Game Review - Wheel World
I've played a lot of games where you control motorcycles or bikes, and they are all nearly universally terrible BUT this is something that Wheel World nails. It's the best feeling videogame bike I've ever played with. After completing the game I am still just noodling around the game's world soaking in the environment.
Wheel World is best described as "Need For Speed but for bikes" and that includes challenging other racers to advance through the game, racing boss battles, finding parts to upgrade your bikes, and other fun stuff.
The adjective I'd describe Wheel World with is "Breezy" it's a breezy game. you feel the breeze riding your bike around a very pretty european landscape. The game has a cel-shaded comicbook style and it feels like you're stepping into another world, and hell I'd live there it looks great.
Plot wise you...wake up and discover a rusty bike, and it's haunted by a ghost, and you need to assemble the ultimate bike to travel to another dimention. It's mostly goofy. and breezy. It's a breezy narrative.
Bike controls are excellent. In most bike games small inputs lead to you careening left and right and it's hard to do minor adjustments. The controls here are tuned very well, and because bikes have a bit of slip to them in the turns you can drift - something that's very hard to get right.
Bikes themselves have four stats. Power - how fast you accelerate and can get up hills, Aero - or top speed, Handling or how fast you can take turns, and Grip which is how loose/tight the steering is. There are hundreds of parts and you can mix and match them, and because the game isn't that super hard (at the start) you can go for a funny build over an optimized one. You also have a mix of offroading, hilly, flat, and paved tracks so it's fun to build a bike around a track, but usually you can get by with whatever.
Like I said, breezy.
Track design is also really interesting. There's checkpoints, and there's little optimizations you can make in the route to stay on paved and cleared sections, but also offshoots - which the game hints at with collectable letters. You can take a very liberal approach to the tracks and it makes navigating them a creative exercize. It's..Breezy.
I want to live in Wheel World's world. I want endless lazy turns and hills through vinyards and farms, I want that old-style city you can toot around on a bike, I want half the people around on bikes. It's idyllic. It's...breezy
Some not breezy things: the end of the game gets a little frustrating as the tracks get more technical, the racers get harder, and sometimes those physics objects just kind of glitch out and ruin your race. was a bit frustrating, but the game is loose enough so that you don't have to do most of them to beat the game. it's bre...ezy
Wheel World is about $20 on steam and takes about 6 hours to play through. I highly reccomend it.