As you drive around Barcelona, finding jumps, completing missions, and destroying cat statues (really), Milo’s car will take damage, and once the flames appear…its time to find a new one. There is an option to get out of the car and find one on foot, but I don’t recommend it. The on-foot portions of the game are abysmal. Taking cover is as simple as ducking behind objects with the B-button, the enemy A.I. is garbage and shooting is mind-numbing. The most frustrating part is the game forces you to endure these sessions. Some of the story missions force the player to drive to a destination shoot through a throng of baddies (I mean throng), steal a car, and drive said car back to HQ. The vehicle portions can be exhilarating, but having to trudge around on foot almost isn’t worth it. If you still need a car, and don’t want to subject yourself to torture, you can drive up behind another car, hold B, and leap from the hood of your car (yes) onto the other. The animation is slick and once Milo lands on the car (before het gets inside) the player can control it. The air jack defies almost every law of physics, but that’s ok, realism is boring.
I’m usually not a stickler for graphics, but I will make an exception. If the only thing I will be looking at over the next eight hours is Vin Diesel and a bunch of explosions, they better look awesome. Vin Diesel is animated well (I hope he doesn’t run that way in real life), and the cars are sleek but everything else looks sub-par. The unreal engine wasn’t used to its full potential and I don’t know if it was because of the size of Vin’s studio or a push to release the game. A few more months back may have cleaned up some of the texture pop-ins and a myriad of other graphical glitches from occurring, and it would have moved it closer to the release date of the movie (couldn’t find an official date) and expound upon their corresponding nature. The sound is a mixed bag as well. Vin is the only voice actor that sounds like he was in a studio. There was a lot of recycled noise as well, the revving of the cars, squeals of the tires, and explosions are homogenous. It didn’t matter what car I was in or what blew up, each sound was almost identical.
I had a lot of ups and downs with Wheelman. It clocks in at a mere eight hours and the complete absence of a multiplayer game makes the sixty dollar price tag too steep. The action is mindlessly entertaining and the melee system is sure to find its way into other games, but it doesn’t offer anything past that. I can forgive action movies like Army of Darkness and Shoot em’ Up because they don’t take themselves seriously, but Wheelman never makes any indication that it cares only about the action by spending wasted time shoving its convoluted plot into the gamers’ face. I appreciate Vin Diesel’s love for gaming, and the plans he has for future games, but I can’t help but hope that the subsequent releases from his studio don’t cater to his Hollywood nature. His games will benefit from it.
