There's a little bit of a story running in the background, and you can either follow along with a couple of female cops on their missions or tag along with a couple of dirty spies. Each storyline consists of ten missions with a normal and hard mode for each, comprising 20 in all. These are all carryovers from the Xbox port. The only differences are the acquisition of medals through unwarranted destruction of public property and new bonus missions. Receiving gold medals on some of these missions, usually in the hard mode, results in unlocking new cars and cheats. The cheats range anywhere from low gravity to unlimited time.

You can get an idea of how the game plays from reading through the Xbox review, but I'll gloss over a few points here as well. Nothing's changed. Control over the cars is simple and easy to pick up. There's nothing outstanding in the physics department to speak of, just gas and go. And you'll be going full out if you want any chance of completing the missions, which range from smashing and destroying opposing cars to finding packages scattered throughout the level. A little help in the form of fire and forget missiles has been added to each of the cars as well as an ability to slow down time (for those delicate traffic situations). Neither of the previous additions makes much of a difference in gameplay unless you've increased your supply through cheats. Hot pursuit of cars through harrowing traffic is mildly amusing for a while, but without any real meat to the system, it gets tiring. The traffic collisions are handled in a similar fashion to Crazy Taxi. You lose a fair amount of speed with each collision, but the game would be unplayable if lost too much momentum. A lot like real life, be prepared for some frustration due to traffic jams.

I have to be straight with you here. Wreckless has lost a lot of its visual appeal in the transition to the PS2 and the Cube. Gone are the spectacular car models and glorious special effects. What the developers have accomplished though, is to keep the fully interactive environments pretty much intact. You can still plow through a line of guard rails or a group of patio tables, and now you can even take out wayward pedestrians. All this without sacrificing a playable frame rate. I rarely noticed a dip in the action even when I could barely see my car on screen. Both systems perform well in this regard and you'd be hard pressed to see any difference in the graphics. The only sore thumb is the full motion video, which is hideously compressed on the PS2 and looks even worse on the Cube. I didn't mean to make this sound like the game is ugly because its not. We just happen to have a basis for comparison and the fact that the game originally survived based on its looks.

The sad truth is that Wreckless on the Xbox was an attention getter because of the fantastic graphics on a relatively new system. The game itself, underneath, is just average at best. Now with the loss of those overachieving looks and through the passage of time, no amount of bonus missions or unlockables can make up for the lack of engaging gameplay. Even the multiplayer mode is a bummer. While not a flawed game, it still is merely an average driving game.