The Wheelman Review
By Gaetano Prestia
Jump for joy, clap your hands and wave your arms around like a moron - April is Vin Diesel month! That’s right, not only do we get another hack street-racing film in Fast and Furious, but we get the highly anticipated Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, the sequel to the brilliant Escape from Butcher Bay, as well as the recently released Wheelman, a title that quite simply fails to impress and entertain.
The only thing this game has going for it is that it actually feels like a Vin Diesel film: there’s plenty of fast cars, ridiculous stunts, hot chicks, terrible acting and an even worse storyline. Yeah, I know. I kind of contradicted myself there. It’s good that it feels like a Vin Diesel flick, but not so good that it actually does…if that makes sense, which I don’t think it does. What I’m trying to say is that the developer obviously wanted to promote this as a Vin Diesel game and not an action-racing title. They’ve done that successfully, but openly promoting a game as feeling very Vin Diesel-like would be like telling a hot girl you’ve got AIDS just before you jump into bed with her. That’s because Vin Diesel sucks. I’m not going to elaborate on that. I really don’t need to.
Wheelman puts in the role of Riddick…ahhh….Vin Diesel….ahhh…Milo Burik, who is an undercover Miami police officer who has gone to Barcelona to sort out the Catalonian mafia. The only thing is that you don’t do this with your hands or with a whole bunch of guns. No. You’re the Wheelman! You do it from your car! Midway, you sure are revolutionary!
Taking out enemies sure is a treat. Once you’ve caught up to the evading criminals, you can sideswipe them with your car by using the right analogue stick. Once their car reaches a critical point, the car will jump into the air, flip and burst into flames as if it’s been lifted from underneath. Sometimes you’ll come across enemies who also have guns, but Vin also comes packing heat, so you can pull out the weapon and shoot away. You can use some slow-motion features to take out vehicles with one shot (who knew that a single bullet from a handgun could cause a car to explode?) or you can decide to shoot out the tires, all of which are targeted automatically, removing any challenge whatsoever.
But that isn’t the best part of ridding the gorgeous city of Barcelona from this scum mafia. You can also jump from car to car, breaking all rules of gravity, speed and movement. That’s right, Vin Diesel also plays a mystical wizard in Wheelman. While driving, you can press a button to prepare Vin until you’re close enough to jump from car to car, kick the driver out in a quick, one-motion flow and take control. Impossible? Not for Vin Diesel.
/sarcasm
OK, I can’t go on any longer. Games have evolved dramatically this generation. I’m not asking for a 100% realistic experience, because no game has ever been able to do that. But Wheelman is utterly stupid in every way, shape and form, that I can’t help but wonder if Vin Diesel really is Jesus. He just has to be. Because Midway seem to have thrown every single basic fundamental for believable and realistic gameplay out the window. It’s as if they haven’t played a single game this generation and decided to insult gamers by assuming we’d believe that a man could jump from one car going at 100kmph to another car directly in front that is going faster. It’s just been moronically executed. The idea itself is fine, but why not add a bit of challenge? Why not make it so you have to be precisely aligned to the car, going at near the same speed to make the jump? Wheelman is bordering being an arcade game, but the thing is that this doesn’t cost you $1 to play. Even renting it is going to cost you $5, which is too much.
Midway was just really lazy. It shows. There’s nothing exciting about the gameplay at all. There’s barely any challenge and it’s not even remotely believable. With GTAIV and Saint’s Row 2, there was at least one level of realism that you could experience, be it from the aiming systems, to the car handlings to the combat. With Wheelman, there’s no realism whatsoever. The execution is just terrible.
Then you have the city of Barcelona. If you’ve been there, you’d have probably been excited about the prospect of driving around a virtual recreation of the city for the first time. Unfortunately, the city in the game sucks. Barcelona is a lively place with people everywhere, music playing constantly, hustlers, sidewalk buskers and tourists. Wheelman’s version of Barcelona is just a generic city with European-like buildings and some terribly recreated Barcelona landmarks.
Driving round the city is dull too. Where are the alleyway dining tables? The small bars? The clothes hanging from balcony to balcony? Instead, whenever you’re trying to evade police, you’re driving through large alleyways with no real obstacles that make it feel like you’re actually driving through Barcelona.
Once you get right into the thick of things, Wheelman suddenly starts to feel a lot like Crazy Taxi – you’re driving around a lot, participating in races, chasing people, evading people and dropping people off. If only the city was half as fun to drive around as San Francisco was in Crazy Taxi. Once you complete missions, you’ll unlock new weapons and garages and also upgrade your Cyclone and Aimed Shot attacks. It’s overly basic gameplay.
What really ruins the experience is that the AI is void of any intelligence whatsoever. They’ll ram you and shoot at you if you’re nearby, but if you fall off and they drive away into the distance, you’ll see that their position on the map HUD has stopped as they wait for you to catch up. Yes, that’s right. The evading enemies stop so that you can catch up to them and the chase can continue. This takes away any challenge whatsoever from the races, which are practically impossible to lose. Fall back from the pack and suddenly every single opponent will slow down and wait for you to catch up.
The only aspect of the entire game probably worth praising is the car handling, which isn’t spectacular by any means but is decent enough to warrant praise, especially in light of the rest of the game. It has a distinctive arcade feeling about it which is fine, but couple this with the fact that almost every other aspect of the gameplay is arcadey and void of any real challenge or realism, and the praise loses all value.
Walking around the city and engaging in hand-to-hand combat is just as dull and repetitive as the car combat and racing. Enemies respawn at the most random times and places and the structure of the missions where Vin is on his feet are just unforgiving. There’s no enjoyment to be had in these missions and they’re so basic and simple that you really have to wonder if the development team have even played a game in the past decade.
Now I can move on to the graphics. Besides Vin Diesel, who looks unsurprisingly good in terms of virtual recreation and design, every other character is last-generation at best and the lighting and city design are just terrible. Luckily a map has been incorporated, because the city is just bland and boring and it would be easy to get lost in the countless number of identical districts and alleyways.
The Final Verdict
The Wheelman is not a good game. Besides a small learning curve and some early excitement through the introductory missions, there’s hardly anything worth praising and getting excited about. The gameplay is dull, unrealistic and stupid, the AI is void of any intelligence and the mission structure is terrible for the most part. The city of Barcelona has been insulted with this terrible recreation, alongside last-gen character design, terrible story and bad voice-acting to round out a forgettable presentation.