Wheel World is an open world cycling title with a clear love for all things biking. While it’s more of an arcade racer than some sort of bicycle simulator, it manages to capture the joys of pedalling like very few other games have.
You play as the comically unbothered Kat, a silent protagonist who sets out on a quest to help Skully — a floating skull-shaped spirit who needs to repair his legendary bike. The surface-level story’s fairly charming while it lasts, but Wheel World’s all about the gameplay.
Following on from a brief introductory chapter, you’re free to ride through the open world, which is made up of several districts. The idea is that in order to rebuild Skully’s bike, you need to collect the all-important parts from the continent’s best cyclists, each of whom reside in different parts of the map.
So, you pedal from place to place, gradually customising and improving your ride with new frames, wheels, handle bars, seats, and gear chains that you either buy, stumble across, or win in races. And once your bike’s in good shape, you start taking on increasingly difficult challenges.
There’s a really nice progression curve to Wheel World. The game’s only around six or seven hours long, but the near constant rewards and tangible bike upgrades make it feel like a proper journey to the top. Coming back to earlier races — which once seemed quite tricky — and utterly dominating with your much improved ride feels great.
The races themselves are dotted across the map. Some feature short routes that reward speed, while others are made up of tangled roads and dirt paths that require more dextrous handling.
You can win most races just by making sure that your bike’s build is suitably well-rounded, but in order to set record times and claim victory on the user-based leaderboards, you’ll need to think a little harder about preparation.
With satisfyingly tight controls and some fantastic haptic feedback on PS5, actually playing Wheel World is often a joy. The DualSense rumbles and whirls in different ways depending on your speed and the type of ground you’re covering, which really adds to the title’s already tactile feel.
Churning uphill, hurtling downhill, braking and almost drifting into hairpin bends… Wheel World gets so much right that it stings when the game eventually drops the ball. It’s not a dealbreaker, but the title’s last couple of hours or so suffer from a dip in overall quality.
Racing routes become more and more finicky, with especially narrow tracks forcing situations where your AI-driven opponents start bumping into you. This doesn’t sound like a huge issue on paper, but in practice, taking a knock usually dampens your control over Kat to a significant degree, sending you off course or, if you’re going at speed, careering into the nearest wall.
By this point in the game, just one bump can be enough to ruin an entire race, and given how erratic your AI adversaries can be, there’s no definitive way to counteract their randomised bullying. With how amazing everything else feels, the collision system — or lack thereof — seems like a weird misstep (and we’re hoping that it’s tweaked post-launch).
Unfortunately, more missteps are made when it comes to the title’s performance. Even on PS5 Pro, there are some pretty heavy frame rate drops in dense areas, like the traffic-laden city section of the map. The game’s tight and responsive controls save these dips from being a complete disaster, but they’re still rough, and screen tearing out in the more open environments is an annoyance as well.
Conclusion
Wheel World is a delightfully tactile indie title, and a real celebration of cycling. It feels fantastic to play and it’s lovely to look at, but it’s held back by a finicky finale and poor performance on PS5. We’re hoping that a couple of meaningful post-release patches will address our complaints, because at its core, Wheel World is joyous.
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