Wheel World
Wow three games in one weekend? That’s… pretty rare for me. But I also recently finished Wheel World, and unfortunately unlike the other two games I finished, I feel… much more mixed about this game.
I initially picked it up because I’ve been somewhat getting into cycling lately and thought “hey, it’s been a while since I played a racing game, this game looks pretty neat and the OST seems nice, I’ll give it a spin.” I will say for sure though that the OST is really good and the game DOES look pretty nice too! There’s charm in the setting and the characters, and it has a vibrant world that is fun to traverse and bike around in! Neat!
Unfortunately, the rest of the game I’m rather mixed on.And specifically, what I mean by that is the racing elements.
As one would expect from a cycling game, you race on your bicycles. However, I would almost hesitate to call them races. They feel like races for about the first 30 seconds to a minute, then after that it feels like a time trial ultimately. For majority of the races, I found that once I took the lead, barring any major mistakes/collisions, I basically kept the lead by a very very wide margin. This is inline with trying to beat Tom’s time, which I get is supposed to be a more “difficult” time to beat, but I found it… not very difficult to achieve.
Granted, it’s been a very long time since I played other racing games, but I found that this was ultimately kind of disappointing. While it would be frustrating to deal with AI that are constantly ahead, with the drafting mechanics and boost mechanics, I think a more back and forth race/battle with the AI would’ve made the races feel more alive and fun. What it feels like instead is just learning the course and doing a time battle and just making sure I don’t crash basically. Very rarely did the AI feel like a presence once I got past the initial bump of the race.
This brings me to the another in my opinion very frustrating aspect of the racing mechanics. The initial bump of the race was almost by far the hardest and most annoying because of the AI. The AI path finding was very very very bizarre at times presumably to avoid obstacles and each other. This was especially obvious in the later more crowded maps in the city where you would see the AI swerve and veer and course correct constantly. It was distracting to see the AI essentially veer off course than swivel back onto the race course and bike normally. Now this by itself I can forgive, even if it almost breaks immersion. However, another aspect of the game that was especially frustrating to me (in my opinion) is how collision physics seemed to work in the game.
Because of how the AI would swerve and veer, sometimes they would of course inevitably swerve and veer into you as the player. When this happened, the bike would sometimes just turn 90 degrees in one way or the other or crash or dislodge you or push you into the wall or any other number of things while their bikes would seemingly go unharmed. This was pretty frustrating and led to a lot of restarts near the beginning of races since there were a bunch of AI biking bots that were in front and constantly having to dodge them. Of course, once you dodged them and made your way to the front, it was fine. There were some weird instances of rubber banding I noticed cyclists on the map would seemingly jump forward/course correct, this one I’m more “ok” with considering it usually only happened to racers behind you at least.
The final race of the game I also found to be quite disappointing. It didn’t really feel like a culmination of anything and didn’t even feel like that much of a race to begin with. It’s a shame because I think there was a cool opportunity with the “gimmick” of the final race (spoilers) to have these tunnels teleport you and I think it would’ve been neat to teleport you to other portions of the maps than just the ones you basically JUST raced in before the final race. Extend the segments to be longer than just like 30 seconds each too, but unfortunately it felt really choppy and it being broken up with dialogue didn’t help either.
Parts were also an interesting idea, and this is more on me granted, but once I found a “build” I basically used that the entire game due to aforementioned reasons. There just didn’t really feel like much of a need to change outside one or two races that I’m sure if I tried hard enough I could still do with my build. Gear shifting felt more hindrance than use too, I think there should be more of a reward for using manual gears than a single speed (at least in my experience).
On top of all this, I also had performance issues in some areas which REALLY took me out of it at times. My PC is getting “old”, but it should not be chugging in certain areas of this game.
It’s a bit of a shame since I think aesthetically the game is very pleasing and the OST is good too! The idea is neat, and I like biking and think a biking racing game is a good idea! Unfortunately I felt gameplay wise the game fell short in a lot of ways. I usually don’t write out thoughts on games that I don’t like that much that I finish, but I think part of me felt like this one had the potential to be really good, just a lot of aspects held it back for me.