The Unreal Engine has been used for every genre this generation including side scrollers, the only missing genre from its list was the sandbox field which had been epitomized by Grand Theft Auto III. Tigon and Midway games come to the rescue of this vortex by releasing The Wheelman on the PS3, P.C and Xbox 360, which not only marks the return of the pixilated Vin Diesel last seen in Chronicles of Riddick, but also manages to cerate the most obnoxious open world game seen this generation.
The fact that this game was being developed since 2006 including a prototype that on the PS2 has no correlation to the quality of gameplay and visuals this game has to offer to adrenaline junkies. The game puts you in the shoes of a wheelman, Milo Burik (Vin Diesel), who arrives in Barcelona to rescue a hunted woman’s life, trapped between an ongoing gang war. This undercover CIA agent needs to choose his sides well or it might just mark the end of him. The entire story of the game has clichés written all over it, but the aspect that makes such banalities fun in videogames is the fact that it is coupled with an insane amount of fun on the street saddling your gun killing and murdering people, I mean pixels, sadly enough The Wheelman offers nothing for a gamer to find solace in. Instead, it represents shoddy production values and a half hearted attempt at crafting a next generation title that should have been canned a long time ago.
The gameplay is a mix and match of Grand Theft Auto and the Driver Series with Vin either taking his regular shots of adrenaline and performing some insane car jacks or some random on foot missions that hold no ground in the sequence of on going events but desperately try to add a variety from your regular driving. Driving has been given a neat twist in the game. Your car is a weapon that can be used to plough and lunge at other cars using the right analogue stick, although the initial experience of was quite enthralling, but its difficulty and application in further missions seemed rather slow, inhibiting the experience, the focus meter used for boost or in car shooting although fun to use initially lacks any substance of progression. The illusion of an adrenaline charged experience falls short at every moment. The game does not force players to explore the enormous city and find shortcuts, since it allows players to automatically skip sequences to move onto their next destination.
The on foot mission are rather funny since Milo has unlimited ammunition for his pistol with a secondary weapon stuck and fends of waves of bullets and gang members ducking behind cardboard boxes. The driving missions are a rip off right out of GTA games. For instance, asking the player to threaten a leader of a gang by making sure he does not fall off the roof, by going too fast or filing ones car onto the wrong side of the road eerily reminds one of the Love Juice mission from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The audio in the game is minimalistic, anyone scourging to find radio stations or music will be disappointed, Vin diesel’s dialogues range from a scruffy line here, a grunt there and a blank sordid expression during cutscenes.
Technically, the game fares even worse, the high adrenaline chase sequences are often marred by a horrible amount of pop ins and bland textures making the game a visually gorefest in the opposite sense. Milo and the other NPC’s have been applied sufficient amounts of vaseline and oil to make their screen models extra greasy and shiny on your high definition television. Blowing up cars seems ridiculous since the player can see the separate flame animation that has been superimposed onto the succulent car models on screen. Bugs aside, this is perhaps the worst implementation of the Unreal 3 engine till date.
The Final Word: The Wheelman runs in conjunction with Driv3r, a lot of hype that ultimately faded into dust by the end of the cycle. A few random sequences that get the action flowing, but the overall structure is such that it translates into a major bummer. Players addicted to a sandbox generation will find Grand Theft Auto IV or Saint’s Row 2 far more challenging and fun to play tinker getting stuck in the world of The Wheelman.
Graphics: 2/10.
Gameplay: 6/10.
Sound: 3/10.
Budget Pocket: 1/10.
Overall (Not On an average): 3/10.
- By Neelesh Mukherjee