Does Wheel Word reinvent the wheel or does it puncture and grind to a halt?
Wheel World rolls to us from developer Messhof and publisher Annapurna, so gear up and get ready to breakaway into a wheel based world of whimsy.
Wheel World begins with you, Kat, the player character lying down in the grass, you stand up and wander into a temple only to find a rusted old junked bike and a skull spirit called Skully. Skully goes on to explain that his legendary parts have been stolen and that existence lies in the balance as he can’t complete his sacred task without his legendary parts.
This is where you come in, your mission is to explore Wheel World and find the legendary parts, spoilers, some walking punctures have stolen said parts and you’ll need to beat them each in a race to regain the stolen bike bits, sounds easy enough? Well, no, you’re just some punk upstart wheel woman, you don’t have the rep to challenge the elite of Wheel World. To earn ‘Rep’ you’ll need to complete races and the challenges therein to earn rep. As well as earning rep you’ll earn vouchers from ‘Cyclorp’ for completing certain challenges, some of which are within races, others are tasks to complete in the wide open wheel world such as discovering hidden jumps and what not.
The only purpose ‘Rep’ serves is to let you access the later parts of the game, but it’s not massively difficult to earn. Each race has four challenges, Finish in the top three, Finish first, Beat Tom’s time and Collect K.A.T and win. The first two are self explanatory, beating Tom’s time is also fairly standard, beat the time, complete the challenge. Collect K.A.T and win is a tad more complicated, Kat’s initials are individually hidden somewhere on each track, you must skate near each one (the game is actually quite generous in how close you need to get) and win the race. This challenge was consistently my favourite as it gives you something to think about aside from just going as fast as you can. It’s a good thing too as one thing lacking in Wheel World is difficulty, almost every single race is a breeze which I found disappointing overall, however that may also be in part dude to…well, parts.
The oh so important ‘Legendary Parts’ are from the only parts you can customise your ride with, your bikes performance is broken down into four stats, Power, Aero, Handling and Grip. In turn these impact your bikes ability to accelerate, lowering drag to increase overall speed, increasing turn speed and decrease skidding while also making you more resistant to other bikers nudging you around the track. Tuning your bike per race doesn’t seem all that important in the initial area of Wheel World, but as you explore the island and areas range from, country lanes, to inner cities choked with cars and then to mountainous wooden hills it becomes essential and adds a surprising but welcome amount of depth to the game. Somewhat frustratingly the so called ‘Legendary parts’ aren’t automatically the best parts for each race or challenge. Initially this is underwhelming and makes tracking them down a purely progressive experience but in terms of gameplay balance it’s actually and great decision from the team at Messhof. If access to the legendary parts were too good then the game would become stale very quickly as you gained more of them.
Visually ‘Wheel World’ looks great, it’s got stunning colour pallet and quirky looks which immediately made me think of ‘Ollie Ollie World’. The Wheel World itself is visually varied and the characters all look fantastic, the amount of variety between each obsessive cycle gang kept me entertained as well as really stressing how obsessed everyone in this world is with the Wheel. The only thing that put the breaks on my enjoyment of the visuals was the games performance. At first I thought it was a quirky animation style but it quickly became apparent that which I’d mistook for game design was in fact an unstable frame rate. Wheel World also suffers from obscene screen tearing at time, especially in the forested areas, as well as some shocking levels of pop up on environmental elements.
The game does manage to convey a sense of speed very well and I was often on the edge of my seat weaving between trees or traffic, this combined with the games soundtrack combined for some adrenaline pumping races even if I was a lap in the lead, it was still exciting. The music is very ‘cool’ and ‘indie’ sounding, the sort of music you don’t feel cool enough to like, but it works so well in combination with the games visual style.
A review code was provided by Popagenda PR.
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