WheelMates

Enjoyed the puzzles and playing with a friend but it jumped into the void of random assets a bit too soon. Could do with a separate option to mute the voiceover audio or turn it down.

What started out as harmless, tiny-car-driving fun quickly devolved into a mess of a co-op game. The level design is all over the place. The cluttered larger areas have a bad habit of obscuring important details, smaller areas make you fight with the mediocre controls, and the puzzles either bore you to death or get lazily overcomplicated. Platforming as an RC car is awkward. Driving in tight spaces is made tricky by the high acceleration and poor turning radius. Performing a sequence of jumps is a similar crapshoot thanks to the lack of air control. In true RC car fashion, there’s a lot bonking into walls and flipping over after changing elevation. Swapping between your tools requires an unnecessary number of inputs, which creates a lot of friction for traversal. Given how contextual these unoriginal tools are, there’s no reason you should have to swap them in and out of slots so often. Providing both players with the exact same set of tools makes for a game that struggles to find meaningful collaborative interactions. There are an inexcusable number of "have two people press a button at the same time" scenarios. This overpopulation of barebones button inconvenience exists to mask how little cooperative interactivity there is to begin with as the majority of the game can be played without assistance from the other player. When cooperating is an explicit requirement, WheelMates opts for something unpleasant, like a house-sized pipe puzzle, prolonged blind communication sequences, or one of many stop-and-go button-trading platforming slogs. That nerd on the radio was grating. All of the genuinely meaningless/inaccurate science vernacular he spews out made his presence an unwelcomely annoying one. Our disdain for him grew proportionally with the game’s many other accumulating frustrations. In what should’ve been an expected move, the ending was a huge cop-out. After a particularly arduous series of “find the button” tasks, what might’ve been the final chunk of the game appears to have simply been cut and you skip straight to the credits. It took us both by surprise. And they had the confidence to tease a sequel. It made us laugh. I'd almost consider it one of those "only fun because it was with a friend" situations if the game itself wasn’t out to ruin the fun. It’s short, dissatisfying, and twenty bucks. Steer clear of WheelMates.