration. Ideally, you want to set the ratio so that you don’t hit your top speed halfway through the track’s longest straight.

Differential and brake balance tuning is for the more advanced players, both of which have an effect on cornering and the car’s overall handling. Honestly, you can usually leave those as normal and still be successful at the game, but if you’re really looking to shave those lap times, consider experimenting with those too.

 

5. Tailor Your Upgrades

Along with a host of upgrades you can install on the car’s engine, players can also purchase a variety of armour installations that protect your car from some big hits, at the cost of your speed and acceleration. In the same way you should tune your car on a per-race basis, you should also tailor your upgrades effectively too. For derby events, you stock up on those armour upgrades, while you can get away with less armour during folk racing.

 

6. The Difficulties of Difficulty

Like Forza, Wreckfest has a customisable difficulty system that allows you to tinker with how hard you want the game to be. You can change how much safety systems like ABS and traction control affect your car, along with the AI difficulty. The more assists you have turned down or off and the harder the AI is, the more rewards you earn in the form of an EXP multiplier. Figure out which difficulty settings are right for you then reap the benefits.

 

7. Bonus Challenges

Career events will offer one or two bonus challenges, such as causing a certain amount of damage, finishing in a certain position or by causing spin-outs. While they’re entirely optional, they do offer EXP rewards if you complete them, just not a huge amount. EXP is always useful, as you unlock new cars in the shop and new purchasable upgrades as you progress, so the challenges are worth doing, but don’t feel the need to go out of your way for some of them. Wrecking cars during a folk racing event usually isn’t worth the effort.

 

8. Podium Finishes

You might think that getting podium finishes is like the most obvious tip for a racing game ever, but hear me out for a second. Podium finishes unlock new items such as engine, armour or visual upgrades for your vehicles, and in general, you can make progress in your career if you consistently place in the top 3 in every event.

 

9. Use Your Mini-Map

One of the most useful tools to survive events in Wreckfest is the mini-map on the side of the screen. In standard races, the mini-map tool can help you to defend against racers trying to attack from behind, blocking them off before they overtake you, while in derby events, the map acts as your eyes in the back and sides of your head. You can also use the map to find isolate and pick off stragglers for more points.

 

10. Reset Often

Racing games often come equipped with a reset button of some kind to allow you to teleport back onto the track should you speed wildly off course, and in Wreckfest, you should use that button liberally. You can only reset when you’re moving incredibly slowly, but if you’re slow enough to reset, you’re slow enough to get rammed.

Resetting puts you back on the race track with temporary immunity to collisions, allowing you to avoid getting smacked around. This feature is particularly useful if things go wrong during the first corner of a race, allowing you to recover quickly and effectively. Meanwhile in derby events, being able to reset when caught in the middle of aggressive scrums means you can avoid taking massive damage. Just remember that it can’t be used right at the very start of an event, nor can it be spammed successively.

 

11. Grind It Out If Needed

If you do get to a point where you need extra credits to unlock a new car or career event, the best course of action is to launch one or two single events. For the best effect, set up a destruction derby deathmatch with yourself driving a school bus and 23 AI racers on lawnmowers. 5-10 minutes of that should give you enough EXP and credits to push you in the right direction.

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