Recent reviews by Zopal

Enjoying it so far, not sure what the immediate influx of negative reviews is about.

Feels like a very competent iteration on Circuit Superstars, few little nitpicks in terms of car handling, online handling, netcode and amount of cars but I'll give it some time and see how the game develops.

Absolutely worth the money as it is though IMO.

Having completed the main game, I'm very pleased to report that Wheel World is a wonderful game and I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun, laid-back open world game.

It feels like it's taken cues from games like Burnout Paradise, A Short Hike, and BoTW. Then rolled them into a neat package that was infused with cycling culture in a very sincere manner.

The soundtrack is great, the visuals are charming, the design is intuitive, the core gameplay loop is engaging and the price is fair.

If you're on the fence, read no further and go hit the trails.

However as someone who deeply enjoys cycling and cycling culture, there's a few boxes I'd have liked to see ticked that can perhaps be added or considered for further DLC.

I haven't fully completed the all the achievements and collected all the parts, so I'll update the little things here if they become untrue.

Minor gripes

• In a game about cycling, why can't I pop a wheelie?
  
• I can ring my bell, why don't environmental NPC cyclists ring their bells back?
  
• Riders don't hold drop bars by the hoods or the drops, but only by the tops
  
• Where are my rear rack and rear panniers :( Ladies and gentlemen, I have found my panniers
  
• For a game with such deep representation of cycling culture, it's a shame there's no cargo bikes, bakfiets or trailers organically in the world, would have been really cool to see a gang of bikers with kid trailers and flags on them, or a front loading cargo bike gang that works for a logistics company
  
• The vast majority of drivetrains are single speed, but they all visually have a derailleur
  
• Other cyclists get rear lights but I don't :(
  
• For a game that references gravel cycling culture, it's odd that there's no flared drop bars - I could be wrong about this as I haven't unlocked everything but it feels like I've unlocked two dozen flat bar variants and literally only one pair of drop bars, I'd have loved to see some mildly flared bars, very flared bars, riser drop bars and flared riser drop bars.
  
• It's odd that none of the vehicles in the game ever carry bikes on a rack, the world is full of cyclists after all

Gameplay

• Drafting vehicles is largely inconsequential, because every vehicle travels about half the speed of you, so you pass them very quickly and can't tuck in behind them like you might IRL.
  
• Largely I found the game a little easier than I'd have liked
  
• It feels like a huge missed opportunity to not have tow trucks driving around with ramps on the back
  
• The game heavily seems to encourage swapping components for different use cases, it would have helped to have preset bikes that I could load from my parts as it became a bit of a slog remembering which parts I liked using and which combo's worked best for me.

(Story/gameplay spoilers beneath)

On top of this, it kinda feels like the game takes a bit of a nose dive once you've completed the main map.

Once you enter Wasteland, I think the commentary on car dependence, corporations, fossil fuels and parallels to world politics and certain billionaires are absolutely on the nose and I appreciate them greatly. It's great ludonarrative design to thrust the player into this dense city full of WAY more cars and traffic jams, and the game does a great job of simulating the experience of trying to cycle in a city designed for cars.

However, you never really recover from this tonal shift. The final race with the fabled Tom is short lived and takes place only in the Wasteland (I was hoping I'd get to chase him through the regions I'd mastered previously), and then you're quickly whisked away to Mt. Send, which is essentially just a very small area in which there's nothing to do apart from head to the final objective.

The design of Mt. Send feels like it falls short of the standards set by Tramonto and the Wasteland, it feels like an afterthought.

It would have been nice to have more impact on the world having beaten the game, and also would have been great for Mt. Send to offer a little more in the way of gameplay, condensing all of the lessons and disciplines from Tramonto into a reward.

Tramonto does a very good job of allowing you to achieve mastery over different styles of riding and environments, and it's a shame to never really have a chance to flex those muscles again once you leave. Wasteland offers some good urban riding and crit racing courses, However it doesn't come close to the variety that Tramonto offered (though this is deliberate, of course).

Obviously, it's a minor miracle every time any game makes it out the doors of a studio and into the hands of consumers, and as such I find it hard to fault Wheel World for the way things were tied up as I have zero idea what went on behind closed doors, deadlines, budgets, publishers and 100s of other things all have an impact on game development.

It's just a shame to see a game that flew so high for the first ~5hrs crash and burn in the final ~1.5hrs, and you can probably tell I enjoyed the hell out of the vast majority of the game, which made it all the more disappointing when I discovered Mt. Send was not the promised land, but a means to reach the credits screen.

Tech stuff

• It'd be nice to have a toggle to turn off audio when tabbed out
  
• I'd have liked a way to rebind controls so I could move boost/shift buttons around
  
• It would be nice to see how many components you're missing
  
• It would be useful to have a way to get hints to find missing components, or know which shop they're in
  
• I'd like to be able to see Tom's time while I'm in the race, next to the KAT UI

Performance-wise, the game was fine for me at 1440p given my system specs (i5 14600K, RTX 5070), though it's inability to maintain something like a constant 120fps on high settings doesn't bode well for lesser systems, and doesn't match up with the performance of other indie games that are similarly stylised.

None of the above outweighs the fun I had playing the majority of the game or my appreciation for the game's deep and humorous cycling culture references, as you can imagine it just sucks a bit to enjoy something so much and feel let down. It's not even necessarily the tonal shift but the lack of reward for finishing and the brevity of Mt. Send.

Happy trails!

On a fresh install of Windows with all drivers up to date, having just installed the game, I can't create a save file without the game crashing.

Not going to bother learning how to fix it, insane that a game can exist in this state in 2023.

Donut Country is a game I thoroughly enjoyed, but find hard to recommend to others.

It's charming, well executed and nicely polished. There were definite moments of actual laughter from the characters and their dialogue.

However $12.99 and 2 hours of gameplay is a hard sell, as much as I enjoyed the gameplay I was left feeling that the mechanics could have been explored further, and the puzzles could have been harder. It felt like I reached harmony with the game by two hours in only to be told this was the end, rather than "Now that you've really got the hang of it, here's some more challenging iterations of the gameplay language we've already established"

Once it goes on sale, grab it, enjoy it, but don't expect anything more than a couple hours of being a hole in the ground.

Rolling line is a wonderful idea ruined by incompetence.

I only had to spend a few minutes past the tutorial to realise that I'm never going to play this game in its current state. Whoever designed the controls and UI for this game has obviously never actually played any VR games other than their own.

The tutorial text is attached in front of your headset, you can't move it, you can't minimise it and you have to do what it says to get it to go away, but you can't do what it wants you to do because the text is blocking your view.

You activate buttons by putting your hand on them and pressing the trigger on your controller and they they just magically activate. Why did you devise a solution more complicated than having the player push a button in by using their index finger to physically press the button?

Also, why am I making my index finger point by making a fist? In literally every other game I've played with my rift I can make a fist with my three fingers and thumb, and point with my index finger just fine.

You adjust the speed when you're in a train by pushing buttons that point left or right, I'm not even going to get into why the buttons don't point forward and backwards but why didn't you just give me a damn leaver that I can pull and adjust with my hand??

Finally, why are all of the face buttons on my controllers taken up by teleporting controls? Do I really need four buttons for teleporting?

Why not just use the thumb sticks to teleport like in oculus home, since they're only being used when you're actually holding an item or hovering over it.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but thats what you bring on yourself when you release something this unpolished and fundamentally flawed as a finished game and not an early access title.

It was good

Does what it says on the tin

A fun, top down, minimalistic drifting game with tight controls and satisfying physics.

Would buy again

I'd love to play more, however the camera shake when I land a spear makes me nauseated, is there a way to turn it off?

edit: See dev comment!

edit2: its been nearly a year, still no sign, still feel sick playing the game

Impresses me every time I open it, worth a look if you're interested this genre in general.

Early critisisms

A few things that stuck out to me within my first day of owning the game, when reading please remember that this is a DAY ONE, EARLY ACCESS review, and its not even a review, more like a few issues that struck me within the first day of ownership.

The one thing that is bugging me currently more than anything is the camera, and this is probably why I've spent so little time in the game so far. The in game camera is hard tethered to the car and its movement, resulting in the camera swinging jarringly at the touch of a joystick, this is extremely nausiating for me, especially because of the wide FOV of the viewing camera, which is not helping at all. I was rather hoping the camera would be fixed, like in the release trailer, or have an option to be soft tethered, whereby the camera is following the direction and angle of the track, and not the car.

Secondly, the handling of the cars seems far too forgiving. The way the cars slide, and speed and angle around corners regardless of how much I try to whip it into a corner is highly unrealistic. Yes, I get that this is a casual, arcade racer, almost all arcade racing games adhere to basic physics when it comes to cornering, and it just looks plain weird to see a car getting a load of angle around a corner, without the slightest dab of countersteer, thats not how any of this works.

However, the gameplay is good, the AI are okay for what they are, the environment and tracks are great to look and and even better to race, but the UI is a bit counter intuitive, and the lack of mouse navigation, and being forced to chose between Keyboard and Pad is confusing, but I honestly wasn't expecting much for the initial release on early access, other than some basic functionality and gameplay, and looking at the career mode, VooFoo has exceeded that.

I'll definitely be playing more of this game, and would recommend it, of course only if you're willing to get into an early access game that is currently in development, but currently the camera mode is holding me back, as I'd rather not get motion sick after 5 minutes of playing.