First impressions are really important in gaming. If someone loads up a game only for the opening hour or so to be a slog, then they are more than likely to put it down and not return to it. So when I first loaded up Wheel World, the new open-world biking game from Messhof Games, who you may know as the Nidhogg developer, I thought I was in for something special.
A vast open-world biking game with a seemingly deep parts mechanic to customize your bike? Quirky dialogue and a somewhat intriguing plot setup? The opening hour of Wheel World has a unique charm and relaxed vibe that would be difficult for anyone not to be swayed by. If only the rest of the game could have kept that momentum going.
Welcome to Wheel World
The beginning of the game finds your main character, Kat, waking up in the middle of a field next to some ruins. Immediately, I was enraptured by the world with its bright colors and cel-shaded graphics. It felt familiar yet alien at the same time. The music throughout the game is also very good and fits the vibe the game seems to be going for. As I approached the ruin and made my way inside, I was then introduced to our second main character, Skully, an ethereal skull that needs your help to gather the missing pieces of his bicycle. You see, Skully needs to perform something called “The Great Shift,” which is meant to escort the spirits of Wheel World to the moon and back. In order to do this, Kat must earn rep from beating bikers and challenges across Wheel World and find the missing parts to restore Skully’s legendary bike.
You also learn that Skully has a special ability that can give you an edge in races: boost. Skully can use his spiritual power to give you a powerful boost that can send you blasting off past other racers or power through rough terrain to take a little shortcut. As you explore the world, you’ll visit shrines that reveal sections of the map and of any areas of interest in that region. You will also get a permanent upgrade that extends your boost bar. It is an okay progression system, but I’m getting really tired of finding towers to reveal objectives.
After this, you are quickly introduced to the game’s main gameplay loop. You can explore the world, finding new parts to install on your bike as well as challenge rival bikers in a race in order to gain rep. You can gain additional rep by completing optional objectives during races. These include beating Tom’s Time and collecting the letters K-A-T hidden throughout a course and then winning the race. A lot of these hidden letters can be quite tricky to find, especially in the later races. Tom’s Time challenges were usually reasonable, and I didn’t have much trouble beating them on my first completion of the race.
This seems like it could be fun and made me wonder what new wrinkles they were going to throw into future races and how I could improve my bike. That’s where the cracks of Wheel World start to show themselves.
So Many Possibilities, Too Little Reward
When you first start riding your bike around the world, you will notice that your bike is not very responsive and feels pretty hefty. This makes sense in the context of the game. Since Skully’s bike parts had all been stolen, what’s left behind is just a rusty bike frame. As you start collecting bike parts and cobble together your bike, the pain of the controls starts to be alleviated a bit. However, even after collecting tons of parts, I never reached a point where the controls felt just right. It wasn’t debilitating in my ability to finish races, but instead just never made the racing feel good. On top of this, I found the perk system with parts extremely underwhelming.
For example, certain parts offer perks, such as off-road, which is designed to enhance your bike’s handling on rough terrain. The game tells you that these perks can be stacked, and this should increase their effect. Despite this, I had multiple parts with this off-road perk on it and could not notice that much of a difference in how my bike handled when moving off pavement. I appreciate there being so many different parts with some cool designs if you find a full set, but I really feel like they dropped the ball in making new bike parts feel significant. There are such small incremental improvements that I never found a bike part that made me feel excited to try them out.
There are also different types of frames that change your bike from being a single-speed, two-speed, or three-speed. This again seems like something that could change up your playstyle significantly, as having the extra speeds introduces shifting to the game’s mechanics. Shifting, unfortunately, feels awful. I played on controller, like the game suggested, and even swapped out controllers in case there was a problem with one of my older DualSense controllers I use for my PC, because it didn’t feel great to control. There seems to be a large delay between when you hit the button to when your bike shifts. Also, your bike doesn’t automatically shift down if you start to slow down or get run off the track by the other racers (we’ll get into this can of worms soon). You have to manually shift down, and with the delay in how you shift, if you fall behind even a bit, you might as well restart the race because you aren’t gonna catch up.
Road Rage
Now let’s get to my biggest problem with Wheel World. It presents itself at first as a cozy game about riding your bike along the countryside and taking in the sights. The locals talk a lot about just chilling out and the joy of just riding your bike. I wish the other bikers on the road felt this way. Throughout your time in the races, you’ll find your opponents swinging into you to push you out of the way and cause you to crash as if from out of nowhere. You’ll have a great run going, and some asshole will decide to just clip your wheel just a tad, and your bike decides to go completely sideways and sends you careening off the road.
Now, I’m no stranger to aggressive racers. I’ve played a lot of Burnout in my time. What makes this style of racing fun is choosing when it’s worth the risk to try and take out your opponent and the thrill when a maneuver causes them to crash, giving you an advantage. However, Wheel World punishes the player regardless of who started the contact in its races. Some guy bumps into you while racing? You go flying off the course and bounce away as if your bike is made of jelly. You decide to dish out some of your own road justice in return? You go flying off the course and bounce away as if your bike is made of jelly. It is maddening! It only gets worse as you progress further into the game and you get into more tight race areas with obstacles, and you need to pass by other racers.
I also encountered a lot of bugs later in the game when it came to other bikers spawning into a race. Every race doesn’t have a starting line where everyone is at a standstill before starting. Instead, every race begins with all participants in motion, and you in last place. It seems the developers didn’t have a lot of later race areas in mind when deciding to go in this direction, because I would start some races to witness a couple racers immediately collide with a shipping container or another obstacle and take off into the air. It was amusing at first, but then I had one incident where, at the start of the race, one of the other racers would have one of these collisions, and if I tried to advance past them, they would rubber band back onto the course, collide into me, and cause me to go flying off and crash.
It is baffling how they decided to punish the player anytime there is contact in a race with another biker. Maybe they didn’t want to have the player play aggressively and reward that behavior in a race, but then it makes no sense that the other racers can initiate contact with you and still punish the player. It makes it a lose-lose situation for the player, and that’s never fun.
A Road Trip With No Destination
Now, what about the story that starts out intriguing and quirky? Well, it goes pretty much nowhere. You get small hints of lore nuggets from NPCs you meet throughout the game, and they hint at some threads that make you curious where they lead. A large portion of these don’t have a resolution, and almost seems like they were forgotten. Who is Kat? Doesn’t matter. What happened to Skully and his Legendary Bike prior to the events of the game? Not important. Who are these four champions that each have parts from Skully’s bike, and how did they get them? It’s hard to find a reason to connect or care due to the lack of focus on these.
Seriously, why is it that you build up these four champions and have literal statues representing them as soon as you reach the main area of the game and not expand on them more besides some very basic descriptors? After beating them, you don’t even get a cutscene or have a conversation with them about who they are or learn anything about them. You just get dropped back into the world, and they say a line about how you beat them and Skully celebrates. Why should I care about this world if it feels like there isn’t any detail whatsoever?
The story does touch on some other themes as the story unfolds, such as consumerism, environmentalism, and capitalism, but they are so ham-fisted and half-baked that it falls completely flat. There are important things to be said about these issues, but Wheel World not only fails to bring anything compelling to the table, it fails to tell a comprehensive story at all. I replayed the ending twice to make sure my game wasn’t bugging out because I felt like there was no way this is how the ending was supposed to play out. Obviously, I won’t spoil the story for those who still are curious about this game, but to say Wheel World left a sour taste in my mouth after completing it is an understatement.
Back to the Drawing Board
I know I came across extremely negative and bitter in this review, but that’s just because I was so excited and optimistic about it when I first started playing Wheel World. It’s such a fun and unique concept that seemed like it had some really good ideas. Customizing your own bike with and having such a large assortment of parts should be fun and engaging. Instead, I felt like it was mostly for cosmetics and that the stats didn’t matter too much. The story that starts off so interesting and quirky loses its way halfway through and never recovers. The quirky writing starts to become grating, and the bike puns stop being cute very quickly. This feels more like a tech demo that was expanded out to 6-7 hours with no idea of how to keep the experience engaging and fun.
I didn’t even touch on how the goals for every race are exactly the same, except for champion races, which have no optional goals, and the final race, which has a very frustrating mechanic. Besides those, every single race in the game has the exact same goals of beating Tom’s Time and collecting K-A-T. This becomes very monotonous and boring after the tenth or twentieth race. Why not add variety or other race modes to participate in? It’s just another half-baked element of a game that needs more to it to justify its existence.
Disclaimer: Annapurna Interactive provided a PC (Steam) copy of Wheel World for review purposes.
