Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions is a wild ride through Hong Kong's streets, where you blend high-speed driving with a dose of chaotic Yakuza-themed missions. The game thrives on over-the-top destruction; you'll smash through buildings, blast enemies off the road, and perform gravity-defying stunts. However, Wreckless suffers from repetitive mission designs and sometimes frustrating controls, making the initial thrill wear off quickly. While a fun distraction for fans of vehicular mayhem, it lacks the depth and polish to be a true classic.

The obscure google I had to do to find this game.

Well it was this actually.

game on xbox where you play as 2 japanese girls driving a police car

But damnit it worked.

I was awful at this game, but what I did see of the characters, seemed fun enough.

No real desire to come back to this, had to just make sure it wasn't a fever dream.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2021/09/16/wreckless-the-yakuza-missions-jp-double-s-t-e-a-l-gcn-ps2-xbox-review/

For everyone, there is that one game that you played as a kid, a game that only you seem to remember. The one game that remains at the back of your mind, laying dormant, until it pops up randomly out of nowhere as a distant memory that you could swear is a fever dream, but after some searching online, you find out that it wasn’t a fever dream, but an actual game that got released, and no one else seems to have heard of it besides you. For me, one of those games is ‘Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions’. Or as it’s called in Japan, ‘Double S.T.E.A.L.’, but for the sake of consistency, I’ll be calling the game Wreckless since an English audience is going to be the ones reading it anyway.

Set in Hong Kong, you either play as a pair of police women who are part of the corrupt Hong Kong Police Force, called the Flying Dragons, attempting to crack down on rival Yakuza operations, or a pair of spies hired to take down the Tiger Takagi, the head of the Hong Kong Yakuza, along with trying to uncover the links between the mafia and the police and helping to stop the Yakuza stranglehold of Hong Kong.

The funniest thing that I could find about the plot to this game though comes from the official Nintendo website, in which the two police characters that you play are described as “But they’re more like Inspector Clouseau than Robocop.” If that doesn’t set the tone, I don’t know what will.

Not that it matters all that much since I could probably count the amount of cutscenes of this game on one hand, all of them less taking up less than 5 minutes total combined. The characters are dumb caricatures and they don’t even get enough screen time to even be 1 dimensional, let alone get more character development than the two sentence description that they all had that were more of a vague concept that a character description. They’re fun to watch, but you’re not going into Wreckless: for the in-depth characters. They’re more there to help give the game it’s comedic tone. The best way that I could describe Wreckless is that it’s like ‘You’re Under Arrest!’ and ‘Tank Police’ had a baby and that baby came out through an explosion.

To give an indication of just how silly the game’s plot is, there is one mission in the Police campaign where the bad guy is on top of a skyscraper and the two female cops are in a helicopter, with the car, for convenient reasons, in the helicopter with them. The bad guy then shoots out of the sky, and somehow both characters and their car land safely on top of the skyscraper. And at this point the bad guy gets the good idea to know you and your vehicle off the skyscraper wit his car, which came up on the same elevator that he did.

I’ll briefly mention it here that Xbox version and the PlayStation 2 and GameCube versions are different. I’ll focus on the Xbox version for now, but I’ll come back to these differences later. Each ‘Campaign’ has 10 missions each, with 20 missions total. The missions range from taking blood packs from a crashed ambulance to a hospital without taking too many hits from the Yakuza or running into walls before getting to the hospital, to smashing more Dim Sum stands than the Yakuza can, to saving a kidnapped Feng Shui Professor who has been tied to the front of a monstrous dump truck. And to save the Feng Shui professor, you have to driving into the dump truck off a higher ledge, causing explosions due to the dump truck being filler with dangerous explosive barrels.

It can get pretty weird and funny with it’s objectives.

But a lot of these objectives can be more difficult than they need to be simply because of the way the cars control. I don’t know how to describe the driving other than it feels like a mix of trying to control a car while it’s driving on ice and trying to control a beach ball. Once I got used to it, it wasn’t the worst driving that I’ve ever experience, but it’s still feels a little bit slippery.

There were a few times where I either flipped the car and had to wait for the game to respawn my car back upright or got stuck on geometry and it took a while for the game to notice that I was stuck, both requiring me to restart the mission because the time was now too low to complete the mission. The amount of times that I’ve had to listen to one of the characters over the radio talk about taking the blood packs to the hospital or having to save the Fung Shui Expert have been drilled into my mind and I’m pretty sure when I’m 80 and reminded of this game, those quotes are going to come back up and haunt me.

And on top of that, every mission is timed. That doesn’t sound to bad, but the time limit is so low that you’re practically completing missions by the skin of your teeth half the time. But then if you screw up at specific points in some missions, the time limit resets to whatever it was when it sets you back, just giving you enough time to complete the mission I had one mission cut time off the time limit. Why would you give me that time limit if you were just going to take time away from me? I have no idea if this happened at other points of the game because I was too focused on trying to complete the mission in the time frame.

One of the most annoying missions is one where you’re playing as the spies and you have to take photos of someone. But instead of just driving around to take photos from certain angles, that simply require you to just drive to where you need to get the photos from as quickly as possible, you have to not only drive around a pier, which is narrow and has tight turns, but also requires you to jump over openings in the pier, one of which requires you to barrel roll. And that’s if you don’t know that you can just drive around. Which way to do you want to waste precious seconds, trying to perfect the barrel roll, or having to drive the long way? I’m pretty sure the PS2/XBOX/CGN Grand Theft Auto games had more reliable physics than this game.

It also doesn’t help that you have to manually save the game if you want to keep your progress. It doesn’t even bother to autosave the game after you’ve completed a mission, a feature that a lot of games had at this point. I found this out the hard way after completing a couple of missions and turning my console off, only to turn it back on again to find out that all of my progress had gone.

The game also has a variety of unlockable cars. Some of which you can unlock by simply completing missions, but others are located throughout levels and you have to go out of your way to not only find them and hit them with your current car, but also continue and complete your mission, which is going to take a lot of retrying with just how tight the game is with it’s time limit. These cars can range from a Monster Truck to a rip-off of the Delorean from ‘Back to the Future’ to a tank, which can actually fire rounds. When I used the tank, my time for the first mission went from just over 2 minutes to complete to just over 30 seconds, shaving off a whole minute and a half. It’s not quite as effective or all missions though.

That doesn’t sound too bad except for the previously mentioned floaty controls timed missions, causing a close shave, meaning you’re going to have to get really good at this game if you want to unlock those cars. And you don’t really have anyone to show them to since the Xbox version of ‘Wreckless’ is a Single Player game only, unless you have some friends around or posting proof on the internet and want to brag to them about some obscure game.

Also, I had some problems with the pause menu. For some reason, the ‘Retire’ button, which takes you back to the main menu, is right at the top of the menu, and it’s the button that the game highlights when you pause the game, for some reason. The ‘Return’ button that would take you right back into the game is right down at the bottom of the menu. Not even right under the ‘Retire’ button. Instead, the button under the button under the ‘Retire’ button is the ‘Restart’ button, which restarts the whole mission.

Which has resulted in me accidentally pressing the ‘Retire’ and ‘Restart’ button more times than I should have because I was rushing to press the controller buttons to get back into the game due to years of muscle memory from games having their return to game buttons at the top of the menu and being highlighted. You can also press the ‘back’ button and the ‘start’ button to also get back in the game, which means that there is three ways to get back into the game and all of them are the most annoying way to get back into the game.

The game also looks pretty good on a technical level for an Xbox game, with lots of destructible objects, bloom, great lighting (even if some of the shadows looked a little off at points), and the cars even having good looking damage models. There were a few moments that the screen was a little too cluttered and too many things were going on, but the game does look good.

And I guess this is a good time to transition over to comparing the Xbox version of the game to the PS2 and GCN versions of the game. The PS2 and CGN versions weren’t just a simple port job, as those versions of the game were developed by ‘Stealth Studios’, with the original being developed by ‘Bunkasha’, resulting in quite a few differences between the versions. The most obvious being the graphics.

The PS2 and CGN posts look downright awful to the Xbox, and even look bad for their respective consoles. There are a lot less things to destroy, random stuff like characters and a few vehicles look weirdly shiny for no reason, and all of the models are textures are so low quality, with a lot of the textures being blurry. And just because these consoles didn’t have the horsepower like the original Xbox did, that didn’t mean they weren’t capable of good looking games, such as other open world games like ‘Jak II’, ‘Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction’, and ‘Spider-Man 2’. It’s like night and day.

Also, the cutscenes in the Xbox version are in real time, while the cutscenes in the PS2 and GCN versions take the cutscenes in the Xbox version and present them as pre-rendered videos in the PS2 and GCN versions. Maybe the studio that ported the game just didn’t have the time, money, or both to properly port the cutscenes and this was the best that they could do. The PS2 and GCN versions also came with a myriad of technical performance issues, such as slow down, which pretty much confirms that it was a rush job.

The reason that the Xbox version looks so much better, technical limits notwithstanding, is that ‘Wreckless’ was originally designed for the Xbox from the ground up, resulting in a more polished experience, with the ports probably being after thought since they were ported by a different company. As a result, those versions are a worse looking and performing game, not only resulting in a worse looking game, but resulting in a game that had more glitches and slowdowns than the Xbox version despite looking worse.

And to top it all off, the driving feels so much worse. I know that I complained about how the driving in the original Xbox version felt slippery, but I could get used to the driving in that version. In the PS2 and CGN versions, the driving somehow feels both stiff and slippery at the same time. I don’t know how else to describe it. Although in this version, I can pull off drifting better.

But despite a lot of the game feeling rushed, there are some nice additions to the PS2 and GCN version of the game, even if it doesn’t make up for the downgrade in graphics and gameplay.

Firstly, there is an adrenaline feature that slows down time for a brief period along with a limited supply of short range missiles. I felt these additions were a little pointless and that they were added to make up for the way the cars control, but it’s nice that they’re here.

Missions are now ranked based on not only how quickly you complete them, with Gold, Silver, and Bronze medals to indicate you on how well you did, but the game has secondary objectives to complete as well, such as destroying a certain amount of traffic or objects in a mission. If you complete one of these objectives on Hard Mode, you can unlock a bonus mission. If you earn Gold, you can also unlock one of the cheat codes, such as low gravity or unlimited time on missions.

There are also now twice as many missions as the Xbox version, with 40 instead of 20. It’s hard to complain about new content. But weirdly, the missions that were ported over are now in a completely different order. It’s not super important, but I thought I should mention it anyway.

The PS2 and GCN versions also come with two new multiplayer modes exclusive to these consoles. The first one has one player chasing after the second, where the objective is the first player has to destroy the second players car as quickly as possible. But for some reason the mode has only one camera instead of being split screen, with the camera following the player who has to destroy the other player’s car. I imagine this is probably due to the time limits imposed on the development team.

The other multiplayer mode is a racing mode, which is pretty self-explanatory.

The game also comes with a free drive mode too, allowing you to drive through the city in a more relaxed casual manner, taking in the views of the city. I wish the original Xbox version has this, as it would have been nice to see the city with the better graphics without having to destroy Yakuza cars or take something somewhere.

Also, in the Xbox version the pedestrians run out of the way, while in the PS2 and CGN versions, you can hit the pedestrians, flinging them into the sky. So at least those versions have that going for it.

So when it comes down to it, you have to either pick between a better looking and better controlling game, or a game with more content, but controls worse, looks worse, and has more technical issues. I hope that down the line someone remasters this game with the Xbox graphics and controls with the PS2 and CGN content added in.

Would I recommend ‘Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions’? I know that I spent a large portion of this review complaining, but I would be lying if I said that I hated this game. Sure, the wonky physics are going to turn a lot of people away from this game, but I still enjoyed my time with this game, specifically the Xbox version, and I know that someone else is going to get something out of it.

It would be a lukewarm recommendation, since the only people who would probably play this are people who love finding weird obscure games, but it’s still a recommendation all the same.