Wheels of Aurelia Reviews

Oh my god! I was really on the fence for buying this game before the steam sale, but when I saw the price drop I bought it immediately. I was right to! I've gotten only 5 of the 16 endings so far, but geez, this game is great. It might seem like a very small game, but, as I mentioned before, it's got 16 ending, and each playthrough is about 15 minutes. The only games I've found myself to replay this often (notably Thirty Flights of Loving) are those with a great story, and this game has that in spades. Get this game if you like something short, but replayable, and with a really great story! Slight story spoilers ahead You play as Lella, a, tbh, cool-as-all-heck lady, and a friend she's only just met. Both of them get on adventures ranging from racing to discussing life, to, if you feel like it, some very sapphic events. You can even change your car up, changing what people say in the story.

Wheels of Aurelia is a great adventure game where you control the car and choose to go where you want. The 70's ambiant is very good and the graphics are beautiful and original. I recommend it!!! 💗💗💗

Some people complain that there's no innovation in the AAA games anymore, just TPP loot crafting shooters with stealth elements. Well, on the other side we have Wheels of Aurelia that is trying super hard to look like nothing else, combining a racing game with visual novel. Too bad it fails at pretty much everything it tried to do. We're a rebelious women that doesn't need no man, a feminist (or the one that only looks like one) that picks up another chick at the disco. Both then decide to have a long ride to France along the Via Aurelia road, having all kinds of topic to talk to - abortion, kidnappings, abortion, family issues, music, feminist movements, traditional values, abortion etc. If I'm being not clear enough, the game has a statement to make, and the year of the game isn't random. It encapsulates two main events from 1978 that have taken place in Italy - Moro kidnapping and legalisation of abortion. Both of these topics will be pretty much on our tongues no matter where we'll ride or what hitchhiker we take next. No matter what you'll get 'strong independent womyn' vibe from the protagonist, Lella, that is as rebelious as annoying. Every once in a while you'll have an option to pick up a topic for conversation or your passenger will ask you a question about another topic. These can then be answered in one of two ways, and it can be summarised by 'yes', or 'sarcastic yes'. Many topics present no real input on the conversation, your answers will always be in the spirit of the defined character, later even called a communist. Opinions of your character will always be skewed in one way - someone said something controversial and you want to disgree? Nope, you can either agree or say something mildly controversial too. Question about abortion is a prominent example - you can say it's either just a medical operation or it might be a traumatic experience. Other time you can say that men are no longer needed. The whole story feels like it's been written by a raging feminist who tried to put as many leftist ideas as possible. Later in the game (as 10 minutes later) you can ditch your friend for different kind of passenger, a priest or a has-been race driver, and these conversations aren't that bad, but first couple of runs you'll probably keep Olga till the end and you'll get sick of woke comments. That one thing that is somewhat competent are splitting ways and different outcomes. You can change your destination by turning to different road, you can pick up hitchhikers that will give you optional dialogue options and sometimes can alter your ending (or drive them to different place they wanted), you can change your passenger in the city and alter some endings by dialogue options. The gameplay is pretty solid on paper too - at one point you can run away from the police, chase a terrorists car, enter the race in supercar or just drive recklessly to piss off your friend. All of these you can ultimately lose to get different ending. Finally there are some unlocks, as changing your car in story missions will let you choose that car in new game+. My complaint here is that motives and reasons for your passengers change as well. Nothing is set in stone. If you ignore one topic long enough it'll also rub on your friend, who will now either have different story to tell or will forget about given objective. Olga for example [spoiler]drives with you to catch a fascist terrorist with a gun, but if you miss him she'll sell you to the paparazzi, as you've been a victim of a kidnapping two years ago, all pregnancy and abortion topics eventually being just a void blabber[/spoiler] Now all would be nice and dandy but the driving - essential element of racing game - is atrocious. You can turn left and right or speed up, but you can't slow down. Driving into oncoming traffic won't damage your car or other car, you'll just bounce a little. Driving into the side of the road will also bouce you a little, but your speed won't change. On another note the road is too narrow to not hit a curb here and there. Traffic on the road is another problem, as cars in front of you will drive slower than you. You're forced to overtake them but with oncoming traffic you'll be also forced into a crash. Another story is that you can even ingore all steering as your car will try to stay in the middle of the road on its own, taking nice turns on the curves. It will hit other cars and occasionally bump into the side but other than that you can ignore the driving part. I think it's a compromise between two types of gameplay mechanics - car will drive on its own for people who want to enjoy the story. Too bad anyone caring about driving physics will be annoyed, to say the least. I'm not 100% disappointed with Wheels of Aurelia though, as it comes with a neat encyclopedia. Every time your conversation hit a specific name, event or place you'll get a new inscription explaining the meaning. These are all excerpts from Wikipedia though, so a minimal effort has been put there, yet I found these extra bits of information a true highlight of the game. Finally it's also interesting how many different events we can encounter in this game (where one full playthrough will end at 30 minutes max), from trailing someone to being chased, to driving through traffic recklessly, racing someone to win his car. Too bad all of that is locked inside this game. If you want to broaden your horizons or just drive casually through basic looking Unity game you might want to check this, otherwise you'll get offended it's being sold for money.

The moment I was getting into the characters I'd chosen for my journey and their banter, the game ended. Ten minutes long with a wall of text at the end explaining how the story unfolded. I wanted to like it and did until it ejected me from the game world and just let me know that there are 16 possible endings, so i guess I could go back in and keep each hitchhiker. There's also zero penalty for crashing your car. I was supposed to tail someone's car that I completely lost track of, smashed my car a lot looking for it, and the game still rewarded me for successfully tailing the people. I thought maybe having to make dialogue choices while controlling the car would feel tense but it's not because crashing is meaningless.

Nice idea, awesome visual style, great music. The problem is that the story is not engaging at all, dialogues are sloppy, driving mechanics are questionable at best.

I found this quite disappointing. It has a somewhat nostalgic atmosphere and the music is good, as is the concept. A driving background - and it is very much in the background as a vehicle ;) for a conversation game set on the coast of Italy is just, well, cool. But the conversations aren't in and of themselves interesting. It's frustrating because the conversation themes are rich with potential, but aren't explored. this game doesn't really know what it is, and because it can't commit, it falls short at most of what it does.

Not much of a game. You can start the game and not touch another control for 25 minutes and the game will actually play itself from start to finish (though there are several different endings should you feel the need to play through it several times). Ths would be okay if the game told a compelling story; which in my opinion it does not.

I like this game. It's very much interactive fiction done pretty, the backdrop of 70s Italy is interesting and the stories vary nicely depending on the choices made. Whilst a run through can be completed in 15-30 mins, there are a number of different stories and endings to find. By no means is it a driving game though, avoid it if that's what you're looking for, the driving is a means to explain the story/stories and little more. The art style is nice and the soundtrack is great.

[i]Wheels of Aurelia[/i] is a neat little game with great replay value. However, it is best appreciated in small doses. As said by other reviewers, it is much more a narrative-driven experiment than a racing game, but there are some endings and achievements that ask for the player to have good reflexes and race other cars. The dialogue is surprisingly rich and becomes more interesting after having finished three or four playthroughs (which last between 15 and 20 minutes each), as the player begins to put the pieces together and can focus on the characters instead of the road. [i]Wheels of Aurelia[/i] may have a particular resonance with Italian or italophile people, but as someone who doesn’t know much about the history of the country, I thoroughly enjoyed learning more about some of the emblematic figures and political struggles of Italy in the 70s. And needless to say, the soundtrack and art are really unique and aesthetically pleasing ! In conclusion, I would recommend this game to people who favour choices and dialogue over reflexes and speed, and advise those who are not convinced by their first playthrough to at least complete several others before giving their final verdict.

I wanted to like this game - the music in the trailer is amazing, the setting is a rarely seen one, and the characters seemed unique. Unfortunately, the in-game music is less remarkable, the dialogue is railroaded so tightly that the characters feel one-dimensional instead of complex, and the branching story paths feel completely arbitrary - it seems at least half of them require you to unceremoniously ditch your passenger. Also, even if you've seen a cutscene before, you can't skip it, or even speed it up - this makes unintentional trips down the same story path boring and frustrating, and there's no real way to tell which turns will and won't uncover new content. All of that could be forgiven if the gameplay were fun, but... it just isn't. The collision geometries will often have you colliding with invisible hitboxes, the "autopilot" doesn't work well enough for you to rely on it, and the frequently obscured road means you will often rear-end unseen traffic. The car's velocity occupies the distinct territory of "too fast to stay in the right lane, too slow to pass in the oncoming lane reliably," and there are no brakes. You can stop for passengers, but the controls don't give you any way to slow the car. So if you have three cars in front of you in the right lane and three cars coming at you in the left lane, you're either going to rear-end the car in front of you or sideswipe multiple cars while lane-sharing. The result is a buggy, unsatisfying game that seems to fail at everything it sets out to do. The setting is interesting, to be sure, but I feel that exploring it isn't worth sinking several hours into such frustrating gameplay.