Review: Wheelman

Wheelman is a game that's been development for what seems like an age. Not as long as Duke Nukem for sure, but we've been hearing about it for quite a while. And now it's actually here.

The game that Midway has released feels an awful lot like it was rushed out of the door to help solve the publisher's current financial difficulties.

That's a real shame as there's plenty of promise on show in Wheelman, but the rushed released has left us with a game that feels half-baked, half-arsed or half-finished.

Jumble

The most obvious signs the game was shoved out of the door before it was ready come in the way the story is told.

It is told badly.

Often the player is given important spoiler information in on-screen text before an important cutscene reveals it in the correct manner. Often the story lurches dramatically between one scene and the next mission leaving you feeling there was some missing exposition.

But even if we're being generous about the story problems being more related to timing than actual creative problems it is worth mentioning that a lot of what happens in Wheelman makes no sense.

There's a famous quote from the Vietnam War, "We had to destroy the village in order to save the village." Here you're left wondering that whatever the bad guys were up to really can't be much worse than the death and destruction Vin Diesel is allowed to carry out in Barcelona in order to catch the criminals.

How many cops do you think James Bond would be allowed to kill before M told him things were getting out of hand? Not many.

Mechanix

Yet while the story is a load of hairy old nonsense, badly acted, badly performed and badly rendered with horrid Unreal Engine 3 characters there's much to admire in the gameplay mechanics.

The car handling works rather well.. The chance of bullet-time style shooting, enabling you spin the car round and take out the guys following you, is great fun once introduced early in the game.

So to is the way you can leap from car to car to take control. It doesn't always work, for example in a mission with a passenger they don't follow you. Making leaping from a near-destroyed car a bit of a waste of time.

And so your first few hours with Wheelman will be spend causing mayhem, side-swiping police cars, shooting chasing gangsters and perhaps thinking in terms of driving it's much more fun than Grand Theft Auto.

However the fun doesn't really last much longer than that. The infinitely respawning enemies and rubber-banding mean that it really doesn't matter how well you play when chased by the bad guys. There will always be the same number of foes on your tail whether you try to do something about it or not.

The missions tend to feel the same rather quickly, and the on-foot gunplay is rather poor. Wheelman tries hard, it shows you all the toys really early on and then you feel within two hours you've seen it all.

Barcelona

One of the main reasons for that is how dull the Barcelona location is. Open-world games need to present a world that's fun to play around in, that make you want to explore. Wheelman fails this test.

Part of the problem is down to the use of Unreal Engine 3, which looks pretty, but rather generic. You could be anywhere in any average game of this generation. I couldn't help think some tasteful post-processing lighting and effects really could have livened things up a little in the visual department, but that still wouldn't have solved the problem of a dull representation of the city.

Barcelona is a vibrant and exciting place to be and very little of that is captured in the game. And while in technical terms Wheelman hangs together pretty well, with some attractive graphics at times and fairly fluid framerate it's yet another UE3 seen-it-all-before game.

Puncture

I was really looking forward to Wheelman, hoping for this generation's answer to Driver. It did tick some of those boxes.

But poor storytelling, dull mission structure, lack of variety in the location and a lack of polish left me wanting much more.

There's not even any multiplayer fun to be had.

There was enough here for me to want a sequel, there's definitely potential here for something different in a market beset by a constant flow of the same old crap, but this game feels more like an evening's fun rental than a sensible way to spend £30.