Can Vin Diesel’s voice acting be better than his on screen antics in The Pacifier?
The Wheelman was set to revolutionise the action driving genre and when Vin Diesel first made the big time with The Fast and the Furious, teenage girls the world over craved for the muscle bound heart throb. Obviously Midway and Ubi Soft thought this a good idea to throw the Hollywood star into an uninteresting, flawed, boring driving game. Can Vin Diesel’s voice acting be better than his on screen antics in The Pacifier? Well… NO and here’s why.
The Wheelman picks up with our hero Mr Diesel as an undercover agent and highly skilled driver, named Milo Burik, hired to infiltrate Barcelona’s underworld and gather intelligence on a covert heist while staying one step ahead of the rival gangs and local law enforcement. The Wheelman is based around pretty much every car chase movie ever made with a hint of the classic Playstation title, Driver. However, The Wheelman feels more like its older, bigger flop brother, Driv3r.
At first, The Wheelman looks like a pretty good arcade style driving game, it’s not until the game comes under your control that the flaws hit you in the face at 140 mph. Control of the vehicles are stiff and a little awkward to manoeuvre, unresponsive and sluggish. The on foot sections are appalling; the motion capture looks like it was performed by a cardboard cut-out rather than actual people. It is clear to see that these on foot sections have been rushed and more attention to detail has gone elsewhere, this is not all bad, as the driving sections, (although still not as good as we have come to expect from current generation games, now 4 years old) are fairly good even with these obvious bugs. You will be happy to see the inclusion of motorcycles in The Wheelman, however, don’t get too excited as, yes the handling is somewhat improved and you can perform some impressive manoeuvres but when you plough your 2 wheeled mean machine into the back of a van/tree/car/, whatever, you will do either of two things, A.) Find yourself 30 feet in the air still clinging onto your bike or B.) Find yourself 50 feet in the air, still clinging to your bike. The thing is when you hit the ground again, you will see that very little damage has been done to you or your vehicle and you will simply carry on to your destination. This gets very annoying and you have to concentrate more on avoiding other vehicles than enjoying yourself. Getting past this major flaw will reveal that there are some actually, pretty cool features in the game, follow a vehicle close enough and you will be able to perform a jump hijack move similar to that in Pursuit Force for the PSP for instance or the sideways ramming you can do to help shake off pursuing cars. Camera angles are good and you always have a pretty good idea of what’s going on around you at all times which helps improve things significantly.
The driving sequences are not the only feature that is not up to standard, the graphics are also very ropey and still not what we have come to expect from current generation games. Everything looks flat, plain and just simply boring; multiple colour layers have been applied to the characters to give the illusion of shade and shadow, which just looks messy and unfinished. Environments are again, flat, plain and boring, everything just looks square and unfinished. Sound effects are again, nothing special, the usual engine sounds are ok, but decent ambience is missing, you never really feel involved in a real living environment, racing through traffic feels and looks simple which is a real shame and spoils the game from being fairly playable and enjoyable. Collision detection has been rushed and very often you will crash through a steel fence only to find that, that fence is trapped through the middle of your vehicle and only by crashing said vehicle into something else will mostly, although not always remove the nuisance fence.
The Wheelman offers a fairly decent driving game if you can get past the many flaws.
The police in the game are persistent and will do everything in their power to bring you down. This offers you great enjoyment side swiping them and taking them out in a fireball of twisted metal. It does take a few too many hits to see any results and you will spend more time using slow motion gunplay than m�l�e attacks. This does provide some enjoyable moments and you almost forget previous flaws, that is until 2 or more police cars are at your side, even though you are travelling flat out they still manage to catch up to you and this can feel like you are just destroying police rather than escaping them. You don’t feel the thrill of a chase like we have come to expect from other titles. This can become quite repetitive through the course of the game but is the most fun and will take you a while to get bored of.
Having said everything previous, there is a large array of side quests for you to attempt in the form of race challenges, taxi drop off’s and destruction based activities, with these side missions offering upgrades upon completion, giving the game a slight RPG feel, although you will find yourself replaying these missions at least once to score the appropriate points in order to unlock the upgrade in question, however, you do not need to do any of these side quests to complete the main game and are completely optional. There are NO multiplayer features what so ever in The Wheelman and so as you can imagine by now offers no real replay value at all making this a very short lived average driving adventure. And short lived is really the case here, the whole adventure will take between 6 and 8 hours to complete if you choose not to take on any, or at least a very few side missions. If you do decide to take on all 60 main missions and all 105 side quests, however, expect the game to take considerably longer.
When all is said and done, The Wheelman offers a few nice new features to the action/adventure driving genre, nevertheless, fails to utilise them in a fun and effective way. Sure, The Wheelman offers a fairly decent driving game if you can get past the many flaws. The poor physics and average gameplay however, spoil this from being something more, something it could have been, the basics were there but poor production value and animation ruin this from being a must buy, the must buy many were hoping for.
The Bad: Vin Diesel, Over the Top Gameplay, Graphics,; Collision Detection, Physics, Character Animation
