Wreckreation 2 Announced After Studio Shutdown, Just 9 Months After Original Flopped

If you were hoping for more from Wreckreation after its rocky launch last year, well, you're getting it — just not in the way anyone expected. Former Criterion head Fiona Sperry has announced Wreckreation 2, a sequel to the open-world racing game that came and went with barely a ripple in November 2025.

This is the same Wreckreation that got its entire development team placed on redundancy notice immediately after release, with publisher THQ Nordic pulling support. So yeah, a sequel wasn't exactly on anyone's bingo card.

From Three Fields to When Tides Turn

Here's the thing: Sperry and her team aren't giving up on the concept. The sequel is being developed by a new studio called When Tides Turn, which is reportedly staffed by veterans of Three Fields Entertainment — the original studio behind Wreckreation. Think of it as a phoenix situation, minus the fire and plus a lot of racing games.

Three Fields Entertainment has a history of making Burnout-adjacent titles. Before Wreckreation, the UK-based studio made Dangerous Golf, Danger Zone, and Dangerous Driving. Those games wore their Burnout inspiration on their sleeves, and Wreckreation was no different — it explicitly recreated modes, sound effects, and parts of Burnout Paradise's on-screen presentation.

What went wrong the first time

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The original Wreckreation didn't exactly set the world on fire. IGN's review called it out for its "unpredictable handling, dull open-world map, [and] samey event structure," ultimately saying it "feels like a supermarket brand homage to a series of better arcade racers, built with the user-generated content tools of another game." That's a tough review to bounce back from, especially when your publisher has already walked away.

But Sperry and the team seem to have taken that feedback to heart. According to Rock Paper Shotgun, Wreckreation 2 is described as more compact than the original, trading its predecessor's enormous but bland rural map for something with a lot more urban environments. The result sounds like it might be even closer in spirit to Burnout Paradise than the first game was.

A quick turnaround

Here's the wild part: Wreckreation 2 has only been in development for about three months. That's an incredibly short window for a full sequel, which suggests either this is a smaller, more focused project, or the team had a lot of ideas left over from the first game that they didn't get to implement before the studio shutdown.

Coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, Wreckreation 2 doesn't have a release date yet. But if you're a Burnout fan who was disappointed by the first game's execution, this might be worth keeping an eye on. The wishlist button is already live.