Half platform game, half arcade challenge, Wheeler’s Treasure is an interesting game that combines the joy of free rolling down a hill with treasure, lava pits, skeletons and other tricks to try and stop your fun. It’s a bumpy ride most of the time, but also an exquisitely presented one.

What’s unique about this one is that you won’t be controlling horizontal movement in the traditional sense—all you have is a jump/double jump control that you control with a flick of a finger. And, when you’re wearing an eye patch you can see the angle of the jump, although you don’t have much time to plan these when you’re aboard the wheel. This scheme makes for some nontraditional platforming that does take a while to get used to, but generally doesn’t hinder your freedom of movement until the game gets faster.

Trying to use this scheme to jump on enemies, Mario style feels a little more cumbersome. Whilst in the air, you can tap on these to come crashing down, but again often you’ll encounter them purely by accident rather than skill. The game moves on at a brisk pace, especially when you’ve travelled a hundred yarrds (sic) or so.

Collecting treasure yields an ability to repair the wheel from all the various projectiles launched at it—whilst it costs 20 gold pieces it can provide that much needed lifeline. Pieces of the wheel will actually fall off instead of having a life bar, and this makes for an interesting gameplay aspect of trying to stay inside the thing when it’s battered and half constructed. You can travel outside the wheel, but you mustn’t let it get away otherwise you lose the game.

Each time you play it feels organic, like a landscape you could find yourself in if you were lost on a lone desert island.

Various treasure chests are scattered about the level, some simply contain bounty but others yield new equipment that possesses magical properties or that are simply useful to your plundering. Once you’ve traveled for a certain distance these will be presented to you—they range from almost useless like the camera which takes photos of the game, to semi useful like a bottle for carrying water to heal yourself, to very useful like the double jumping boots or the beard that earns you more gold and more pirate clichés as you spin through the game. We also love the fact that you can choose which items you have equipped—there’s some skill in deciding which is the most useful ability to have with you and each comes with it’s designated slot so you can only have one of each type at a time.

What’s great about Wheeler’s Treasure is not only its atmospheric look and feel but also that the environment is constantly changing. Rather than looking like something out of Scooby Doo with the same recycled background, each time you play it feels organic, like a landscape you could find yourself in if you were lost on a lone desert island. Plus, it takes a leaf out of Doodle Jump’s book and shows tombstones of players who have died at that particular place if you’re connected to the Internet. OpenFeint handles all of the score tracking for this title.

Overall, Wheeler’s Treasure can be a little fiddly. Sure, it looks beautiful but sometimes the game moves along at such a pace it’s tough to get through without getting lucky. We’re not too sure whether a more traditional movement control and jump button would help to make the game feel more controllable at least when you were outside the wheel, but as these moments shouldn’t come up too often it probably wouldn’t make a difference. Having said that though this is very much a love/hate game and your experience with it will be very much determined by how you put up with the control scheme—the rest is just gravy. If you’re looking for a different kind of platformer then this one is a good one to try.

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