Wheelman

"Deep down, there is a good game but its hard to reach it"

Graphics 8/10
The graphics for this game are quite good. They feel like a mixture between the more cartoony looking style of Saints Row and the more realistic style of Grand Theft Auto 4. Everything is also shiny, including Milo's (Vin Diesel) chrome dome. The developers captured the city of Barcelona, Spain very well and they even included monuments of the city in their respective locations on the map. This includes the Sagrada Familia which is unfinished both in the real world and the game with cranes showing from the inside. If you enter one of the small parks in the game, you can see art stands where painters were painting portraits of someone. I say “were” because they're always vacant. One thing that draws the graphics down is the lack of a day-night cycle. Seriously, I didn't know it was sunny in Barcelona 24/7/365.

Sound 7/10
Aside from the roar of the engines of the vehicles you're driving (About 88% of the gameplay is driving) you can hear the radio which has several types of stations. They aren't actual stations like you would see in GTA4 or Saints Row but they are named by their style of music such as American, Rock, Urban, Spanish and Classical. Each station has an okay amount of music to listen to while causing mayhem but the vehicles are so freaking loud you cant hear them anyways.

Gameplay 5/10
Yay we get to move onto the gameplay which both makes this game shine and also breaks the game. First I wish to talk about the most interesting feature and the strong point of the game;

Vehicle Combat. Yes ladies and gentlemen, drivers now get to duke it out in their vehicles and not have to use guns so much. A wise Jedi once said “Guns are so uncivilized” and this game proves it. Instead of shooting drivers, I can be safer and cause less casualties by ramming enemy vehicles. The way the combat works is simple. While going over a certain speed, you can flick the right thumbstick forward for a quick jump forward to bump a car in the rear and make them lose control, flick it left for a “sidestep” to the left to bump a car into a wall and vice versa for the right side. Vehicle “meleeing” as it is called can also serve a purpose outside of just combat. You can dodge traffic if theyre getting a little too close or just bump them and watch a nice explosion.

There isn't too much wrong with the combat but I have noticed that moving vehicles will take several bumps to blow up whereas a parked vehicle will tend to blow up in just a single bump. The bikes and scooters seem to blow up at the slightest touch.

Moving on from the combat itself, one thing that really kicks the game down is the slingshot effect NPC opponents have. If I am driving a van or a semi, I can only go about 100mph and a bit faster with focus speed boosts whereas an enemy can slingshot themselves past me at twice my speed in a van while I am in a sports car. Everyone will always be faster than you until you temporarily slow them down. Speaking of slowing down, the game stresses shooing tires to slow down an enemy vehicle but their vehicles can maintain the same stability and speed without tires and guess who can't do that with no tires? Yep, that's right. The player. This makes police chases very frustrating. Speaking of the police, where the heck are they? Saints Row and GTA both have policemen patrolling the streets but this game does not have any. For some reason, Barcelona's finest are either stuffing their faces in a café or shooting darts in a pub until you pester a few pedestrians and then they randomly come out of nowhere. It is extremely difficult to break free from a chase because once you get out of the chase zone, there is a high chance that there will be a random policeman who teleports onto the road and reestablishes the chase.

Now comes another part of the game that bugs the heck out of me. While it isn't too bad, the gunplay is bland and consists of locking on, tilting the reticle to the head and shooting a bullet. Enemies can somehow take a shot, do a 360 degree spin then start shooting several times before falling and I can tell they don't even have armor on. The guns in this game consist of an infinite ammo pistol and a plethora of machine guns. What bugs me the most is that if you have a machine gun and you don't pull a weapon, you can't see the pistol and it looks like Milo pulls it out of his butt but when you have only a pistol, he actually carries it in the back of his pants. Now, as for the second weapon, it just seems to float on top of his spine, unconnected.

Okay, enough of the bad parts of the game. This time, we get to play a game where side missions actually give incentives such as increased handling of your vehicle, an enhanced focus gauge, and more shortcuts on the map. One more thing that makes me happy about this game is the ability to just teleport to missions from the GPS instead of setting a waypoint that can be longer than you wanted or blindly driving to your destination.

One small thing that I found was the dreaded "Fall through the world" glitch and this cant be saved by a normal reloading of a save. You have to turn the xbox off first before it fixes itself.

Replayability 4/10
Very low since the game can get extremely repetitive very quickly with bad gunplay segments and vehicle chase sequences that make up most of the game.

Overall 6/10
The game is a welcome distraction from the mainstream “sandbox” mafia games such as Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto but sadly it doesn't shine where it was expected to. The only saving grace I see is the vehicle combat and how well it was integrated.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 06/09/09

Game Release: Wheelman (US, 03/24/09)