Remember Chase HQ? Well, cross that with a slice of Crazy Taxi and you have Wreckless. Kind of Chase HQ Taxi 2002. Without the fun. Oh dear. Visually appealing to the max, Wreckless pleases and disappoints in unequal measures, erring to the disappointing side. Ok, so I may be being a little harsh but I was a little let down with the overall package from all the hype and glitz that was applied to the game in the run up to its launch. Developer Bunkasha obviously have a great deal of talent but it seems to be little more than a tech demo of what the X-Box is capable of, graphically.

If you are easily frustrated, take care when playing this game because it is hard and baby-simple at the same time. Harder than a male porn star overdosed on Viagra on some missions, and softer than a bucketful of baby bunnies on others, Wreckless will have you going through controllers like they're going out of fashion. I'm thinking of buying stock in Microsoft just because the sales of their controllers will soar when people get their hands on this game. There's two kinds of hard in gaming: challenging hard or frustrating hard. Unfortunately, Wreckless falls into the latter category when you take on a difficult mission. For example, the physics engine is excellent and very realistic, however you don't want that realism to be used when you just clip the side of a bus and get thrown wildly around enough times to render you unconscious. It just doesn't fit with the arcade feel of the rest of the game and just makes me want to cry.

The game takes place in Hong Kong giving you the option of playing either two female cops or two bumbling blokes infiltrating the Yakuza. No real plot to speak of, Wreckless wastes no time with storyline and goes full on with car bustin' action. The bare storylines do intersect at points so you can play both sides of the story and see it from a different angle. There's 10 cars to play with and they feel a lot like driving thick soup. Which raises quite fundamental problems, this being an arcade action game after all. They do, however react very well to their environments and the movement is particularly impressive with suspension looking scarily real. The rest of the graphics are second to none, it really does have to be seen to be believed and I truly believe that the PS2 (its initial intended destination) could not have made this title look anywhere near as pretty as it does on the X-Box. The replays look out of this world, especially with the cool effects that can be applied to them after unlocking them by completing certain missions.

I may have been a little forward earlier saying that Wreckless is no fun. It is fun and enjoyable, it's just that the game is very unbalanced. If the learning curve were plotted out on a graph, it would look like a heart attack on one of those ECG monitor things you see on ER and Casualty. A lot of jolly times and excitement will be had, but please be prepared to miss out on your mission goals by fractions of a second or complete the mission in one go because this is the major flaw with Wreckless. If this were sorted out along with the feel of the cars and the insane physics engine at times, this game would score a well-deserved 8-9 out of 10. Definitely rent this before you buy, it's not to everyone's taste and hey, you may love it. Weirdo.