Wheel World’s unique visual style, laid-back nature, and delightful soundtrack promise an inviting adventure set atop a bicycle in a world where they’re more common than cars. But the gameplay itself, the progression, and the barely-there narrative break that promise with an experience that only gets more frustrating and monotonous the more you play. Rote races, dull dialogue, and an empty world left me wondering why Wheel World’s denizens love biking around it.
Wheel World jumps right into the cyclist action, with protagonist Kat stumbling upon a special ghost bike responsible for helping dead spirits traverse from this world to the afterlife via something called the Great Shift. To do so, Kat must help the ghost reassemble a bike capable of the Great Shift with legendary parts, and it doesn’t take long for Wheel World’s formula to unfold: traverse the open world, gain enough rep to challenge each area’s best bicyclist by completing other races, and earn their legendary part. It’s a simple premise, pushing players to interact with the various question marks around the map that are revealed after ringing the bell shrine in each area – it’s very similar to Ubisoft’s traditional tower formula – but it gets bland fast.
The open world is divided into several distinct areas, including a forest location reminiscent of the Pacific Northwest, a Tuscan-like vineyard, an autumnal coast, and more. Aside from visual changes, these locations do little to alter the biking gameplay. Sure, going through vines in the vineyard slows you down, and the forest area has more elevation changes than the coast, but if you stay on the main path of each race, these do little to switch up the formula. And that formula is rinse and repeat. The various question marks on your map become one of three things: a race, a drone from the rarely mentioned Cyclorp company that rewards your efforts with tickets for buying parts, or a bike parts vendor.
Each race begins by talking to a group of bikers, and though they are visually distinct with quirky pun-and-pop-culture-filled dialogue, there’s no variation in how they race. I rarely lost a race and struggled to find any challenge in them. Fortunately, bonus objectives, like finding hidden “K-A-T” letters throughout each race, gave me something to do while my AI opponents struggled to keep up. In a game built around racing, it’s especially disappointing that races never challenged or surprised me. Even the courses themselves are uninteresting, save for the occasional jump shortcut. And even worse, the courses bounce between uninteresting and annoying, especially in the game’s final area, which introduces an abundance of urban architecture and plenty of vehicles that get in the way.
The physics behind collisions, whether with other racers, vehicles, or buildings, often feel broken and unfair. Colliding with a fellow bicyclist mildly breaks the game, throwing me way off course in a way that doesn’t make sense. Sometimes Kat bounces right off vehicles; other times, she crashes, and when you crash in Wheel World, you’re set back seconds in the race, often placing you in last place, even if the other seven racers were previously so far behind you couldn’t even see them. This was the only challenge I faced: crashing, unfairly being placed way far back, and having to catch back up to first place. But racing is so easy that catching up presented no provocation.
Even the bike itself doesn’t feel great; it’s serviceable at best, and when its physics feel off, it feels like biking through slime. There are plenty of parts to find around the world (one of the only reasons to explore off the beaten path), and even more to buy from vendors using tickets you get from completing side gigs like finding hidden jumps, but no matter how I customized my bike, I felt little variation in how it performed. Picking parts that made the stat bars go up served me best, even though Wheel World attempts to push you to rebuild your bike in various ways; for example, rebuilding my bike for off-roading racing might decrease my acceleration but yield better grip, theoretically making for a better experience over gravel and dirt. My road-ready bike still won off-road races with ease, though, and customizing my bike with various parts I found quickly lost its luster.
While the bog-standard races around the world, which I completed to earn reputation, bored me, I held hope that the races against each region’s best bicyclists would present something more enjoyable. But nope; not only did these races feel like any other, I often laughed at these legendary riders struggling to stay ahead of the other racers. I laughed even harder when they would hit a vehicle or structure and bounce around wildly until they landed off-screen. I’m still unsure whether that’s a feature or a bug. I experienced numerous other issues while playing, including egregious pop-in, weird and erratic lighting, and more; I hope the console versions perform better than Wheel World did on my beefy PC.
My biggest issues with the story and dialogue were most apparent in these legendary races. After beating the vineyard region’s top racer, she said something along the lines of, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Oh wow, you beat me on my own turf. You’re a great racer.” And then I’d receive the legendary part and continue on to the next region. For all the buildup of these top racers, they feel paper-thin. Wheel World does nothing to justify their authority in this bike-centric place.
A last-minute twist attempts to change the formula with the aforementioned new setting, but it’s the worst of them all, and the question marks become the same old races, drones, and vendors. This leads to the game’s finale, which is disappointing and feels unfinished. I was shocked when the credits began to roll after four hours. It felt like something was missing – the game was really over? Those were its final moments? Admittedly, Wheel World does little to build up this finale or any of its narrative, to be frank, but the climax of this adventure rolled along like a popped tire, not the triumphant ride I was promised with the Great Shift.
There is one bright spot in Wheel World, though, and that is its soundtrack. It’s a phenomenal selection of tracks, the highlight of each legendary race, and something I can’t wait to listen to when it’s available outside of the game. Curated by Portland and West Hollywood-based independent music label Italians Do It Better, Wheel World’s soundtrack is one of the best of the year. It’s a shame the music was one of the only highlights and not a complementary harmony to the rest of this adventure, though.
Wheel World is an amalgamation of boring races and exploration, poor storytelling, and often clumsy gameplay that never felt great. Its unique art style and excellent soundtrack feel wasted on what’s here, and the premise of the game is more exciting than anything that actually happens. When I crossed Wheel World’s finish line, I felt nothing about what I had accomplished, instead feeling more excited to get off this bike for good.
