Wheel World review – cycle of pain

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.

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.

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.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: TBA*
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Developer: Messhof
Release Date: 23rd July 2025
Age Rating: 3

*available on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from day one

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