WheelMates Review - Co‑Op RC Racing Meets Puzzle‑Solving Adventure!

Barely Magic Mike
8 minutes ago
6 min read

https://youtu.be/jYlkEgMPsQQ?si=2ZUMlaX0gYNKQm5e

Release platforms: PC via Steam (PS5 and XSX/S to come later)

Imagine, for a moment, that a friend is recommending a new pizza spot to you. They say it’s very similar to a pizza place you already know and love, but significantly cheaper and closer to you. There’s just one little (or huge, depending) caveat - a standard plain pie at this establishment is delicious and exactly what you’d expect going into it, but this pizzeria currently only sources stale, expired, moldy pepperoni. When placed on the pizza, this pepperoni infuses the otherwise stellar slice with a putrid taste that ruins the entire thing. This pizzeria seriously needs a new supplier. But the regular plain pizza is still excellent, a great value, and convenient. How do you go about recommending such a place to somebody?

This, believe it or not, is the position I feel stuck in recommending WheelMates. On its surface, this cooperative indie title looks like Split Fiction or It Takes Two distilled through the lens of toy RC cars navigating through puzzles in mostly-familiar but massive-looking household environments. And in this case, you can mostly judge a book by its cover - a cooperative puzzle-platforming adventure hugging the formula of Hazelight Studios’ greatest hits is exactly what you’ll get here. There’s even a Friend Pass available so your friend doesn’t have to buy their own copy to play with you. But alas, there is one truly gargantuan problem: of the two ways available to play this game with a friend, one is so painfully broken that it’s hard to recommend playing it at all.

So let me stop teasing you and just tell you the gist. If you’re looking to play WheelMates with a friend in the same room via 2-player splitscreen, you’re in for a great time, and I’m happy to tell you all about what that experience is like. But first, I need to cover the so-called moldy pepperoni from my earlier metaphor - WheelMates’ online experience is currently dreadful. If you’re looking to play with a friend this way, I’ll say right now that you should seriously wait for a patch and keep an eye on the Steam reviews to make sure what you encounter is actually playable. And that’s why this title is so hard for me to review - there are two totally valid ways to play this game, and the quality you get from them is so drastically off that it feels like reviewing a game’s early alpha build and final polished build at the same exact time. So for those who want to know why the online play is so dreadful, let’s discuss how my experience of playing online with my beloved fellow reviewer, Seren, went.

At first, we couldn’t even play. I would spawn into the tutorial level, and Seren would too, but she would see herself moving around, and I would see myself moving around, but we wouldn’t see each other moving around. Reset. Okay, hopefully just bad luck. Now we got into the same game, could see each other, and after completing the tutorial and entering the first major level, Seren got hopelessly stuck, unable to accelerate or decelerate, with even the “I’M STUCK” button from the menu failing to reset her to a playable state. We exited and re-entered again figuring “damn, we’re getting some unlucky bugs”.

Okay - reset again. We’re actually playing at this point, yay! Except for the sheer volume of janky, bizarre bugs that would come up and seem uniquely impactful to whoever isn’t the host. Look at this moment where I use the game’s grappling hook, and it unilaterally decides that only the hook part is important and the unhook part is secondary.

Okay - reset yet another time. Now I have to push Seren on a cart using a button at the bottom of it. This would be straightforward enough if the game’s online mode didn’t find physics to be so baffling, like this moment where trying to press the button flung me straight across the room, in what was one of many incidents in which I tried to engage with the physics only for them to promptly tell me to get bent.

As if all of this wasn’t enough, even the most basic interactions like needing to pull a lever to unlock a door bugged out so hard that I truly wondered if we were going to have to reset yet again in order to continue progressing. You probably get the gist by this point. WheelMates’ online play is very broken, and while incremental progress can be made through sheer force of will, the never-ending parade of jank made what would have otherwise been a seemingly pleasant experience instead painfully broken, with every playable moment spent dreading the next game-breaking bug that would force a reset. If I was rating WheelMates strictly by my experience with its online mode, this review would be quite negative on the basis of technical issues alone. Thankfully, all of that is seemingly fixable, so let’s hope it sees some major improvements at launch and beyond.

One last quick side note though - for a game that primarily works best with a controller, these ridiculous lobby codes full of case-sensitive letters and numbers are sure to piss off players trying to set up a game through Steam Machine or Steam Deck, especially with how much resetting is currently required given all the game-breaking bugs. Why aren’t these just simple 4-digit codes? What sort of wild hackery are the developers trying to protect us from?

Anyway - let’s talk about split-screen, also known as the only way to play WheelMates and actually have fun. And, in fairness, quite a lot of fun. Split-screen mode melted away the friction and unbearable jank of its online counterpart to reveal an experience that’s surprisingly polished in a way that reminds me of It Takes Two. First, the playable RC Cars you’ll inhabit look and feel great with grappling hooks, jumps, magnetism, and other traversal abilities creating a fun move set that makes the act of driving around a joy on its own. A huge number of in-game objects are also destructible, ensuring you can bring out your inner cat and swat anything breakable off a ledge to fall to its inevitable doom.

While you’ll spend some time platforming, the focus tends to be on cooperative puzzles that will require you to separate from your partner so you can hit a switch to help them and vice versa. And while we occasionally had a little trouble navigating around, the overall level design is clever and tries to do a lot with the spaces you’re placed in. As with any decent platformer, there are also a bunch of collectibles, so plenty to do for completionists. Similar to It Takes Two, there are even silly little minigames you can activate like Tag if you want a little distraction. Nice touch.

Visually, in circumstances where WheelMates is functioning as intended, the game looks great. Its RC cars look like they were pulled straight from my childhood bedroom, and the colorful domestic environments filled with switches and traps and charming little touches look consistently excellent. Sound design is a bit more on the minimalist side - I barely noticed the music most of the time, though the included voice acting is a good touch and at least means you’re not stuck reading anything to take in the lore.

My coop partners and I found the story to be little more than a mildly irritating distraction, though - at various intervals you’ll scan objects and get some context as to what’s going on, but listening to it rarely took precedence over breaking a vase, doing a flip over a ramp, or grappling our way across ledges. It’s harmless and easy to ignore, but prevalent enough that one might reasonably question what the point is.

WheelMates is not a complex game or an especially original one, but I’m surely not alone in feeling like varied, tightly-designed cooperative experiences are something we can always use more of in the gaming space. And WheelMates represents a version of that which, at least in theory, is polished enough to avoid the friendslop label while being approachable and charming enough for all ages to enjoy. I really hope they get the online mode under control, because it’s hard to ignore how painfully unplayable it is right now. But if you simply pretend it doesn’t exist for the time being, the split-screen experience here is great fun and a complete experience worth recommending.

So how do I rate a coop-only game whose split-screen gameplay is great and whose online gameplay is barely passable because it’s such a mess? Well, rating systems were hardly devised with such a thing in mind. But issues aside, I had a lot of fun with WheelMates. If you’re looking to play online, just keep an eye on its Steam page and updates, because for all I know, many of the issues I experienced could be fixed by launch. I have no way of knowing that. All I can do is review what’s here, and what’s here is easily worth the bronze genie lamp of approval.

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