It’s bikes all the way down. Everything is bikes. The social fabric of the world is made up of bikes. There are only bikes and people who ride them. In a world of cyclical cycling, there is only one thing to do: Pedal fast and lock in.
Wheel World is a simple concept neatly realized. Gangs of bike enthusiasts are plotted in specific terrain that require specific solutions. The game is about mechanical refinement and building the right bike for the right challenge. By racing well and exploring the open world, you unlock bike parts, which allow customization for specific builds that are suited for each environment. Maybe you’re seeking an aerodynamic build and make a lightweight feather-like bike that accelerates down long stretches. Next, you might need to weave in and out of tricky industrial obstacles and need a slow-going bike that’s tweaked for maneuverability.
What’s so satisfying is that the game feel changes so swiftly based on the build of your bike. Whether you’re going for full power or maybe a boosting-focused build, the difference is immediately noticeable, and you will be able to shave split seconds off your overall time, if you come prepared. This is a credit to developer Messhof, a small team who understand how to fine-tune a game until it’s perfectly balanced (see: Nidhogg (2014)).
As you harrow down the course, it’s not just simple point-to-point racing, but often about branching paths, with a few additional challenges for each race: placing first, collecting the letters of your character’s name (K-A-T) which are spread out on obstacles and paths that highlight the mechanical variety of each course, and finishing with a top time. You may even need a couple different bike loadouts to do each of these things. This is good design for any racing game: Encourage the player to do every course at least twice, so they can see that handling it differently really does produce different outcomes.
The aesthetic variety of Wheel World is deeply appealing. Somewhere between Jet Set Radio (1999) and Dungeons of Hinterberg (2024), Wheel World finds aesthetic purchase in its richly vibrant world-building. The world glows with a pop art cell-shaded dynamic, which looks fantastic, and makes the stylistic expression deeply unique. The game is also dripping with personality, both in its flattened pop art textures and the Shadows of the Damned (2011)-like disembodied skull who rides with you and helps you purge the world of any spiritual malfeasance (anything that is not bikes). Then there’s the shimmering synthwave, vaporwave-tinged score that drifts into the background like a warm breeze on a bike ride, crafted by artists from the stellar electronic label Italians Do It Better.
If the game has one issue, and this may be a big barrier, it’s the racing itself. The AI racers go down a fairly pre-determined track. They will not really be knocked off course and do not respond very much to your presence. Which often means that they run into the player bike and throw you off course or careening away from a turn. It’s frustrating that there seems to be little mechanical interaction there. The best way it goes is always that you’ve tuned your bike and never see anyone after you’ve cleared the initial pack at the start of each race. That’s generally within the first 20 seconds. Then there’s some clipping issues and occasionally, you’ll run into objects that are hard to discern from one another given how flattened out all of the visuals are. Mostly, this just leads to a few restarts to reach your desired objective, but on a few races, gave way to frustration with the design.
So, the game comes down to really just feeling like a bunch of hot laps where you’re collecting letters and if you’ve determined the right setup for your bike, based on feedback from the world and what you’ve learned so far, it all goes down as breezy and not especially testing.
That’s fine because Wheel World is all vibes. Bikes and vibes. Vibes and bikes. And that’s enough, because it’s such a compelling little slice of a world, heightened by its aesthetic and the balanced understanding for game feel. That’s what makes Wheel World a true standout among recent indie games and a must play for folks who wish every problem in the world would just be solved by more bikes.
8/10
Reviewed on Steam Deck