Wheel World review: Biking at its most charming

Wheel World brings a fluid, fun biking game that may just surprise us

Don’t make any mistake about it, this is a cycling adventure racing game first and foremost. Those are a lot of words, but they’re meaningful here. Wheel World puts a cozy, chill story onto biking that is engrained into its design.

In the game, we’re helping a sort of Spirit of Cycling collect their missing parts in hopes of putting them back together. The world is on the brink of a doomsday, and repairing the bike ghost is the only way to save it. Don’t at me, this makes sense — in the game, at least. As we travel around the world we take on races, increase our rep and find parts to improve our bike with buffs.

It’s not deep, but it’s all chill. It even has a great soundtrack by Italians Do It Better.

The big controls, the way the bike feels, is really, really good. There’s something about the weight and the movement that’s different from a normal racing game, and we have to control it differently. We have to manage our weight in ways that can only really be done on a bike, so this sets is apart from other racing games from that aspect alone.

I think my biggest pet peeve with this game, the biggest downside, is the racer AI. It has two modes, chill or chaotic. The other racers are either dumb as rocks or the most impenetrable force on the planet. Sometimes we’ll just see them slamming into the walls, and then other times, they’re locked on to us and are trying to drive us off the course. They’re not even bothering racing anymore.

This game lives and dies by if the races feel good or not, and they all feel really good. A lot of the times if we feel like we’re at a disadvantage it’s because we just don’t have the right parts for a race, but we’re usually right where we need to be with our equipment and the right parts are never really out of reach.

Wheel World is a pretty phenomenal game, all things considered. I have some gripes with the weird difficulty, but everything is well-written with a good sens of humor, good soundtrack, and just a terrific biking feel.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and Video courtesy Publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest LIVE for August 07, 2025.