At almost 5,000 game reviews in, I’ve played plenty of great, middling, and outright terrible games… and yet there are still those that manage to surprise me. Typically I’d say that’s a good thing, but every once in a while there’s a title that comes my way that somehow is so thoroughly underwhelming that it blows away even the most mediocre vision of what it could be, based on its title. 

With a name like Rolling Wheels and the minimal game art, the fact that this is such a disappointing mess shouldn’t be a surprise, but what shocked me most is that it seemed to run out of ideas almost as soon as it started. The objective of this game is simply to get your wheel to the finish line, while managing a small number of obstacles like bumps in the road, rocks, or ice formations of some kind. What thankfully seems to keep you going, and racking up your multiplier that you’ll use to maximize your rewards at the end of every stage, are people who are running away in fear.

The thing is, even as simple as the premise is, there are directions it could have gone in to help make the most of what little it had to work with. Why stop at people? Why not allow for running over all manner of critters, or at least cats and dogs? Why have so few different wheels you can unlock and why just have them be cosmetically different, when you could make one with spikes or something sharp, allowing you to bloody or even crush screaming civilians? I’ve played budget games with extremely simple conceits that at least then worked to get every ounce of fun possible out of their basic premise, but this makes no effort to be anything more than it is from the first moment you play it, earning its Shovelware Nonsense Award quite decisively.