The Wilderness of Wolf Ridge
Wolf Ridge by Ziz Parks is a virtual bike-park on Roblox where players can ride their bikes through various scenic bike trails to earn Mons (the game’s in game currency) which can be used to customise and upgrade their bikes and unlocking new trails.
Starting off at the base of the mountain, one can, after purchasing a lift ticket, either travel on the lift or teleport up to the top. Here one of the primary issues with the game soon emerges - the hideous user interface. Rather than utilising onscreen buttons, you use your keyboard to navigate through the map. Whilst the neon lines lining the various trails can be excused, the lack of a background on the buttons which teleport you to various places cannot.
From the peaks, one can ride their bike down various trails of varying difficulties. Trails with the green circle are the easiest, with blue circles being more difficult and black diamond being the most difficult. If you want a test, a time trial mode is available so you can compare your time with the other times set on that trail on the server.
Going down the trails alone won’t net you many mons however. That comes from tricks that you can do from the myriad of keyboard combinations that can be performed. Backflips, frontflips, 360s, you name it - you can do it.
This poses another, more fundamental problem though. The controls in Wolf Ridge are numerous enough that a list of the essential keybinds are included in the experience description. These controls roughly map out as so:
The current key bindings have created two silos for control - WASD (red) for the movement of the bike and UHJK (pink) for tilting (which is also how you control flips). Note that it is UHJK and not the more traditional IJKL - the L key is bound to turn on and off the light (which would probably be effective if there was enough shade on the trails that I visited through). This can make it difficult for the muscle memory of players to adapt to these controls, which combined with the (unusual for Roblox) ambidextrous layout and having to shift gears manually results in a rather high learning curve. There is a tutorial to ease new players into the game loop however it is restrictive and takes up a large proportion of screen real estate.
Another pain point is the camera settings. You can use P to toggle on and off the point of view camera, whilst X (not mentioned in the description) switches between the various point of view modes. The only trouble using this is that it resets the camera in such a way that your face is visible from the inside.1 Mildly disturbing.
Despite these lowlights, the experience itself is excellent. The build quality, despite being very classic Roblox-y looking does look rather impressive. There’s even a museum where you can view a sized-down model of the mountain. The sound design is also adequate as well. Whilst you’ll have to supply your own music whilst riding down the trail, the sound effects in the game do their job. Physics, unusually for a Roblox game of its size, is top notch, which combined with the point of view camera when it works giving players the thrill of riding their bikes downhill.
Overall, even with its shortcomings, the Wolf Ridge bike park is still worthy of a visit. So why not get some fresh air and ride the trails?
Wolf Ridge | Bike Park is a Roblox experience which can be visited here.
This could only be an issue with Dynamic Heads as they contain faces (the 3D geometry kind) inside of them, although I have seen similar occurrences of this with the classic 2D decal face in other experiences.