Rating
Wheel World
Ghost Bike puts players in the shoes of a streetwise kid from Freehub City on a mission to revive the last of the Ghost Bikes, the magical couriers who rode between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Details
- Released
- July 23, 2025
- Developer
- Messhof
- Publisher
- Annapurna Interactive
- Platforms
- PC · PS4 · Xbox One · PS5 · Xbox Series X|S
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Wheel World Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
Wheel World is an excellent game, bringing a realistic weightiness from the bike handling and merging it with a beautiful world that's a joy to explore.
Wheel World is a cyclist’s haven, with tons of challenging races to beat, lands to cycle through, and heaps of customisation options to create your perfect bicycle. Highly recommended.
In Wheel World, despite a few speed bumps, Messhof’s first foray into 3D is a triumph. Join Kat in her quest to help Skully reconstruct the Legendary Bike, allowing them to perform The Great Shift. Explore the world at your leisure, scour the island for treasure and take on the world’s “gangs” to become the ultimate racer. You’ll have a great time whatever you do.
Get on your bike and ride – Wheel World is a sheer joy, and is one of 2025’s most relaxing games.
At its best this colourful racer has the power to improve your day.
Wheel World is a universe that cyclists would view as a utopia. Cycling is life in this open world adventure game, so much so that if an ancient bike ritual isn’t upheld, it will be the end of this cycling paradise! That’s where you come in. You play as Kat, a resident of Wheel World who has been chosen by the Wheel Gods to help perform the Great Shift, a ritual that keeps Wheel World alive.
Maybe I like racing games? I signed up to review Wheel World because it looked like an interesting game with a bizarre story, and I thought Nidhogg was pretty darn good. I ended up getting an open-world racing game and was disappointed for about eight seconds. While I was hoping for a little bit more of a story-focus and a mission-structure that felt more off-the-wall, I got an arcade bike racing game that was really fun to play.
Sometimes, you just want to get on your bike and ride. That's the general idea behind Wheel World, a new open-world biking adventure from Annapurna Interactive and Nidhogg developer Messhof. While the game does feature a story, things are mostly kept simple and the result is an enjoyably relaxing ride.
Wheel World is an enjoyable enough game that gets right to the point of riding a bike and saving the world. The cycling challenges and narrative require nothing but a desire to work away at customising your bike to best go up and down hills, slide around corners, and jump ramps. While its creativity and riding mechanics are minimal, its vibe-based world is perfect for a casual player who likes the premise of a bike-based society.
Wheel World’s unique visual style, laid-back nature, and delightful soundtrack promise an inviting adventure set atop a bicycle in a world where they’re more common than cars. But the gameplay itself, the progression, and the barely-there narrative break that promise with an experience that only gets more frustrating and monotonous the more you play. Rote races, dull dialogue, and an empty world left me wondering why Wheel World’s denizens love biking around it.
Wheel World just doesn't deliver on the promises it presents in its opening hour. You'll quickly find the charm starts to wear off as you complete monotonous race after monotonous race. That boredom only turns to frustration as the later races in the game become increasingly hostile, with no way for the player to push back. Add on a story that goes nowhere, and you have a game that just feels like it never got past the initial brainstorming session.
It's a far cry from Messhof's previous works - the incomparable Nidhogg remains one of the best fighting games of all time. And I'll admit it feels a bit weird to set Wheel World's sweet and ultimately harmless roamaround racing next to the snarling energy and electro fury of the fencing worm and its serpentine sequel. But that redefining of studio style feels inevitable when it expands beyond its origins - Messhof used to be a moniker for solo developer Mark Essen, but is now the name of his...