Bike Shops and Tech Chops
A review of Wheel World, vehicle customization in games, and recommending games that have issues.
Ghost Bike was a far better name in my opinion. Wheel World just doesn’t have great mouth-feel, y’know?
Been a while! Kept you waiting, huh? Sorry… Been playing way too much Metal Gear lately…
Anyway… I have been playing some things!
Indie games have been very, VERY, good this year, and the dearth of high-quality titles on offer everywhere is exciting. This year for games has been excellent, especially since the stuff filling in the gaps between big releases has been on par, if not sometimes better, than the big-budget games that dot the release calendar. Great time to play video games if you ask me!
So, Wheel World used to be called “Ghost Bike”, at some point in development, and you know– I think I prefer that name over the one they went with. It’s fine, you know… it just doesn’t really ‘roll off the tongue’ for me, if I am honest. Bad mouth-feel. But I will say, name aside, I really dug Wheel World.
It’s a tight, cleverly designed little game that gave me thrills just as much as chills to have to deal with regarding its myriad technical issues. At least on PS5, which is where I played it. It’s tough. I am into almost everything this game is doing. It knows what it is and what it wants to be.
The premise of the game is this. You wake up in a field outside of an industrial building, go inside it, and find a broken bike that has been inhabited by a ghost named Skully. Skully is a fun guy, and lots of his dialogue is amusing and full of weird little anecdotes about what it’s like to be a floating spirit with a skull for a body. Great guy, that Skully. He proceeds to tell you that someone jacked all of his bike’s parts and that you need to help him challenge the perpetrators to craft the ultimate legendary ghost-bike.
After that, he yaks on about going to this big mountain called Mt. Send and doing a thing to fix the spirit world, and from there, you get your bearings in a starting zone, and off you go to do video game things. It’s one of the quickest ‘get up and go’s’, I have seen in a video game, recently. I guess, except in Donkey Kong Bananza, which literally gives you controls and off you go practically.
So yeah. That’s the beginning. The game is structured like so, following that: You go around a couple of large landmasses, divided up into Reputation-gated territories where you do all the stuff. Pretty much every activity that dots the map is a race, be it a sprint or a lap-based run through the hills.
Every race has 4 objectives to complete in each to attain completion for that activity, and as a reward for beating each, you attain ‘rep’ to challenge some of the toughest competition on the island. Most bosses have a minimum rep threshold that you have to meet or exceed to even challenge them, so seeing that sort of checklist-y design pop up here, for me, is a plus. I am a big fan of games that know they are games and do video-game things. It’s just fun to do tasks!
You finish objectives in races to gain rep points. They vary race to race, but they are usually as follows: finish in the top three of racers, finish in first, finish in first while collecting ‘K-A-T’ (where you collect the letters in your character’s name, which is a similar goal to grabbing letters during courses in a Tony Hawk game), and finish under a certain time set by the developers. Rinse and repeat. It’s fun to do all those tasks every race too, with most courses having a fair bit of variety, given the different parameters, course layout, the race’s format, and the specific biome section’s terrain distinctions. Doing all the ‘stuff’ in Wheel World is breezy, chill fun.
As you speed along the various highways, winding roads, and cul-de-sacs of the island, you collect pieces to add to your bike. Each part has pluses or minuses that you add or subtract from your bike’s overall makeup. Different parts are better or worse for various activities, and assembling the right bike is crucial to getting a race done right. You can find these parts in large orange boxes hidden in various alcoves, on top of large cliffs, and tucked away in bits of foliage. Every part you add can be swapped out at will (when you aren’t actively racing), and experimenting with these parts is maybe the highlight of Wheel World for me.
I just love it when games let me fiddle with vehicle customization. ‘Mad Max’ had this, where you could build the ultimate supercar for your wasteland questing (if you haven’t played Mad Max, please do…). Even in ‘Days Gone’, they had this bit of design, where you could kit out your specialized motorcycle to cruise along the Oregon apocalypse. Wastelands and apocalyptic settings just have lots of parts lying around, huh? Guess it’s the end times, go nuts!
I love customizing vehicles in games, which is weird because I really am not a vehicle guy in real life. Is this a sign I may become one? Probably not… but maybe? Jokes aside, this is my favorite part of Wheel World by far, and getting the right bike built for the course always felt great.
The bike is built so now to talk about the music that fuels the racing, right? My verdict is… The music is just okay. I like a fair bit of it, but it is a bit too ‘lo-fi’ for the races you are doing, which can be fast and frenetic. It does add layers to a beautifully rendered and presented world, but its inclusion seems a tad out of place, genre-wise, since you are mostly racing. I am looking for more Danny Baranowsky rather than Kavinsky, let’s say. I’m pumping blood through this race, I need some tunes to super-charge my soul, baby!
Regardless, what is there is good but not mind-blowing by any metric, and I think that’s fine. Just not my cup of tea, I think. Music is one of the most subjective forms of art, in my opinion, so tastes won’t be aligned for most folks, I imagine, regarding this.
Where it does kick in, however, is in the boss races where there are actual lyrics tied to the songs playing alongside courses. Those I do like, and wish we got more of them besides where they are placed, but they’re pretty great anyway.
The look of Wheel World has this sort of pastel, washed-out, cel-shaded look, with a chill and low-key presentation that brings to mind the works of the artist Moebius. It also reminds me of that game from a couple of years back, ‘Sable’. Very similar feelings here. (I should get back to that.)
It’s nice, and when the game is running well, it all looks and sounds great! The ticks of your bike as the gears shift up and down, and the foley of your bike wheels rolling across different terrain types, add to the flavor and themes of what Messhof is going for here. When it’s running well, it’s great.
But therein lies the issue I have with Wheel World. Well, a couple of issues, I think.
It’s just not ready for primetime. At least on console.
Messhof, as a studio, has dealt mostly in 2D with their previous titles, Nidhogg and its sequel, Nidhogg 2. Wheel World is entirely in 3D and on a different scope and level of complexity than what they have done previously, so I don’t want to be cruel when I say this, since I don’t think they are accustomed to polishing these sorts of experiences yet. This game is in rough shape. I regularly hit massive frame drops when things get hectic or fast. I was routinely in the later points of the game, hitting the low ‘teens’ to single digits for frame rate. I want to give them some grace, for sure, but it started hampering my enjoyment in the back half of the game.
It’s a shame, too. Because Wheel World is great! I can even forgive the weird model glitches and texture pop-in that crop up from time to time, but when my ability to play the game at a basic level was being hindered, I couldn’t help but feel very disappointed by it when it happened. It happened a lot in the last 2-3 hours of my time with the game, too, and it’s a large, ugly blemish on what I believe is a great game design-wise that people should play.
I don’t think I can recommend this game in the state that it is in currently, which breaks my heart. Hopefully, this game gets the technical attention it needs, because what is there is truly unique and well worth people’s time. I like Wheel World a fair bit, but in the state it is in technically, I think you should wait and play this game when it has been updated with a couple of patches to fix these issues.
I so desperately wanted to cheer this game on and recommend it to folks, but I just can’t right now. It’s good fun when it works and frustrating when it doesn’t. That’s pretty much it, for a verdict from me, I think. If you can stomach these problems, by all means check Wheel World out, but in my opinion, it would be better to wait and see how these big issues get fixed, because these problems soured my time with it by the end.
Wheel World is a good game riddled with technical issues that, if solved, could turn it from just okay to a great game. Don’t let it sneak on by, though. What’s there is great. You judge it for yourself, though. I can only inform you!
As always, keep gaming, and thanks for reading.