Wheelman is the next in arcade action driving games, it has been developed by the Midway Studio’s in Newcastle and published by Ubisoft. Wheelman, is the next game to include a digitized copy of Vin Diesel, the other being The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena.

 

Wheelman’s storyline revolves around Milo Burik aka Vin Diesel, who plays a very resourceful driver, who has come out of retirement to save a woman from his past. While the preview we got our hands on, didn’t share the story in much depth, there is certainly a lot of action in the Wheelman’s plot.

 

 

Wheelman plays like a good arcade racer, combined with a John Woo special which includes a lot of neat little tricks up its sleeve. While at first the game was mediocre to say the least, Wheelman does grow on you, after the first few missions you slowly start getting down to the nitty gritty. In Wheelman, Milo can perform numerous special manoeuvres, ranging from airjacking, the ability for Milo to leap from his damaged car onto the roof of a car in front of him, and then take control of the new vehicle, to bullet time, which has made a very big come back recently, by simply pressing the down arrow, Milo will perform a stunt that spins the car 180 degree’s and places him into bullet time with a gun and this enables him to efficiently eliminate any threats from behind John Woo Style. While Wheelman plays like an arcade game it is easy to identify where the developers drew their inspirations, Wheelman will be 80 percent car based, with the ability to hijack, shoot and destroy any vehicle in game, as well as 20 percent of foot action, which is played from a third person prospective and provides a cover and fire feel much like Gears of War.

 

Wheelman is unfortunately lacking in the graphic department, with cars that explode into nothing more than their basic steel structures, and damage to the vehicles that don’t leave you with any additional sadistic satisfactions when you collide with your many unfriendly neighbours. While the scenery looks fresh, and polished the cars are less fortunate with there being no middle ground in Wheelman, the cars visually look dated and rushed.

 

 

Wheelman features a huge sound databank, with each mission have a unique score, and crash sounds that provide some realism to the arcade look and feel of Wheelman. The bullet time also features some very well designed effects that ensure the player can hear Milo, changing from real-time to bullet time and vice versa.

 

In Conclusion, Wheelman while mildly unique has done little to expand the arcadish car action games such as GTA and Driver, while Wheelman does add many new features to the gameplay it has failed to produce an all round game that will entice gamers to return after their first play through.