Wrack Preview

I do love a good first person shooter romp, especially those that favour all out action and fast paced shooting, over scripted story sequences and tedious forced ‘stealth’ missions. Wrack has all of the former points in shedloads and my god, is it good fun.

Paying homage to the old grandaddies of the genre such as Doom and Duke 3D, Wrack is a beautifully cel shaded, modern-classic FPS title where keeping on the move while twitch shooting is the order of the day. Taking the old style map designs, requiring you to go to X point to press Y button so you can backtrack and head through door Z just to progress further in the map, makes a refreshing comeback from the linear forced pathways of some shooters these days.

Boomstick!

Just like yester-year, Wrack is short on storyline, the plot being set in the far distant future the human race has tapped into a completely brand new energy source which led to world peace on planet Earth. Unfortunately some evil alien types and a crazed scientist threatens humanity and it is down to you, Kain, the protagonist with epic facial hair to save the world.

It’s safe to say that this is one of the fastest moving FPS titles I have played in a long time, you fly through corridors, picking up health and armor tokens, slaying waves of enemies and bounce around for weapons with the greatest of ease. Not even Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 can match the speed of Wrack, and this is a good thing. Due to how quick you move it will help build up those snapshot reflexes which you’ve lost over the years of Call of Duty or Battlefield, those kinds of shots you get only with a railgun in UT/Quake that no other game could match.

Dem combo's

That being said, under the cell shaded surface of the game, you will not find any depth, no innovations and nothing to really keep those looking for more than just a quick mindless blast down nostalgia lane. I do feel though that if multiplayer became a viable addition to Wrack then that could boost its appeal to the market, just at the moment, in its current state of early access beta, we get a handful of levels in the first campaign.

The developers are actively beavering away and promise bi-weekly updates to the game which they even kindly state on the main menu with a countdown to the next build of the game, so it is encouraging to see developers working so closely with the community on their project.

For a few notes out of your pocket it’ll be worth grabbing the Steam early access and bask in the mayhem with your rose tinted glasses, making you wonder, where the hell did it all go wrong with FPS games in the first place.