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The Verge
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Wheel World is the feel-good game of the summer
Momentum is what Wheel World does best. It is the feeling of reaching a downhill section of road, a pristine Sega-blue sea stretching out in the far distance, and letting gravity, the weight of your bicycle, and slope do all the work. Release the right trigger, the button used to peddle, and simply careen down the gently curving asphalt. It's as if you're flying — the wind in your hair and shirt fluttering on your back, coasting to wherever the road takes you. Wheel World is an undeniably feel-good video game. But this wasn't always the case. It started life with the title 'Ghost Bike,' casting you as a deceased cyclist making their way to bicycle Valhalla. One name change later (and probably a lot of behind-the-scenes wrangling), it arrives as a game about the unmitigated joy of riding a bicycle through a Mediterranean island. The roads here are lined with cypress trees, the beaches are white and sandy, and you'll come across many chic cyclists lounging in cafes. The atmosphere is so vividly rendered that I can practically taste the vacation Coca-Cola as I play. Summer itself seems strewn across the screen. You play as Kat, a rider chosen by a cycling spirit named Skully to enact an ancient ritual. This is achieved by accruing parts of a so-called legendary bicycle: frame, wheels, chain, and more, which have fallen into the hands of rival cycling gangs. So you race these teams (which have superbly off-beat names like the 'Nude Dudes' and 'Shimmy Squad'), moving across a mix of dirt and road tracks. You encounter other cycling spirits residing in gigantic sculpted bike bells along the way. Ringing your bell at one of them causes the stonework to crack, thus revealing said spirit. You chat and gain an extra few bars on your boost gauge, before a portion of the map is revealed with tiny little icons indicating where you should pootle to next. That's right: Wheel World, from California-based studio Messhof, maker of the excellent Nidhogg sword-dueling games, is structured like an open-world behemoth from Ubisoft. But expectations should be kept in check. There isn't a blockbuster's worth of content here. Rather, across the roughly seven hours of playtime, you'll take part in races, duke it out with lone cyclists, and meet cute little dudes with boxes on their heads who point you in the direction of new gear. Oh, and there are strange hovering drones which dole out rewards for classic checklist completion stuff (like finding hidden jumps and lost members of cycling crews). You could argue the game is a little slight in its array of things to do. But that's not quite right. Rather, Wheel World requires you to rethink traditional definitions of content — to move beyond markers on a map. Content, for example, is every highway and path whose varying terrains cause your bicycle to handle differently. It is the shaky, unstable feeling that is channeled from screen to hand to brain via the controller when you veer onto the little slip of gravel next to the road. Content is also watching Kat as she strains to surmount a hill with a gradient that would cause a heart attack in most. Our hero remains stoic: I marvel at her thighs of steel! Wheel World is filled with many more beautifully animated details. You're able to hop off your bicycle and push it around on foot. Maneuvering in a tight space, Kat does a kind of swivel trick with her handlebars, essentially spinning the bike frame around in one effortless motion. Another deftly rendered moment: when Kat dismounts, lifting her right leg over the bike, resting it next to her left, and then freewheeling to a gentle stop while standing upright. If you're a cyclist, this move will likely already be familiar to you: it means every journey ends with nonchalant cool (or so you likely imagine). I've never seen it reproduced in a video game before. All this serves to make ambling around the island an exquisitely elegant thing. It's a shame, then, that the racing is a little more chaotic, a little less refined. Showdowns on wide open roads are, for the most part, a joy. Those that take place in tight city streets can be finicky, Kat bouncing awkwardly off AI cyclists, world geometry, and oncoming traffic. The difficulty also feels a touch wonky: races are too easy for much of the game before an unexpected spike arrives in the last hour or so (exacerbated by a chugging frame rate on the PlayStation 5). Still, these moments of frustration only made me pine all the more for the relative serenity of the open (world) road. Upon rolling credits, I dived back in to check off remaining objectives while soaking up the picture-postcard vibe again. This, I think, is the true mark of a game like Wheel World: the extent to which the core mechanics might cajole you back. Galavanting during my post-credits session, I thought about another notable racing title with light open-world design: Mario Kart World. The latest in Nintendo's flagship kart racer is a cascading stream of serotonin hits induced by cotton-candy skies, soaring backflips, and delightful wahoos. It is a pure pleasure machine. Wheel World, on the other hand, doles out joy with a little less machine-like efficiency. It is more languid, massaging your eyeballs, ears, and brain with great blocks of warm, cel-shaded color, nostalgia-tinted electropop, and, of course, beautifully tactile cycling. What mileage there is in simply ebbing and flowing across the gorgeous sun-kissed land, carried along by both cool breeze and smooth tarmac. Freewheeling, it is practically impossible not to break out in a smile. With every descent, those smiles only widen. Wheel World launches July 23rd on PC, PS5, and Xbox. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Lewis Gordon Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Games Review Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Gaming
Metro
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Wheel World review
The latest indie oddity from Annapurna Interactive involves a magic bicycle, a flaming skull, and some Sega blue skies to ride under. There are plenty of video games that make a virtue of their surrealism, ignoring anything as blandly conventional as trying to look like real life. Kentucky Route Zero's clutch of highly atmospheric liminal spaces and weirdoes, Suda51's killer7 and Killer Is Dead, and the more accessible but still wonderfully eccentric Psychonauts 2. All featured landscapes and action that were as far removed as they could be from any sense of realism. Wheel World's cycling-based role-playing game has been nurtured with a similarly high regard for the peculiar. The game's heroine, Kat, is accompanied by an immortal bike daemon called Skully, who looks like a floating cartoon skull surrounded by turquoise flames. He's in trouble because all the parts of his supernatural bike have been stolen, leaving him only with rusty, generic parts. That means he's unable to ride up the Sewer of Spirits to the moon, where he belongs. You soon discover that the stolen bike parts are being held by various cycling crews and have to be earned back by beating them in races. But first you'll need to open up the map by activating huge bell shrines, triggered by riding up to them and ringing the bell on your handlebars. They illuminate new sections of Wheel World, adding more races and stashes of bike parts. Each shrine also increases your boost bar; the cycling equivalent of nitrous oxide. The boost bar recharges when you get air over a jump or spend time drafting behind fellow riders. The legendary bike parts, once you've won them back and installed them on your bike, also regenerate boost slowly over time, but for the first part of the game that's not an option. Not that you particularly need it, because at least in the opening few hours, races are laughably easy. You're rewarded for a podium finish, beating time trial records, and finding the letters K-A-T hidden around the track. Each of those achievements earns a point of reputation, which is useful because the crews you have to race against to get the magical bike parts are all gated behind races based on reputation. At the beginning of the game you don't even have enough rep to be allowed into Velo City, where the toughest of the bike posses resides. As well as challenging cycle gangs, you can also take on lone wolf riders by riding up behind them and ringing your bell, beginning a point-to-point race that automatically grafts itself onto the landscape wherever you happen to be. It makes the most of its open world setting, letting you cruise around looking for people to race, or discovering hidden boxes of bike parts. Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. You can also complete jobs for Cyclorp, the big business biking company whose drones hover around the land. The tokens you win for finishing side quests are exchanged for yet more bike parts, that you see for sale almost everywhere you go. After only a few upgrades though, most new parts you come across arrive with pros and cons, boosting some stats, but lowering others. This means the overwhelming majority of parts you find are completely useless. You could potentially retool your bike for specific races, targeting handling or grip to make cornering easier, or adding parts that assist in travelling off-road, to make courses' frequent secret shortcuts more useful. In practise that feels too fiddly. You can't save configurations, so swapping out every part on your bike just for a three minute event rarely feels like time well spent. Artful use of DualSense's haptic feedback lets you feel the surfaces you ride over, and the adaptive triggers give you a sense of pedalling your way up hills. However, races also come with the impression that the bike is never entirely under your control, its distinctly wayward handling having a partial mind of its own, especially on corners. That's perfectly fine in the first part of the game, where you're touring its flat textured, blue skied open world, enjoying the views and smiling at the strange folk you meet and race against, and generally nailing every single event you take on. At that point the vagaries of the handling model go quite well with the dreamlike atmosphere. It's only when you reach the game's second open world area, The Wasteland, that the clumsy steering starts getting in the way. There you'll find Cyclocorp's minions have piled up endless heaps of rubbish everywhere, with many areas fenced off and industrialised. Once again you'll need to find bell shrines to open up the map, but this time races are a lot tougher. There's debris on the track, more oncoming cars and lorries, and a peloton of fellow racers that's far more aggressive and determined. They jostle you on corners, get in the way while you're trying to draft past them, and conspire to make races an ordeal of random obstacles and crashes that aren't your fault. More Trending Tracks are tighter and twistier too, highlighting the game's stutteringly low frame rate. Getting knocked off your bike by a piece of scenery that popped into existence a split second before you hit it feels unfair the first time it happens. By the fifth time, what used to seem quirky and mildly entertaining becomes actively infuriating. Wheel World has an admirable dedication to weirdness. If it had the same commitment to its racing mechanics it would have been a lot better game. As it is, the unusual setting and art style aren't enough to forgive the shortcomings in its control system and visuals, a sense that only gets worse as you progress. In Short: A quirky and offbeat open world biking RPG that works nicely until races get more taxing, at which point its mechanical limitations make it frustrating to play Pros: Glorious flat-shaded art style, plenty of amusingly outré characters and bike crews to meet, exploring its roads and countryside is initially pleasantly relaxing Cons: Controls don't feel tight enough for competitive racing, low frame rate makes faster races unnecessarily random, new parts you find are usually worse than the ones you have making the loot cycle feel futile Score: 4/10 Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PCPrice: TBA*Publisher: Annapurna InteractiveDeveloper: MesshofRelease Date: 23rd July 2025 Age Rating: 3 *available on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from day one Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Nintendo Switch 2 beats PS4 and PS5 as fastest-selling console ever MORE: EA Sports FC 26 preview – rip it up and start again MORE: The Elder Scrolls creator Julian LeFay dies following battle with cancer
Axios
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Monster Jam, Clippers baseball and other weekend events
⚾ Root, root, root for the Clippers during their first weekend homestand of the season — if the weather cooperates. 6:15pm Friday, 4:05pm Saturday and 1:05pm Sunday. $8-21. 🎵 Witness the heart of soul when the Columbus Jazz Orchestra joins R&B singer-songwriter and Broadway star Crystal Monee Hall at the Southern Theatre. 7pm Friday and Saturday and 3pm Sunday, 21 E. Main St. $24-105. 😤 Rev your engine when Monster Jam returns to the Schottenstein Center. 7pm Friday, 1 and 7pm Saturday and 1pm Sunday. $22-100. 🏐 Sit courtside and see the Fury take on Indianapolis at Nationwide Arena. 7pm Saturday. $25-65. 🕺 Boogie down during Disco Inferno, a Skully's dance party. 9pm Saturday, 1151 N. High St. $10. 🌸 Celebrate Cherry Blossom Day at the Franklin Park Conservatory, with free admission all day long for Franklin County residents.
