Wreckfest

Wreckfest launched on Xbox One in 2019, and it's a game built around one simple joy: smashing your opponents' cars to pieces while still making it to the finish line. You drive beat-up sedans, vans, buses, and homemade contraptions across dusty ovals, tight country circuits, and derby arenas where it's not about lap times but about who's still moving. The handling model sits somewhere between arcade and simulation — the cars are heavy, the slides are long, and contact with an opponent has immediate consequences. You can tune gearing and suspension stiffness, and add protective bars and bumpers that change how well a car takes a hit.

The main draw is the damage model. Body panels deform gradually and believably, sheet metal bends, wheels snap off, and after a string of impacts the car genuinely handles differently — pulling to one side, losing power, and eventually falling apart. Bugbear spent years on this technology, and it shows, because the destruction never feels like a pre-scripted animation. On Xbox One, the game holds up reasonably well, though frame rate takes a hit in the densest arena pile-ups. The sound of blown-out exhausts and screeching metal is excellent, and the accompanying rock soundtrack fits the countryside racetrack atmosphere perfectly.

Wreckfest had an unusually long development cycle and launched first on PC, where it built a reputation as the spiritual successor to older destruction racers. On consoles, reviews received it very well, praising the physics and its sheer replayability, while criticism targeted the sparser career mode and the technical strain on older hardware. The game single-handedly revived the destruction racing genre, long left on the sidelines, and built a loyal community through later updates. Today it's one of the most entertaining Xbox One games to play with friends, since every derby in the arena plays out differently, and the laughter over crumbling buses can't be scripted.