Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Wheel World Reviews - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

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What's up and welcome to the Kind of Funny Gamescast for Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025. Of course, I'm your host, Tim Getty's. I'm joined today by Snowbike, Mike. Tim Getty's, it's nice to have you back. As I told you before, you are the heartbeat of this company, and we missed you inside the other room over there. I appreciate you very much, Mike. We also are joined today by Greg Miller. Oh, where you gone?

Tim didn't notice. Hey, so much. I thought it didn't smell like Game Showdown loser in the office, so I guess I should have known. Round it out the group today. It is Andy Cortez. Really good comedy bit right there. Sorry, I was a little bit late getting out here. I was busy showing Nick the new base layout with our two ornithopters.

Got it. It's so hard to see the normal folk down there when you're so high up in the sky. You're flying. You're soaring over Iraqis. And our very slow ornithopters. Can you speed them up? Can you upgrade those things? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. You got to get the spice. Stay tuned. buddy's getting the spice is looking great well remember this is the kind of funny games cast each and every weekday we get together to talk about the latest and greatest in video games whether it's previews reviews or just topics we're talking about games live on youtube twitch and podcast services around the globe if you love what we do please support us with the kind of funny membership on patreon youtube spotify or apple podcast you get the shows ad free all of the shows we do so many shows each and every

week and you could be getting them ad free and a daily exclusive show in addition to that it's gregg way It's a great time. For a chance to be part of this show, though, submit your thoughts and opinions as YouTube super chats as we go. Little housekeeping for you. We're an 11-person business, all about live talk shows. Games Daily covered the Outer World Two.

The Outer Worlds Two price decrease, which is a little crazy. And then after this, it's a Magic Commander stream with some special guests. You want to talk about that, Mike? Yeah, super excited. We're bringing Magic the Gathering into the studio. And today we're going to have a nice four-person game of Commander going on. Some special guests, that blessing has booked.

and we're really excited to show it off. Kevin has gone above and beyond on the production side that you're going to really be impressed by the look of it. Awesome. That's very, very cool. That's after this. If you're a kind of funny member, today's Greg,

waste 18 minutes of Greg scheming on how to review Pokemon Zah. I watched the Pokemon Presents yesterday. I watched y'all's reaction to the Pokemon Presents. So I heard it all, Craig. I heard it all. Then you must be on the same page as everyone on the panel. If someone was to go and compete at the Pokemon World Championships, maybe they should automatically get to review.

did, I mean, I don't know what you're scheming, but I did see that somebody in the chat was like, Greg, like, you can't, you can't just compete. Like, that's closed. You can't do that. Oh, Greg, he'll figure it out. He'll figure it out. He had to do a parade to him. If you end up going to the goddamn Pokemon World Championships before me, I'm going to be so

You never been. I have not been. I don't know, I don't know, a guy who'd never mention a review of Pokemon game. You know what I'm saying? One of my, I see you soon. Anaheim. Anaheim. I don't know.

I don't know. It's a hundred hundred. Oh, really? And it's anahund student. SF next year. Oh, wow. We're all going to go.

We're all going. I'll show you the ropes. Yeah. I'll show you all around when I, when it's your turn. I just kept on laughing to myself the whole night. Thinking it just. Oh, man.

This song. This song. I showed it to Jen last night. And let me tell you, the context did not. There was, I couldn't give her anything to make it funny. Like this.

It's like this song. Thank you to our Patreon producers, Carl Jacobs, Omega Buster, and Delaney, the Psalm, twining. Today we're brought to you by mood and factor, but we'll tell you all about that later. For now, I'll start with the topic of the show. Tots, Tots, Tots, Tots, Tats. We're doing a two for one, everybody.

Wuchong, Fall and Feathers, Wheelworld, two big games this year that we've been looking forward to, and we're about to review them. Let's start with Wuchong, Fallen Feathers. The steam description is as follow. Real world. I was saying Wheel World. Wheel World.

Wheel World. I just love saying that. Wu Chang. Wu Chong. Wu Chong. Wu Chong. Fallen feathers is a soulslike action RPG set in the land of Shoe during the dark and tumultuous late Ming dynasty. Plagued with warring factions and a mysterious illness spawning monstrous creatures, a blight, if you will.

The dev is Len Z, the publisher's 505 games. Metacritic currently at a 75 as of 10 a.m. this morning. Who here's played it? me. And Ted's, you want to talk about Wuchong Fallen Feathers? I would love to, Tim. I played Wuchong Fallen Feathers at GDC and came back, really underwhelmed,

wanted to play that other Blades of Fire game, which ended up being pretty mid, I guess, when Blades of Fire came out. And I regretted not playing more of that other game, and I was like, ah, I spent too much time on Wuchang. It didn't feel great. Wasn't loving the systems. And so I,

So I came into this when Greg goes, are you planning on playing this game? I go, well, I probably should. I'm the souls dude. I'm not souls like Mike, granted, but I'm the souls dude. And I expect to maybe put in 10 hours into this and maybe fall off a little bit.

And this game is probably my surprise of the year. Woo! Yeah, I, you know, it's one thing to always be looking at all these games. I totally get it. I get it. When Greg, Greg made the perfect thing, when he brought up, um, was it, GDC going, oh, God, another one is like bloodborne looking

fucking dark. Everything's freaky looking sort of games. I get it. There's a lot of these games that come out. However, I think this is, I think this is the best attempt at this since Lies of P. Wow. I think that, you loved Lys B. I love Lys of P. I think that this is the best version of one of these Soulslike action games since Lies of P. I think that, you love Lys of P. I think that this is the best version of where I enjoyed Kazan, first berserker Kazan fell off of that.

Like it just, it wasn't kind of keeping me in there. Everybody, you know, black myth Wu Kong is the combat bad? No, it's just not great. And that was one reason

why I fell off. I'm like, everything about this game is stellar production. Everything's amazing in this video game. But the actual fighting things is like one thing

I'm just not loving here. Again, it's all different jokes to different folks. But man, this game really, really surprised. me. I think it does such a great job with being player friendly while not, you know, would it be

even player-friendly or to have difficulty options? Sure. Of course. But I think it does a lot of stuff to make the experience a lot more streamlined when it comes to just re-specking whenever you want. I don't know, man. I wish that as I was playing it, I was talking to Lance McDonald, who's the guy who helped me mod my PS5, he was playing it as well, he does a lot of like Souls content. And we both had the same thought about 15 to 20 hours in saying, man, I wish I was really pay attention more to the story. Like, because I'm getting to these story beats and I go, fuck, I don't remember who a lot of these names are. Granted, a lot of that could just be my ignorance and mistaking one Chinese name for another Chinese name. I think that's just like me not, you know, not paying attention enough.

And there are a lot of awesome story beats in this. There are, there's an insane amount of optional content, like a staggering amount of optional content where, you know, I beat a boss and said, wow, that might be my favorite boss of the video game so far about 20 hours in. And then was told that the whole area I just explored was all optional, completely optional. I'm about to make a big ass statement right here. All right. Prep everybody. Roger, get the clip button ready.

Batting down the hatches, everybody. Matt bats and them down. This is the best Souls-like level design that I've experienced since Dark Souls 1. And Dark Souls 1 to me is the pinnacle. Maybe that's a hot take.

Maybe it's seen a little reason to see bias. But the amount of interconnectivity, the amount of crazy shortcuts that just kept on going and blowing my goddamn mind. Like, how the fuck is this over here now? And I just explored this whole zone and then I have a magic thing that opens a door and like, oh my God, that's so smart.

It was constantly surprising me with really, really smart level design moments. Boss fights are a lot of fun. Could do a bit more with weapon variety. There's not a whole lot, but there are different weapons. types. Anyway, I've been blabbering. I'd like to get more into specific. I would like to jump in if you don't mind. You talk about coming out of GDC, like, ah, I don't know, not, you know,

didn't spend too much time with it. There was a great moment in the office where you went to blessing and said, hey, you actually need to go back to Wu-Chang. He's like, really? What about the opening or the jump or whatever is off-putting that you then power through or find something that other people, if you were to do a preview of you might miss? What, what change? Okay, honestly, this is going to sound very, very spoiled. But I think the reason why I didn't love the way that it felt was because I was just playing on inferior tech. I think I was playing on a not-great monitor with a not-great machine maybe. Sure.

Maybe that's not even the case. But it just felt like it wasn't responsive. There's a peri mechanic in the game that you can use if you want. You don't have to. It's a skill. so it's a skill that you actually bind to one of your buttons and if you don't want the parry

then you can replace it with another sort of move that does like some cool animation based on every weapon has their different type of moves and when I was playing it at that GDC presser or you know preview it's like it didn't feel good it didn't feel responsive, it didn't feel tight it just like it always felt off

I was having to hit the button way sooner than I needed to and it just didn't really feel like it was kind of coming together. And I think they had me exploring an earlier section in the game, which is pretty generic looking. Like, it's, I think the game's, the game's pretty. It does some really nice stuff with art direction later on in the game, maybe about 40% of the way through. But early on, I think when you look at this game, I got a lot of responses on Twitter going

like, eh, I've, I've played a lot of these Soulslikes based in like Asian Terrible. territories and like this being a kind of like um alternate take on history and stuff like a i've done a lot of these before i'm good you know securo is the last one that i really really enjoyed or whatever and i totally get it and maybe when i did that gdc preview they had me do two sections they had me do just kind of run around these this early sort of area very foresty kind of generic looking and the second one the second part of the preview was go fight this boss that area looked a bit different but still kind of like what you would expect

from one of these video games but I think there's some really awesome kind of like mind-blowing stuff they do art direction-wise that was really really impressive but yeah I think a lot of it was just the responsiveness and the feel of it and once I got into here the I think the game's a lot of fun

it's a massive surprise for me I when it comes to like review score it took me about 44 hours to beat um When it comes to review score, like I think this game is like an easy eight, like an easily recommend if you are into these games. I think it could have done a bit more if there was different production.

I think maybe if they were doing storytelling a bit differently in the way that maybe Stellar Blade did it where they said, we're not going to really do the from software. You have to uncover clues and kind of put it all together by yourself. We'll do it more kind of front facing. Here's the narrative. I think it could have benefited from that a lot. However, when you are able to put together some of these clues and you have those revelations in the game,

it's like, oh, fuck, that's this character. Oh, man, I can't believe. Like, it does that just not anywhere close to how from software gets it. I think Liza P this year is like easily the best example of doing it the perfect right way. But yeah, I would say this is like, if you are into action souls likes games, and I know there are a diamond dozen these days,

They feel like they're always around. And playing this, I thought it was going to be another one of those experiences. And I was like, God damn, they made another good one. Fuck. Like, they just keep making good ones. It's not my fault that they're making good ones, you know? Guitar Hero Arrow Super Chats insane. Wohong, Wu Kong, and Wu Chang.

Yeah. How would you rank them? I would go, I would go Wuchang easily, number one. Oh, man. It's a tough one because Wokong Fallen A Wukong Fallen Dynasty No, Wolong Fallen Dynasty

Is the combat's great It's Koi Tecmo It's you know It feels the way the Neo games do And the way that The game that Came out on PlayStation exclusive Stellar Blaze

No no no no no The samurai game Oh Ronin Rhin the rodent. I mean, the combat feels amazing in those games. It was just, it was lacking everything else around it. I would put Blackmouth Wukong over it,

even though I like the combat more in Wollong Fallen Dynasty. Blackmun the Wukon just had a lot of those like, I was surprised I kept on going with Blackmunth Wukong because the production was so high and fantastic and the cut scenes were amazing. So the Metacritic at 75 right now.

You giving it an 8, not that much higher than that, but are you surprised that the consensus seems to be slightly lower than you? For sure, yeah. And I, you know, I was looking at something. I saw like a four on there. I was like, whoa, that's fucking crazy. You know, again, different tastes and everything like that. I could totally see this game getting sevens, but while I was playing it, I was like, man, this could, this could really kind of hit some nines with the right sort of crowd. I, yeah, I'm a little bit surprised that it's as low as it is, but I just think, I just think it's easily my most surprising

game of the year. Like, another one of these that I expected to kind of not hit and miss all the marks and try to emulate from software in ways where it's just like, ah, you don't got the stuff. Don't try to do that. But damn it, they did it. Like, it's a really, really damn good game. And even, again, even if you're not, if you're the type of person that goes, yeah, Liza P may be more of my jam because it has difficulty settings and I don't want to be struggling through a boss because I got a kid, I got a wife, I got a, you know, I got a husband, I got to eat dinner tonight and shit like that.

I don't want to spend four hours on a boss, Eliza P, you could just drop a difficulty and make it a lot easier. This game does a lot of stuff with just quality of life improvements that I think were really fantastic. Do you know the price of this one? I don't.

It seems like Chad saying 50 as they asked. Somebody asked this earlier. 50, holy shit. Okay, that's really good, but also game pass. Yeah, $50. for the game physically and you can also get it on game pass.

Yeah. Very cool. The, there are some crazy difficulty spikes, I would say. Like, I, I think every boss took me around five to eight to ten tries, maybe.

So, like, it was fairly easy. You know, some bosses, you'd get through quick, but then there would be. Great face. But, well, I guess, you know, I know, I know. Grading on a curve.

I know, I know. but then there would be some bosses that you were an hour and a half two hours in and it's just like oh man I'm stuck here right now I don't should I go kind of grind a little bit should I like I was often met with those two hour long bosses I would say like at least three bosses were pretty big roadblocks for me where you're talking in the hour to two hour range um well no one of them was around two hours. The other one were like a little bit over an hour, but still was like, fuck, some of these bosses, difficulty spikes are, I think, really easy to maybe tune down a bit because the level of aggression some of them have is insane. And once you get to that boss, you go,

oh, I haven't fought anybody like you so far. Because I'm having to dodge a million times in a row and I have no opportunity to attack. So I have to dodge perfectly seven times with this crazy flurry of like wild shit you're doing. And if you hit me one of those times, I would like to heal. But you better believe as soon as you hit that heel button, they have their button, you know,

button input reading or whatever. And as soon as you hit heel, they go for that crazy stab. It's like, God fucking damn it, you know. So there are, one of the first big roadblocks in the game was the one that I played at the, at the GDC thing.

And it felt a little bit easier than maybe, but this time around it was still really tough. Took a while and the level aggression is insane. And I guess when I'm comparing this game to something like Securo or First Preserker Kazan or Stellar Blade where if it's a parrying-based game where you're having a deflecting, ding, ding, all the attacks,

you normally, you see the posture meter grow up. Boop, boop, bo, bo, you kind of see it going up. But if you don't have your, your deflect attack or your deflect skill equipped, you're having to dodge all these moves. At no benefit to you other than not dying. You're not like hurting them in any way. It's not like making, you know,

which it shouldn't, but it's like I would love if the deflect was able to bring up their posthum, the only way their posture meter goes up is by attacking them to then eventually break them down to where they are stagger, you know, where they become staggerable. So there are some mechanics that I don't feel work out, perfectly, but

you know, you force your way through it, you bang your head against the wall and get through it. Pabzulu, oh sorry. Pabzulu wants to know about the skill tree. Skill tree is so awesome. It's not your stereotypical from software

or even Liza P or any one of these games where it's do I put points into health? Oh, I just level I have two level up points. Should I go into strength or dexterity or where should I it's all weapons-based. So there are four weapon types of the game. You have a long sword, like a two-handed long sword,

dual blades, an axe, and then you have a one-handed sword, which is normally more of a magic-based type weapon. And the way the skill tree works is you are putting points going into the weapon tree. So I started putting a lot of points into the two-handed sword tree because I found a weapon I really, really liked. And the points will be like, all right, this is a strength point.

So add one to strength. And as you're building out the tree, now the next one is, because long swords are strength and agility, the next one might be agility. And the next one might go into health if you want. So you're building out your character, but making your weapon better because you are enhancing it to get like, it has like up to 10 levels of mastery to where you level up your weapon.

But you're also finding discipline skills, which are the actual, like, kind of special abilities whenever you build up your meter, we'll call it. I forget the in-game term for it. But if you're dodging a whole lot, if you have, for example, the weapon I used whenever I would, whenever I would make contact on the second swing of an attack, it would give me a little point of,

all right, your meter's been built up or whatever. And if you can keep building it up if you want, and then those discipline moves are your, special moves. And those are the ones that are, it's either you could use a parry or you can have some really big attack double spin or this one adds fire or whatever the hell. Like there's a lot of like kind of special abilities in here that really make the game. And it just adds a lot of variety of the game. You can have a whole lot of fun with this in addition to once I started building up the long sword tree quite a bit and I'm kind of really, really leveled up there with strength

and agility. I'm like, oh, I haven't been using a secondary access whole time. And this game tells me about this mechanic that whenever you click in the left stick and you have your meter built up, it swaps to your other weapon with a big attack. Cool. Like a special animation type attack. And I was like, ooh, that would be really cool

to go into Axe. Since I already have a lot of strength and the axe uses strength primarily, I'll start building up my axe stuff to make my axe stronger. And I had a really, really awesome sort of time doing my attacks. And then when I would build up my meter,

click in the left stick, and suddenly the sword she busts out the axe and does like a crazy big hit that adds a lot of stagger and then that there's just a lot of like customization here and again the awesome thing about this though is if you find yourself at a boss where you go oh maybe this weapon isn't the best for it maybe I'm in a situation where I am not super spec out for it

you just go to whatever point you want and uncheck it and then go put it somewhere else I like that that's nice it is awesome You're not having a, you know, every Souls game, you always got to go to the special little, ah, you're looking to lend new powers. And you got, they always got to give you some special bullshit item that makes no sense. Takes goddamn forever. It makes you unspec everything and redo it.

Donkey Kong, goddamn Benanza, I'm looking at you. Why does it take so long? Liza P, you need the special gold coin fruit seeds or some shit like that. So you need those like respect and then it becomes a whole deal or whatever. But it is so player friendly to just go into the menu and, and go, oh, you know what? I'm dying a little bit faster here, but I'm still doing decent enough damage.

Let me take three points out of strength and then two points out of dexterity and I'll go look somewhere else on the tree. Oh, there's health. I'll put a health there. Oh, there's two more healths over here. I'll put two more health there. And it's so freaking user-friendly and awesome.

And I loved it. I was so in love with that system. In addition to not only building out your health, but also getting more flask charges to where you have eight, heels now instead of just two or whatever. And then you can also upgrade how much health you're getting back from each, you know, drinking of the flask.

Camera kind of was dukey in some moments. It doesn't, it didn't really let you look down or up a whole lot. Like, there's a lot of moments where it's like, oh, can I drop down here? I'm not sure. And it just, I hope they, I think that's an easy change. And I hope with feedback, they're able to fix things like that. The transmog right off the rip, which is important. because this game's a little bit of a gooner game.

Warning, forewarning for everybody, but the further and more powerful you get, the less clothes you wear. That makes sense in the narrative, though. We all understand that. Of course, of course. Which was kind of surprising, because at the preview event,

I was like, they put me in that early section. They're not one of those pervert games. No, they put me in the GDC section where I'm just kind of early on in the game, adventure, and I'm just normal,

normal, you know, a fighting lady or whatever. whatever. And they're like, all right, well, now you're doing with that section. Let's go fight the boss. And I go fight the boss. I'm wearing some crazy hat. And it's just like, you know, the

titties are just doing their things. And, you know, like, like, nip are barely being covered to him. In some cases, you can maybe kill a boss. Whenever you kill a boss, you can get their armor set. And a lot of them look... Throw it away, because you don't need that. A lot of them look really, really cool.

But you can mix and match and transmog at any point at any time. which is super awesome because a lot of times it'd be like, all right, this looks really sick. I love the way this look is. But this enemy that I'm fighting does a lot of, um,

like corruption damage where it's like it poisons me and then, you know, your point, you know, so it's like, well, let me speck out all of my armor with the best corruption possible. Because they're not doing a whole lot of physical damage.

I'll go all corruption defense. And let me just transmog and swap out my look and make me look however I want. Um, which is, again, Another one of those super player-friendly quality of life things that I super love. Crazy when games don't have Transmog ready to go right away. Yeah, 100%.

They also have a standoff perspective mode similar to Gosu Shishima, whenever you're locked on, which maybe isn't great, but I guess in Goose Shishima, a lot of enemies can kind of like, you know, flank you and all that sort of stuff. But yeah, so you can choose to have your normal lock on where you can still move your camera but you're just locked onto the enemy in that moment or you can switch to standoff perspective where it's just always third person

behind the back and you are just looking at that person or you could swap your lock on. But I thought that was like, oh, pretty neat. Another thing I love, again, I'm just kind of like super glazing this game. I think it's just really, really damn good. Can I interrupt then?

Because you are glazing, you're doing all the same stuff. Is this a contender? Oh, man, I think the year is way too packed to say so. I think in any other year, yeah. Yeah? Yeah. I mean, the more I think of it, I think maybe like 8, 8.5, I'm around there. I'm around there. No official. There's no, there's no official. Let the podcast go another 30 minutes. It'll be a nine.

But one thing I love, another one little tiny option that I love that I've experienced with a lot of Souls games where, you know, the old, you know, the old Dark Souls games had the largest UI possible. Cover up so much of the screen. And then when I would download mods, they would always offer like scale the UI. down and shit like that. And I think a lot of the Souls games have UI re-scaling. Maybe I got that completely wrong. I think they already have UI rescaling. But there's a lot of games that don't offer that. This one does. And you can make it larger if you want or make it smaller.

And then, you know, suddenly your health is super tiny on the bottom left of the corner. It also has the hide the UI option whenever you're not in combat, which is great because the game looks awesome. I always was saying during my streams that I wish Liza P had that option. and I was looking for a mod of that where I just like walking for the bit rate and just like taking in the sights but the UI is always up unless you go turn it off.

I love when Souls games and this one whenever you're not in combat it'll just fade things away and then you're just kind of walking around. Then as soon as you see an enemy, you know, you see your health bar pop up, your stamina bar pop up again. Games great.

Highly, highly recommend if you are into this style of video game. Hell yeah. Boss fights rock. And again, the amount of optional shit is crazy. Like the, the stuff that's missable and, like, an entire fifth act that's not playable if you do certain things a certain way. It's awesome. Awesome. Chocolate Fox, Super Chats, Insane, Birthday Day, Tax.

I'm ready to try both of these games. Happy birthday, chocolate, Fox. In both these games, of course, Wu Chong Fallen Feathers, the entity is glowing about. And also, Wheel World that we're about to talk about right after a quick word from our sponsors. We all world. This episode's brought to you by. mood. Let me tell you about the online cannabis company that's revolutionizing how we deal with life's challenges. From sleepless nights to stress-filled days, mood.com has created an entire line

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Wheelworld. Steam description. Dive into Wheelworld as Cat, a rider chosen by ancient cycling spirits. Race elite teams trick out your bike and perform the long overdue. Great shift ritual to save a universe on the brink. Your bike is your destiny. The dev is Messhoff.

You know them from Nidhog. very cool, publisher Anna Perna Interactive. It's currently at a Metacritic of 73 as of 10 a.m. Greg, this is one that you have been very much looking forward to. That's 100% correct. Have you beat it? I have beaten it. Five hours took to beat this one.

What are your thoughts? Andy just said his game was his most surprising game of the year. Wheelworld is my most disappointing. Oh, game of the year. Yeah, I'm going to give this one a six on the kind of funny scale. Call it mediocre. or um it's a heartbreaker i it's such a i'm sorry okay i'm calling it okay got confused there um that's where that's why i'm at too great a six okay thank you sorry for miss naming and edit it right roger uh

but it's the idea that it's so close to being good but it's also so close to just being completely forgettable and everything else this is another one similar uh to andy i played at gdc but i walked away from that xbox gdc event so high on this game of like i love the art style. I love the music. I love how peddling feels. I love biking in this game. They're doing this burnout kind of bike game, right? Where it is, you're riding from area to area, going race to race. You're earning your reputation rep so that you can unlock other races. You know, the idea here is that, yeah, your cat, you wake up, you pick up your bike, who's this ghost bike? Obviously, they can talk to you. All of the legendary pieces have

been stolen from this bike. You need to go get those legendary pieces so you can go challenge and beat all the guys who've stolen it to then, you know, save the universe kind of thing. I think all that sounds great as you see the roam here. We see the race here. We see the things here. The problem is that the game is just rinse and repeat that GDC demo. And my biggest problem with Wheelworld is that it didn't commit to an A or a B. If this game would have committed to the A of, hey, you know what?

We are going to go and be burnout. Now, this is going to be a game about bike racing. You unlock so many parts in this game, Tim. And they have a little bit more handling, a little bit of this. It's better. It's better in gravel or dirt or, you know, this kind of thing. None of that matters. Like, none of that is put into any way where I'm playing a game or a race where I'm falling

behind. I'm like, oh, if I could only do better on gravel, if they would have leaned into being an actual bicycle racer where it was, I came in, I did this thing. Okay, I lost, but I was on gravel, so I should switch these tires. or I should do this, I should do that. That would have worked. They don't do that here. To the point that there's spoilers, like two biomes, really.

There's technically, I guess, three, but two biomes you're mainly in. And so the first one at your whole point in the game setup is, hey, go through and get these legendary parts, right? They got taken from you so you can do the thing. You get all of them in the first biome, then get put into the second biome where it's like, okay, well, get your rep up to 100, I think it is, by doing all these things to then do the final McGuffin to do whatever. It's like, okay, but I'm doing the races and I'm still earning rep and I'm still earning the currency that I can go then get new pieces from people. I don't need new pieces. I'm using the legendary thing, which gives me the boost, you know, it makes up its own boost. So it's like,

I have no incentive for the entire second half of this game to trade any piece of my bike. It's not until the story is like you have to, you know, use these new things to do it that I did anything with that. So it's like, okay, that's been removed. Again, they should have leaned into that able. part of it of like cool we want you really into it the other way to go that i think would have worked for this game is go the b direction on this crossroads i'm talking to you about and say hey we are going to tell you a story this is going to be a gregg game where the gameplay is super easy and whatever but we're giving you an emotional tale of this and that and the other i'm playing this game it's all about spirits and stuff like this i'm like oh is am i dead is that what's going to happen

is i am i doing so none of that at all is touched on by the end of the game you you just do the thing and the game's over. And so it's this sadly, really, I think, impressive looking game. I think on the bike feels great. I enjoy the races. The problem is that as you unlock these legendary pieces, I never felt challenged in the races. And by the end, I was just blowing the doors off of everybody I came in contact with.

So it's like, okay, they do an all right job of, you know, again, to get more rep. You have obviously come in, you know, first on some of them, come in the top three, beat this guy's time, collect all the letters KAT and the race. So there's like sub-objectives you could challenge yourself with, but none of them, at no point was I hurting for a rep that I needed to go do that. I needed to double back.

I never wanted, I'm not a big, I want to do the race again. I just wanted to win the races. And that was enough to win the races, often set the high score to get the extra rep there. Like you just, I steamrolled through this game and really felt like it was Groundhog Day.

I think it's one of those things of there's no voice acting in it, right? So you walk up to these NPCs to race them. Inevitably, you walk up, they're going to say something funny, but then challenge you to the race or whatever. But it's not hilarious. It's not like you're really into it. It's not like I remember any of these people, which they try to make a joke about at the end.

And I'm like, that's not, you don't want to remind me. Because it's like I, when you're about to go into the final bad guy, I guess, like, your bike's like, hard to believe we beat Billy and Jimmy and Joey. You don't remember the rooster, bro? And then it's, And it's like, and what was her name? And then they go to your character.

It's like dot, dot, dot. And back to that Alice or something. It's like, yeah, none of these people had any real personality. Sorry, rooster. That made me do anything with this to do it. So it's just like, this is a game that is on game pass. And I would say this is so many people's interpretation of a game pass game. This is a great game to drop in, check it out, play.

I would imagine you'll do your first few things and be like, what was Greg talking about? I think when you do it again and like, oh, they're just replaying this song that was awesome. The first time I heard it. They're just replaying the song over. You get to a new biom, a new song, and then they play that over and over again. They have this game where you are racing, and you do need to pay attention on what you're doing, where your curve is, when you're breaking, whatever. But they still have dialogue popping up from the characters.

They're like, shit talking around. I'm not going to read that. I'm not reading that right now. I would take my eyes off what I'm doing in the game to do that? It's an okay game. I, again, the reason mediocre was on my mind is that I was very, I went and made sure I was Googling it and dialing into it. It's like mediocre, you know, of only moderate quality, not very good. That's not the definition of wheel world. That's why it's okay. Right.

Like it's like there's fun to be had here. Again, five hours, but nothing about it is going to leave a lasting memory. I have the positive memories I have are summized by the GDC 30 minute demo I did. Yeah. Where it's like I don't need more of it. If you'll remember chat, the unofficial Andy Cortez scale. I think it was like a six out of ten. I highlighted the phrase missed opportunities, but tease was T-E-A-S-E.

Because it really just teases you that this could be something really cool. That's a really good. This game just has a lot of misopportunities. Really, really bummed me out that I wasn't loving it, even though I would redo races to beat Greg's ass. More often, not just...

Totally fine. It shows, you know, I was beating a lot of, like, the gibberish names in there. C-H- underscore A, whoever the testers were. But again, like, I'm not at all compelled to go. Like, again, if it would have gone,

we are full-on burnout. Like, you know what I mean? Here is Andy's time. And I'm like, he did what? I'm going to go in and tweak my tires and do. I'm like, no, I'm just going to keep on going. I would have, I would love to hear from the devs, you know, whether it was maybe a time or a budget thing

or maybe just not the best direction. But, like, I think I just needed the final box. That's like where I kind of fell off because I was playing the game on Steam Deck and Rand Green on Steam Deck the, you mentioning you wish that they went all the way. I was telling this to Barrett where I wish, you know how in Ollie, Ollie World,

the whole game is like everybody is a skater. Like when we make fun of karate kit, the whole world revolves around karate. Like there's cars in this game. And, but like, it's the statues are these monumental figures all with like bike parts. I wish like cars were like four person bikes or you know like I wish they did cuter things like that which would not have changed the core of the game but it would have it would have

shown a bit more heart and the again you bring you bring it up the soundtrack is I think one of the biggest you know drops in and one of the biggest negatives I have because the first couple of songs are so good and so sick to just bike around and zen out, right? Yeah, 100%. And then my biggest problem with it is like every region you're doing,

like Greg is mentioning small side quests to then take on the big boss of that zone and they have your legendary part. And it lacks any fanfare whatsoever. When you finally get to that final boss, like sure, it's a gang of bikers and they have their

cute little pun name where they're like the fucking wheeljackers I don't know what the fuck like they just have like some sort of bike pun and they're they're all like their own sort of personality and they could have done a lot more with it and then the race starts and it might be a song you heard

three races ago it might be some more kind of like low-fi beat with like a like Billy Elish style singer like I know and it's like dude this needs

be hype as fuck right now and it's just not hitting right now and just a lot of the music is just a total total miss. No, the music is awesome. It's just not utilized correctly. Yeah. It's just not really utilized well where the boss fights should feel like this big moment and then when you beat them

it's over. You beat the boss not another word. You get like a caption box of like oh you beat me here's the part or whatever. Dude and that's it. It was so disappointing that there's just so little fanfare to make you the player feel stoked about this big thing that you just achieved. And again, that's like one of the things.

I would go back towards the emotional. I would have ditched the second area, which I find so less exciting and interesting than the first. The first area is what you've seen over and over again. You're in the trees. It's a mountainous town. It seems like a bicycle kind of town, right? Double the size of that or just double the amount of activities in there. Change them up because the activities are go there and race.

Like there aren't really side quests as much as do you want to race me. You can find other people on the road and ring your bell at them and race. them but it's like you're not encouraged to do that in any way and it's just like the race I'm going to anyway so why would I like it's that's an odd mechanic because again you just see these random races with an icon and it says ring your bell

and they're like oh shit let's race and when you beat them they go ah damn I lost you own this you own this street now but like nothing changes it's just you beat somebody as a little side quest I I just wish those a bit more there I wish I could create a character burnout way have my ghost

and have Andy's ghost in it that's walking her Yeah, I really wish, like, when I spoke to the devs at GDC when we were playing there at that little Xbox mixer, they had mentioned that they created their own creative character and that every NPC in the world is made using this creative character where they kind of hit randomized and eyes will be put on the head with a different skin color and different hairstyle or whatever. I just saw water splash back in your face. And I just really wish I could have created my own bike rider. Especially for his generic as cat is. Exactly. There's no thread to Cat of who she is,

why she's doing this. Yeah, there was no story of why Cat needed to be the main character. And I really wish I could have just created my person and been my avatar because I did like customizing the bike, but there wasn't like a whole lot of, you couldn't really color it in any way. Like the bike parts. Which again could have been cool,

but it's not because I'm just going to stick with the leg. I want to put a little cute helmet on me, like cool jacket. I don't know. Mike, you played this, yeah? I've had the easiest day to day. These guys got in their bags. They told you everything. Yeah, Real World for me was a vibe.

The first 30 minutes to an hour, you will smile. You'll get lost in the art style. You'll get caught up in the music. You'll have fun exploring this cool little open world that they've created, pulling off the side of the road to go grab a new box of loot that might have a bike part in it. You'll love rolling up to different bike teams and hearing what their story is, right? like, hey, we're the bruise bros, we're going to go out and get some bruskees, come race us over there. You're like, yeah, that's fun.

And then by about race number five to 10, you're like, all right, this is too easy. It's not engaging or exciting. This is boring. I'm done. And yeah, you guys said it best. This was just a missed opportunity. This game had some potential here. It has a vibe.

It just doesn't nail, hey, keeping me invested in this. Past hour one, you're going to be like, all right, this was good enough. I don't need to play this anymore. Did you beat it? No, I put it about three hours in. I kept playing it. I had fun. I liked the different, the first area.

I liked the vineyard going into there. I liked going, oh, there's some moments, Tim, where you're like, is this going to become a platformer? Am I going to get that extreme biking where the guy's hopping from platform to the platform like you see on ESPN? And they could have done that, but they didn't. They have one cool little jump and that's it. So, yeah, for me, it was just a vibe, a missed potential, an okay game, as Greg said. And I'll remember it for that. To jump in and give a comparison, I think,

like Dungeons of Hinterberg, right? That's the game I talked a lot about last year, after seeing it a GDC in a very similar fashion, right? And I think this game is what Wheelworld would love to be. And they're like, here's a striking beautiful art style, right, that Wheel World also has. But there's just so much personality to Dungeons of Hinterberg and the characters you meet.

And again, the gameplay's easy. This isn't like a soul's like, this isn't a challenge thing. It is about being in this town, finding yourself, meeting these people and having these relationships. And I think there's so many cool opportunities for the experiences of this to be merged with Wheelworld. Yeah, here are the Brew Bros. We don't like you. We're racers. You beat them. Let's get a beer.

And even if it's just a little scene of them having a beer and talking about what is going on in the world or their life or whatever, like that would have gone. But again, that's that A or B choice that they don't make. And so they stay in this very okay lane that I don't think appeals to necessarily anybody. Like Greg brought up, they have the Tony Hawk Pro skater mentality. of every race has five mini objectives, right? Place first, beat the ultimate time of two minutes and 30 seconds.

Collect cat. And so there I am, blowing the doors off of everyone. And now I'm looking around the map going, okay, there's the K, there's the A. I'll even turn around, hit the break, stop, grab the A, turn back around. Still no one beating me. So, yeah, it was just one of those of, it was too easy for me on that one. The, oh, gosh, I had another sort of, oh, they, kind of maybe halfway through the game

introduce a different, a way to switch gears while you're biking or whatever. And so it's not just like a single gear thing. You can like, if you need to go fast, you hit a thing and you will max out your speed that way and that's the way that you want to go the fastest. But if the devs are still listening, sorry for, you know,

didn't love your game. I feel like there's a lot of mis-opportunity there. But I was just really annoyed when I tried doing that because I wanted to like, oh, what if I can min-max this in a way? Yeah, yeah. Whenever you do need to change your gear, the notification is like on the bottom left on the screen. Yeah, it's underneath.

So you're constantly having to look down to it. And I wish it was just like, I wish something on your bike flashed or something like that, like just kind of more directly in the frame. And again, I think that speaks to if they were going, choosing the A route and we're making a racing game. This is a burnout game.

Yeah. However, all that said, like, we, we had, we're currently a 73. on Metacritic, but an 81 on Open Critic. So if everyone could stop reviewing on Open Critic right now for my fantasy team, I was like, this is when I refreshed it. I would like Winston, 11 boys are all right.

I'm sure it would be like 2a T though. Just keep falling. Never start well. Stop. Stop the steal. So that was Wheel World. We have a super chat from Mike saying, I'm wondering if y'all are going to talk about Wildgate. I saw Mike playing it last night and it was so epic.

Love y'all. I did a podcast yesterday. And at the end, the guy was like, Also, if you haven't played Wildgate, go play Wildgate. Hey, let's talk about a game with just a nice little breath of fresh air, a really fun, interesting take on the multiplayer genre. Tim, this is cool. I want to get Andy involved.

I'd love to get Nick in a stream going here. What is it? It is a four-player multiplayer battle arena, we'll call it right now, but it's five teams of four. You're in a spaceship, and you're on a large, giant map that is space, right? And so your goal is amongst the five teams of four to go out and explore space and find the one piece. Okay, the artifact is what they call it.

So as you're traveling, think Sea of Thieves out in the ocean, right? We have to now navigate our ship. Someone has to pilot it. The other members of the team are putting out fires. They're repairing the ship when we get into fights. They're jumping on the turrets. They're fighting. They're also probing out in the space.

You can send three probes out, and you'll be like, hey, there's fuel, there's rockets, there's coolant out there. Oh, look, there's this crazy outposts that we, can go to and we can get ship upgrades. We can get better guns for our characters because when we do collide with one of the other five teams out there, we want to make sure we're at our best. And so you're playing this push and pull of, hey, let's go out and play cat and mouse where we need to go get more cool it.

We need to get more energy. Let's go get better gear. But also we need to find the artifact so we can then go get the artifact and extract out of it through the Wildgate to be the winning team. And so you have a really good time of like, oh my God, there's a ship over there. there. What should we do? All right, let's run away. No, they're coming at us. Now we get into this epic ship battle where people are jumping off their ship into your ship. They're trying to mess up your reactor. You're trying to mess up theirs. This was a breath of fresh air for

2025 and just a great multiplayer experience. My worry, of course, will this last three months or six months? Probably not. But right now, this is a really fun time. This is a really good game. One thing I loved about it, Mike, when I got to play maybe one round during the Steam Next Fest several months ago. I love how, like, player-friendly it is in the sense that whenever you go to another ship, if you find a crash ship just kind of out there, like this derelict thing that already crash, and you want to upgrade your ship in any way, and you run to the wall where maybe the power fucking block my might be or whatever. It's such just like a big ass chunk of like, hey, this is going to make your shield stronger and you just pick up this big chunk and you fly and jetpack back to your ship

and you just play. It's all like so plug and playable as if everybody's using USBC out there. I love it. It's such a cool little way to make the game a lot easier, a lot easier like and more visually identifiable. It's a really neat concept. I wanted to hop in last time, but we had to get those ornithopters. Like, I don't know. And to get them. Yeah. Nick was going to play with. Nick he had to play with Nick. Nick was already on. Mike didn't want to join.

This is a game that you should check out. It's $40 price tag. Not on game pass or anything. So it is kind of a steep jump in, but it is a budget title at $40, but it is worth the 40. It is super fun to jump in and play. Like I said, I don't know how long this will last. What kind of game modes do you add? How do you switch up the formula?

In my mind, we go five versus five team stim and we do a capture the flag and the goals, you got to go capture their artifact. Get across to the second half of the map, your side of the map. $30. That will get you more? 30. Okay, so there you go. So that's a nice budget title.

But yeah, you got to, this is one of those jumping early before it goes too far and it either starts to die or you have a lot of kids destroying it. Before it gets too good. Yeah, that was the feedback that I heard immediately from Washburn and JD last night in the Discord. And I'm like, yeah, it's a really cool, fun game, really well-made design game. And then you're going to have, you know, 13-year-olds that just shit on you in the game.

You have an AI option where you can play matches against a. AI so the other four teams are AI's, but they make the map much smaller and there's only three other AI teams. And when you go to their ships, it's like true AI. They're just sitting there waiting for you. And it's like, oh, we got to be able to play with that of like, that's a perfect onboarding for like me to show Tim the game. But then I need AI level one, level two, level three, where they actually are doing stuff.

Because you board the ship and the guy's just still on the turret and he doesn't even look away from it. You're like, oh, elevate that a little bit more. But it's good. A good game. I want to bring up it out. one real quick thing that happened recently. The digital extremes, the devs of Warframe,

they are working on Soulframe, which is more of a fantasy-style-ish-type offering. And I think they recently opened up their servers to anybody who wants to join into these early episodes. They just do stuff a lot more different because their stuff isn't on Steam. You don't request access there. You've got to go to their website.

And obviously Warframe has been, very, very popular for a long-ass time and you kind of got to do things there way about downloading a little executable file and stuff, but I'd hopped in a couple of times, and I know it's like way too early to even call this an alpha. Like they are building the game with you,

they want you to end these tests, they want you giving feedback, but just a tiny bit of what I've experienced, like, oh, this is like, again, I'm such a new bit at this, but I never played Warframe. And as I'm playing this early, early-ass look into Soulframe, I'm like, holy fuck, this is so impressive.

This looks great. The, already what's there is just, there's such a level of production already that I'm just blown away by. I guess I'm just used to hopping into early access games all the time with, you know, 50% missing art assets and stuff like that. I was really blown away and immediately understood, oh, this is why Digital Extremes has been killing it for so long.

it's really impressive three classes you choose from it's going to be like Warframe where it's sort of an open world open shared world whatever you want to call it but you start you could pick out of the melee class the Mage class or the Bowen Arrow class

and it dude it's super impressive for just what I experienced and the couple of missions that I did I was kind of floored by it like holy shit I need to really really keep this one on the calendar for myself you know. Hell yeah. Well, everyone, this has been

today's kind of funny games cast. We're about to jump into some magic the gathering commander with some special guests. So that's going to be a ton of fun. Stay tuned. If you're on Twitch, you can stay where you are.

If you're on YouTube, you have to make the jump over to that video. But thank you for hanging out with us today. Until next time, love you all. Goodbye. Bye. We'll.