Wreck Runners Review — Lost Treasures

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what the co-op extraction genre is. This genre has become so popular in recent years that the community has, somewhat in frustration, dubbed it “friendslop.” While these new releases often vary in setting, aesthetic, and gameplay, they always follow the same formula: a group of players, with local voice chat, enters a level with the goal of collecting a quota of valuable items. Along the way, they will run into thematic, horror-adjacent monsters and hostile entities that will try to either outright harm the player or make the collection more difficult. The genre thrives on small moments of tension and scares between a close-knit friend group as they loot, extract, and repeat the process, seeing how far they can go before they finally kick the bucket.

Wreck Runners doesn’t deviate from this formula and is easily recognizable as a member of its genre, even if you only have a baseline familiarity. The core loop is all there: enter a strange location, encounter monsters, and extract with valuables before you become a victim yourself.

The differences begin with the game’s setting, which sits comfortably somewhere between a punky near-future and Scooby-Doo-level supernatural drama. Interestingly, the game revolves around exploring and exploiting the Bermuda Triangle, delving into old shipwrecks and pulling up treasure to meet your quota.

While you would think this would mean ghosts and sea monsters, you’d only be half right. I encountered plenty of ghosts of old sailors during my playthrough, but the game was surprisingly lacking in sea monsters or other nautical mythological creatures. I found many of the monsters I encountered a little strange for the setting, but I have to respect the developers for making a world they wanted to make instead of simply taking from pre-existing material.

Still, it gives the game something of a crisis of identity when, in one room, you’re fighting ghosts, in another you’re fighting giant mutated frogs, and then you’re chased out by men with jetpacks or birds made of fire. All the while, your crew is comprised of people with televisions for heads. Unique though it may be, I couldn’t tell you what, if anything, Wreck Runners was trying to convey through visual storytelling.

I was disappointed, however, by just how little of a threat these enemies posed. Nearly every enemy can simply be grabbed and thrown to be dispatched, while larger enemies can be dealt with the same way using an empowered version of your gravity gun that you obtain by boarding the ship. Once you realize that nothing poses a real threat, encounters stop being mystifying and scary and instead just become tedious. I entered every zone without fear by the second mission.

Making the monsters easy to defeat also makes the upgrades you’re supposed to want to purchase between rounds much less valuable. A suite of guns and efficiency boosts doesn’t really appeal to you when every encounter can be solved without breaking a sweat. The firearms, while a fun gimmick, end up being sort of a waste as well, as every enemy in the game can be killed more quickly or more efficiently using your main, free tool.

The inclusion of an all-terrain vehicle makes the game a bit more interesting than its counterparts, with players piloting a car-boat-helicopter that can seamlessly drive on land, sail, or dive into the sea and fly into the sky. Piloting this vessel, as well as walking along its roof and platforms, was super fun, especially with how the developers managed to include physics that allow you to stand on the moving vehicle without falling off or slipping. However, the game puts a limit on how long you can fly, which seems like a pointless restriction when almost every enemy that pursues the ship has the ability to fly anyway.

My initial impression of *Wreck Runners* was that it was a fun entry into the genre that fans are likely to enjoy. The setting was initially interesting to explore, and the loop was fairly familiar and solid, though it had a few things I’ve already criticized in this review.

The problem is that I’m not a fan of the genre, and so Wreck Runners very quickly started to feel like more of the same, closely replicating a gameplay loop that doesn’t really excite me without doing much to deviate from it. There is, honestly, not a lot that I would say separates Wreck Runners from many other games in the genre, so your mileage with the game will really depend on how much you like similar titles. At the end of the day, it isn’t a terrible comparison to say that Wreck Runners is just Lethal Company, but you get to drive around.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Low-Budget Repairs. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Wreck Runners is available on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.