Wild Wheels

About Wild Wheels

Wild Wheels is a kart racer with forty-eight karts on the road at once, which is a lot more than most, and the whole game is built around actually doing something with that. There are eleven circuits, six animals who genuinely drive differently, and two ways to race: a straight ten-lap event, or Knockout, where the number of karts still running goes down every eighteen seconds until there is one left.

Knockout

The mode worth starting with. A cut lands every eighteen seconds and takes a quarter of whoever is still racing with it, so forty-eight becomes thirty-six, then twenty-seven, then twenty-one, and so on down to a winner in about four minutes. Sitting comfortably in the middle of the pack stops being safe: if you are inside the drop zone when the clock runs out, the countdown on your HUD turns amber and then red, and then you are watching. It is the one format where being thirtieth out of forty-eight is genuinely frightening.

The animals are not just skins

Biscuit, Mochi, Bao, Bonbon, Fidget and Pickles each have their own top speed, acceleration, grip and weight, plus one signature ability. Biscuit shakes off spins in half the time. Mochi lands every jump clean and gets a kick of speed for it. Bao is heavy enough to knock rivals aside instead of bouncing off them. Bonbon has a second jump in mid-air. Fidget is fastest flat out and can steal the item off whoever is just ahead. Pickles barely notices ice, oil and mud.

The spread is deliberately narrow — about fifteen per cent between the fastest and slowest animal — because a kart racer where one animal is simply better is a kart racer with one animal. What changes is where you are strong, not how strong you are.

Eleven circuits, and they are not all ovals

Six original worlds — a playground, a city at rush hour, a candy carnival, a snowbound summit, a jungle and an after-dark funfair — plus the Four Seasons World Tour, a single course that links all six across spring, summer, autumn and winter. Then four circuits with layouts of their own: Thunder Mesa Speedway, two enormous straights and one long sweep, where top speed finally matters; Lantern Night Market, a lantern-strung street circuit with no straight anywhere on it; Cascade Falls, a long grinding climb over a bridge in the clouds and then the drop; and Dustbowl Rally, washboard dirt and blind crests. The last two have real elevation, and a climb genuinely costs you speed.

The garage

Every race pays coins, scaled by where you finished and how big the field was, with a premium for Knockout. Coins buy engine, gearbox and tyre upgrades, each capped at six per cent, so a fully-built kart is quicker than it was but still cannot out-run a stock kart of a faster animal. What is left goes on paint. Your coins, parts, paint and career record are saved in your browser, and feed the site rankings if you are signed in.

Controls

WASD or the arrow keys to drive, Shift to drift, Space to use an item, J to hop and R to look behind. Two players can share a keyboard in split-screen. On a phone or tablet there are on-screen pedals and a steering strip.