Wheel World Review
I was not expecting Wheel World to capture the spirit and essence of a certain classic 90’s series, but that’s exactly what happened once I started racing. I’ll be honest, every trailer I saw for Ghost Bike or Wheel World, which it eventually became, never truly captured my attention with gameplay. It was always on my radar, but that was due to the beautiful Ligne Clair art style, the hazy electronic soundtrack as well as the pedigree of the people behind Wheel World.
However, once I started playing Wheel World, a wave of nostalgia hit me as I quickly realized that it’s a modern day Road Rash. Where most attempts have tried to emulate the formula and failed, Wheel World unintentionally captures the essence of what made Road Rash beloved and succeeds by modernizing it. Wheel World is a casual and addictive arcade racer on two wheels.
To put it simply, Wheel World is Road Rash for the modern generation.
Instead of motorcycles, whips and rock music, Wheel World is about bikes, changing components, drafting, and indie electronic accented by the beautiful sounds of nature. While it mostly brings along the best qualities of the classic two wheel racer, it unfortunately carries some of the shortcomings as well.
BREAK THE CYCLE
Wheel World is the newest game from Messhof, the studio behind Nidhogg and their first entry since 2017. In Wheel World, you play as Kat, a cyclist who wakes up in the forest of what looks to be some sort of bike heaven. You have no idea why and how you got there, but you quickly meet Skully, an immortal bike spirit who has lost his rider and his bike stripped of all its legendary parts. All that remains is an old rusty bike.
You need to help Skully find all of his legendary lost parts so that he can reach the Sewer of Spirits and Mount Send. Once there he will be able to fulfill his purpose and send spirits to the Moon completing the chain of life. The quest for legendary parts begins similar to Breath of the Wild by unlocking shrines, which highlights points of interest in the region for you to investigate.
Unlocking shrines will also increase your boost gauge, which is essential to success. During races, boost will recharge slowly over time, or you can speed it up by taking jumps, drafting other cyclists or by equipping unique components with bonus perks.
Roam, Race and (W)Rench
Wheel World is a joy to play thanks to its addictive gameplay loop of roaming around the semi-open world looking for coupons and bike parts hidden around environment, tweaking your bike with the new components you find to squeeze everything out of it and most importantly, finding races. This gameplay loop sounds better in the words of the devs that label it Roam, Race and Wrench.
The ultimate goal is to beat the region bosses as this is where the legendary parts have ended up. However, you wont be able to just go straight to each boss, you will need to increase your reputation as a legendary cyclist first. You will need to race all of the different gangs along the way, which all feature clever names from the handlebaristas, a group of baristas who cycle on the weekends or The Grand Crew, a group of cyclists who race in the wine region, which is a very clever play on words for wine aficionados.
Winning these races will earn new components for your bike, but also rep points, which is the real reward because you require a certain amount to challenge each regions boss. Each race has a total of four potential rep points to gain: First Place, Top 3, Finding the letters KAT in the Race and beating Tom’s time. If you’re wondering who Tom is, you will find out near the end of the game.
The races will gradually increase in difficulty and success will require you to be mechanically sound. Braking at the right time, hitting the best apexes, drafting to increase boost and even finding the odd shortcut. The hardest part of each race from the beginning of the game until the end was breaking away from the peloton.
As for those components you will find, they will increase your overall bike stats in four categories: Power, Aerodynamics, Handling and Grip. It’s not always all bonus stats, which means that you will have to determine what is the best bike build for you and for the type of race. Unfortunately, once you find the legendary parts, you will have no reason to swap out to anything else, because they have good stats and a bonus perk of recharging boost much faster.
Exploring these worlds is a very chill experience thanks to the sounds of nature, but it’s also accented perfectly by some hazy electronic beats. The soundtrack is handled by Italians Do It Better and the score works perfectly when cruising in the open world, but they also see a tempo spike during the races that feels completely natural.
SPEED BUMPS
The premise of Wheel World was intriguing as you awaken in a forest and want to learn more about Kat, but after establishing the characters, Wheel World failed to expand them and Kat barely has any lines of dialogue and it was never what drove me to keep going.
The amount of bike components you can win or find around the world is staggering and that number exponentially increases when you look at different combinations there are between these seven different categories. At the start of the game, it was very rewarding to make incremental changes on the bike as well as try to determine some of the best combinations, but as soon as you find a legendary part, the system becomes redundant.
There were a variety of track types including gravel, pavement and dirt, but they didn’t feel drastically different. Embracing this idea and forcing the player to constantly alter components would added a well needed level of strategy and challenge outside of the racing. This would have had a knock on effect as it would have increased the difficulty, which Wheel World needed as almost all races were won on the first attempt.
Finally, there was the massive pothole as you moved to the second area, which not only became much less interesting visually, which led to the second area feeling slightly repetitive, but also to issues during racing, as it was hard to separate the similar shades of green on the guard rails, cars and road during the races.
As indicated in the first few minutes of the game, you are trying to help Skully get to Mount Send, which you eventually do and it’s as gorgeous as the first area. Sadly, the devs took all the effort to create it, but barely utilized this area. It would have been great if rather than trying to cram everything into the second area, it was spread across the three, as this would have drastically improved the visual variation, but also the pacing.
Wheel World Verdict
Wheel World has all the ingredients to be a great game, but the underlying problem is that it fails to integrate them to their fullest or in cycling terms, Wheel World leaves too much in the tank.
Wheel World is a whimsically good time. Everything from the short five hour playtime, carefree soundtrack, beautiful visuals, and the tongue in cheek writing. The gameplay loop of racing, roaming and wrenching was initially very satisfying until the wrenching aspect became slightly redundant with the only logical choice being to equip legendary parts.
Wheel World can be found in the middle of the Venn Diagram between Road Rash and Nature Loving Cyclists. Even with the shortcomings, there aren’t games like this and as a result Wheel World finds itself in the upper echelon of cycling games.
