Wheelman is a good game, with a bit more polish it might have been a great one. Having some good dialogue, a great soundtrack, and pretty cool premise helps distract from the pop-in that comes up every once in a while.
It's cool to drive on Barcellona's ramblas, chasing down enemy's vehicles, hijacking cars and destroying city's environment. This funny curious mix of GTA and Driver, starring Vin diesel, has a lot of different missions, pretty good visuals but sometimes is plagued by an awful artificial intelligence, especially in the on foot sessions.
I didn´t expect anything when I got a copy of Wheelman as a present. I thought it was just another bad GTA clone. The moment I gave this game a chance, I was surprised how good it was. Yes it has many flaws like the mediocre graphics and the dump story. But the gameplay is great driving and shooting fun, the open world is well designed and the atmosphere is satisfying, just like a Hollywood blockbuster. Absolutely worth a look!
Out of nowhere comes a game full of action sequences and fun gimmicks, that it is almost possible to forgive the poor design of this 3rd person shooter/driver hybrid. Wheelman really throws some interesting stuff in front of you when you are behind the wheel. Unlike any game before it has there been so many options to take out rival cars or shake pursues off your tail, from leaping from a car that is about to explode it any second, to shunting a cop car into a pile of rubble, Wheelman really delivers the satisfaction when your speeding down the freeway.
Where Wheelman stalls is the awful third person shooting sections that are average at best and at times game breakingly frustrating. Also while having some unique special moves to target pursues with your gun whilst at high speed chases, some of the missions can be awfully unforgiving when trying to navigate the road and pick off targets with your gun when you do not have said special movies locked in.
So many cool concepts and so much average/frustrating gameplay keeps Wheelman from being the sleeper game that could of really come up from behind.
While it won’t win huge awards, The Wheelman remains a fun game to experience. The saddest part of all is that Midway’s economic problems have clearly hampered the development of the game. It feels unfinished, unpolished and compressed into its simplest form. When you go to the store to buy it or rent it, just don’t expect to be blown away and it won’t hurt your feelings.
The Wheelman is a fusion between the sandbox and the race genre. Featuring ideas taken from games like Driver, Need for Speed and GTA, Vin Diesel is the main figure of the staff between the game. Controlling Milo Burik, a sort of undercover cop, we´ll travel to Barcelona to see what´s happening there. We´ll never know which is our real objective, and the plot lacks depth and connection. Racing through Barcelona, we found a decent game that has a mix of driving and shooting. Pack this with a fair graphic engine and you have a title that performs well but is not at the level of the best.
Sure, you might give the developers a hand when it comes to several “cool” concepts of slamming enemies into the wall with your car or leaping from car to car, but you’ll grow tired of the over-the-top action sooner rather than later.
It’s like an ironic mustache or mullet. Like having a Steven Segal DVD in your collection. You’ll never get any real use out of it. You just have it in with your other games to show you friends you have a sense of humor.
Vin Diesel's Wheelman is a decent game.
The gameplay is a mixed bag,with great in-car gameplay,but awful on-foot action.
Car sections:The physics are OK,with the great skyjack mechanic of leaping between from your car to another and hijacking **** is special moves known as the Aimed Shot and Cyclone.These are very useful in sections where you need to shoot enemy vehicles or passengers.
On-foot sections:Terrible shooting with an awful cover system.There are sections where you can use the environment to your advantage,which is useful as you are often significantly outnumbered.These sections are easy too,as the on-foot AI is completely braindead.
The graphics are okay.However,some character models,particularly Vin himself,look **** framerate is solid though.
Sound design and soundtrack are bad.
Overall,Wheelman is a unique,but merely average game.
Food critics will usually review a restaurant a few days after opening as the first night will have a show put on by the owners, a method which could not be more apt for Wheelman. While the demo will **** you in, the game from then on will spit you out and desecrate you for good measure. Naturally, there are a few aspects of the game that deliver on its promise of the over the top action we've all come accustomed to from Vin Diesel films of late. You can attack other cars with your own vehicle using the right stick, which is useful for ousting enemies and police alike. You can also "air-jack" a car, in which you hold down circle/B, and when an arrow on top of your desired car turns green, you will leap from your car and get into the other person's. While this seems incredibly ridiculous, it is actually fun. Once you've sped enough (or something similar, I haven't touched the game in the past year and a half), you get points which you can use to slow down time while driving, and you can physically aim where to shoot through the wind-sheild, which is aided by an overly simple auto-aim. A more advanced version of this turns the car 180 degrees, which is incredibly useful for taking cars out behind you. And of course, there's a heap of cheesy lines from Vin to keep you going. And those are the good aspects. All of them. There are absolutely no more.This is a GTA clone if someone mixed up the embryos with a game from 5 years ago and created some mutant offspring. You'd think that **** is entitled "Wheelman", there would be a great emphasis on driving. Not so, unfortunately. Most of the game will be spent on foot, with truly abhorrent controls. It's difficult to aim, and the cover system is beyond clunky. There are limited weapons, which Vin magically stores on his back. They could've just gone for the old-school GTA method of switching guns out of nowhere, but an invisible adhesive is used for some reason. The game focuses too much on explosions, with exploding barrels everywhere from an abandoned metro station (understandable), to a church graveyard, which is not. And what do you do if you want a car to escape this on-foot madness? You just press triangle/Y, and the nearest car magically stops, waiting for you to steal their car. And how many cars do you have to choose from? This may be an exaggeration, but my guess is 14. For a driving game, about 14 cars. GTA is both shooting and driving, and has over 200 cars. 14 is pathetic. And I'm not a car expert, but I counted 2 licensed cars, something which GTA will never have. What are these cars? A Vauxhall/Opel Astra, the embodiment of mediocrity in cars, and the Smart Car, one of the slowest on the planet. Awful, truly. The story is instantly forgettable. You're some sort of undercover agent infiltrating the infamous underbelly of Barcelona for some sort of agency. My guess is Interpol. But you still get pulled over by the police. Anyway, you get involved with each of the three gangs that control Barcelona, one with an African-European, who is the most obese character in a game I've seen since Big Smoke, one old school mafioso family and another gang, who I don't know for the life of me who they are, although it hardly matters. You'll do missions for one gang against one of the others, yet you'll be able to continue missions for the others. I remember doing a hit against an armed convoy, and going to the family on the receiving end the next day, at which the boss knows that it was you, but he lets you continue working for him due to you saying "I'm just a Wheelman". And you continue with your business. I'll be honest, I didn't finish the story, but I doubt it mattered much. I also didn't do any of the side missions, because I wasn't pushed to do them, they meant nothing. I didn't wonder around as you do in a free roaming game, Barcelona is such a nondescript city for a video game that you'll be bored in 2 minutes. The graphics could easily have been lifted from a PS2 game, and no one would know the difference, with glitches more common than not. Apart from Vin Diesel, the voice acting is terrible, and the soundtrack is dreadful, with radio stations called "Hip-Hop" and "American". There's no replay value with the absence of multiplayer, which would be accepted if the single-player was anything close to focused. Saying that, there's not much play value, either. Gameplay: 4
Story: 3
Graphics: 4
Sound: 3
Replay Value: 1
Verdict: If you want to, play the demo, nothing more.
SummaryWheelman takes gamers on a white knuckle thrill ride that unfolds throughout the streets of Barcelona. Featuring car chases inspired by Hollywood's most famous action-sequences, Wheelman delivers powerful cinematic moments throughout the game's compelling storyline. Vin Diesel stars as an undercover agent and highly skilled driver who mu...