 Midway has been one of the most interesting companies across the gaming spectrum. While their games have never been great, they were usually fun. The games might not have been technically savvy, but Midway always held a special place in my heart. So, going into Wheelman, which may very well be the last game that Midway has produced, I was somewhat disheartened. Midway's debt has gotten so bad that they needed UbiSoft to co-publish the game, as they couldn't afford to press the discs.
To be totally honest, I was not exactly hopeful for this game. First, it's a game starring the simian-man-child, Vin Diesel. The fact that this, along with "Fast and Furious" and "The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena" seems to be an attempt to revive his post-"The Pacifier" career. Secondly, the gameplay looked somewhat broken. My fears for this game, along with Midway's future held in the balance as I put the game into my PS3.
Get behind the wheel after the jump.
In Wheelman, you play as Milo Burkin, a "Wheelman" working for different gangs across Barcelona. You quickly find out that Milo has a double life, as he acts as an undercover CIA agent. You work for the 3 primary gangs across the city, doing various odd jobs for each of them. The story is extremely convoluted, however, as at any given time you will be doing a job that has little to no set up. The epitomy of this was when I had to retrieve a document for no apparent reason. For some reason everyone was after this document, and even after I had it, I had no idea why I had risked life and limb to retrieve it.
The story is a veiled excuse to allow you to progress through the various missions. There's a variety of missions involving both driving and on-foot levels. The world is an open world and is reminiscent of the Driver series. You will run through a series of missions and optional objectives consisting of everything from trailing an enemy to escaping police.
Most of your missions will involve simply killing off your enemies, whether through vehicular or through on-foot combat. To say that the out-of-vehicle portion of the game is not good would be an understatement. The combat plays like an average 3rd person shooter, however most of the pure mechanics of it are fairly broken. There's limited weapon selection, and there are times that the auto-lock for your targeting will pick targets who are furthest away from you. Other times, you will shoot into an area that appears to give you a clear shot and instead you will not be able to shoot past some sort of invisible wall.
If the on-foot combat for this game is the worst part of the game, then the best part is clearly the vehicular combat. This portion of the game is where you will, thankfully, spend most of your time. The vehicular portion of this game plays fairly uniquely in comparison to most other games in the open-world genre as you can perform any number of actions from within your car.
The most prominent of these is the concept of vehicle melee attacks. When you reach a specific speed, you can use your right analog stick in order to slam your car to either the left or right or you can use it to ram your car forward. This means that you can use your car to take down enemy vehicles by ramming them off the road, slamming them into oncoming traffic or lose them by pushing them onto freeway ramps. This can be extremely fun and makes the game feel extremely frantic.
The other aspect of vehicular combat that is immediately appealing is the concept of "Airjacking" cars. When you are trailing certain cars, you can hold the circle button and jump from your car into another car. This was a concept that I first saw in the game "Pursuit Force" on the PSP. In that game, it felt fun, but in a fully open world game, the concept of jumping from any car to any other car is a blast. Combine this with the subtle detail that if you jump from a car that is on fire from damage, to a new car, the camera will pan around so that you can see your former car explode in a fiery wreck. This subtle detail makes the game feel like you are in a high speed action movie.
The final addition to this game in terms of vehicular combat is the Cyclone and Aimed Shot ability. Speeding or performing dangerous stunts will fill a small gauge along the lower right hand of the screen. When you fill this meter to a specific level, you can either use it to boost your car's speed or you can use the Cyclone or Aimed Shot ability. Using the Aimed Shot will slow down time and move the camera into the car, allowing you to perform methodical shots that can destroy your enemies car or kill passengers who may be wielding weapons against you. The Cyclone ability mimics this, except your car will spin around, allowing you to shoot enemies behind you. While you can shoot other cars normally from your car, this addition makes it easier to take out other enemies.
As driving is the primary action you will perform, the driving controls should be noted. The driving plays very loose in comparison to many other games. At moments, it feels like it's too loose, however. Many times when I was driving I would try to hit a turn using the E-brake, however my car could spin out of control. Many times, though, this was advantageous as there were times that I needed to get out of a tight spot and being able to easily maneuver was critical.
Wheelman is fun, but it is not without its flaws. While the instances of clipping were few, they could cause tremendous problems. The most notable instance occurred when I was thrown off of a motorcycle and Milo was thrown through a wall. I remained there, forcing me to restart the game. The game also suffered from several frame-rate drops, though they mostly occurred in cut scenes. As if all of this wasn't enough, the radio stations leave much to be desired as the music tended to be fairly generic. Custom soundtrack support would have added a lot more to the overall experience.
In addition to the main plot of the game, there are several side-missions. They will range from anything to taxi missions, where you will need to bring customers to their destinations in a given time, to rampage missions, where you will destroy as much property as you can. You can continue playing these missions after the game, which adds to the level of replayability of this game. You can also find several "Cinematic" jumps and statues to crash through. There is a lot to do here, which means that you can keep playing for hours after the main storyline is finished.
Overall, I really felt like I shouldn't like Wheelman. There are any number of issues that the game has that, many times, left me extremely frustrated. However, I came away from this game having a lot of fun. While from a technical stand point, this game is really not that good, I found myself having a lot of fun with it. As this is probably one of the last games from Midway, this seems to mirror most of the games that they made. Perhaps the saddest thing about this game is that most of the license plates for cars are names of Midway games. The fact that every so often, I would be driving a car with the license plate, "MRTL KMBT" was heart breaking. While they might not have been the best games, they were fun and many times the over the top. While this game is not going to save the company, it's fun and a fitting end to a great game company.
Final Score: B
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