Maybe I like racing games? I signed up to review Wheel World because it looked like an interesting game with a bizarre story, and I thought Nidhogg was pretty darn good. I ended up getting an open-world racing game and was disappointed for about eight seconds. While I was hoping for a little bit more of a story-focus and a mission-structure that felt more off-the-wall, I got an arcade bike racing game that was really fun to play.
Wheel World
Developer: Messhof
Price: TBA
Platform: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review.
Wheel World has a very simple setup. Skelly, a powerful skull that used his legendary bike to ride souls through the soul sewer or something, lost his bike. A bunch of bicycle gangs all around stole parts for themselves, and it’s up to our protagonist, Kat, to race ‘em to get their stuff back. It’s not really a thinker.
The gang leaders won’t race you, though, if you don’t have enough rep, which is represented by a thumbs up icon, very cute. Players gain rep by participating in races against smaller gangs that don’t require rep to race. And the racing is actually pretty damn good. There’s a simple boost mechanic that fills up when you draft or perform a near miss on a vehicle or a wall, but otherwise it’s just a simple arcade racer.
Racing offers four different metrics by which to gain rep, each one granting the player one rep. Placing in the top 3, earning first place, beating Tom’s time, and collecting the K A T letters, you’ll find rotating around the racetrack a la Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled. Collecting the letters can be both dangerous and time-consuming if you don’t spot them ahead of time, as a lot of the races are only one or two laps per race.
Often, I’d either have to go back and re-race in order to collect the letters, or I’d have to sacrifice time to collect one if I missed it on the last lap. Let’s face it, if you’ve played a racing game, you know not all laps are perfect. But Wheel World gives players a lot of reasons to redo a race out in the world. When you finally get to the races that require a certain number of rep, the only objective is winning.
Out in the open world, though, there’s quite a bit to do. Hitting up on the d-pad allowed me to ring my bed, which is primarily used to ring giant bells in each area. These giant bells woke up another Skully to reveal races in the area, scold Skully for losing his bike, and increase the amount of boost the player can acquire. The more fun use, though, is challenging lone wolf bikers to a race.
Roaming around the hillside, forest, or countryside of various areas, you’ll often find bikers riding by their lonesome. Riding up next to them and hitting your bell will immediately start a race and create a track for you. I was really impressed by how, no matter where I was, a track would appear that didn’t create an immediate turn or send me backwards. It was a sensible track spread out in front of both Kat and the lone wolf biker, and the on-the-spot racing was fun.
Parts can be found by getting first place in races, finding them in the wild in a parts box, or by purchasing them from vendors with coupons. What indie game wouldn’t be complete without extolling the evils of capitalism? A single corporation runs things in the Wheel World, and they want to reward you for doing things like finding jumps, lost bikers, scarecrows, secret tracks, all sorts of things by giving you coupons.
Coupons can be spent on bike parts, and there are a LOT of bike parts in Wheel World. Customizing your bike is surprisingly visceral, with parts often boosting one or two stats while detracting from others. Most impressively, though, you can feel the changes in the bike parts. It’s also apparent which stat is going to be useful in which race after racing on the track for a bit. All races take place within the area where they’re triggered, so participating in the race itself isn’t completely necessary to understand the terrain.
What makes Wheel World worth playing is an extremely simple mechanic that we’ll all experience at some point. Failure. The failure state in Wheel World is incredibly simple and makes the game for me. When running into a wall or object, doing something that would result in a ‘game over’ screen, Kat is sent back to where she was three or four seconds prior and just allowed to continue. This might be something overlooked in another game, but the ability to mess up and be back on track in seconds is immensely relieving.
I have an issue with action games taking away control from the player. Even in a fail state, if I’m trying to do something quickly or just want to keep going, I prefer the Meat Boy method. Respawn me immediately and let me get back to gaming. Wheel World’s concept of this, allowing you to immediately just get back to racing, makes this game.
While playing through Wheel World, my impression of the race tracks went back and forth. Some of these tracks are designed beautifully, with an aesthetic that guides the player throughout the track, requiring little signage. Although I should note, there’s considerable signage in Wheel World. However, there are a few tracks that outright mislead the player, offering a ramp or tunnel that takes the player wildly off-course.
Understandably, some tracks need to be designed to be more difficult, but this felt like more of a gotcha than any skillful design decision. Some tracks had me struggling to navigate them without maintaining a healthy balance of pedaling and drifting. The gotcha tracks felt cheap, and I felt cheated rather than outplayed. Truthfully, these tracks are few and far between. The majority of the tracks are designed well and had me playing them more than a few times out of fun rather than to complete an objective.
Wheel World’s biggest issue really is that it feels easy. No track bested me more than once, and many of the races I completed with all four objectives on my first try. The AI is a little spotty on some of the other races, causing them to swing wildly around the track without care for objects or cars. I feel like a little fine tuning on the AI and figuring out a way to manage the gap between player and AI could make these races a bit tighter.
At the time of review, Wheel World has a few problems. No controller support on Linux, mediocre performance on the SteamDeck, my only hope is that these minor issues can be fixed before release. Those issues aside, there are some bugs in the game, especially later on in the playthrough.
My biggest issue was with geometry, issues where there’d be a small divot or spike coming out of the ground and sending me flying or spinning, something impossible for me to see. Obviously, clearing an object on the road only to have Kat hit the fail state or spin in the opposite direction was a little frustrating. Likewise, there were several times where Kat hit an object and instead of triggering the fail state, got stuck. Or, at one point, my wheel was stuck in the ground, and Kat couldn’t get on or off her bike.
The small amount of bugs and other issues I ran into did little to detract from how much I enjoyed Wheel World. The game itself is a bit short, but overall, a really great time. The world itself is gorgeous, the animations are fun and fluid, and the music is incredible. Wheel World had me from the beginning, and I struggled to put it down.
The Final Word
Wheel World is one of the few games to feature arcade bicycle racing and manages to keep it light and fun while offering depth of play and a lovely collection-based gameplay structure.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good