Are you wary of driving games? Do you dislike things with Vin Diesel in them? Does the thought of a Vin Diesel driving game make you want to hide your head under a pillow? Well this might just be the game to change all that. If there was one word to describe this game it is “FUN”.

Vin Diesel plays a character called Milo, who is a secret agent working undercover in Barcelona. His driving talents make him the ideal wheelman for local crime organizations and gangsters to hire. It’s a fairly shallow story, but then don’t go into this expecting anything like the storyline you would expect from a GTA game. The emphasis here has been placed on creating a good driving game, and that is what you get.

Some games go for realism, whereas this game has ‘steered’ well clear. And it is all the better for this decision. A game where a lot of the time you end up smashing into things or doing ridiculous jumps would suffer from too much realism. This game is therefore reminiscent of old-school arcade driving sims, with cars that both stick to the road and then again powerslide nicely around corners. On top of this you get to shoot your weapons whilst doing the craziest stunt jumps you can imagine. Realism is definitely not on the cards here. And there are slight nods to other games of a similar ilk, but the game style in this is distant enough to be able to stand on its own.

Wheelman is a semi-open-world game. You can sort of go anywhere, but you are still restricted (with police road blocks for example). There are different missions, but the generic principles remain unchanged. First thing is to find and get into a car (or bike). Similar to GTA you can basically mug/rob someone on the street, however a much cooler way is to do this on the move. Yes that’s right, you can get into cars whilst driving. The controls are simple enough to make this quite easy to achieve, but it is worth mentioning that better driving makes this easier. This is also true of shooting whilst driving. You can powerslide and then target the enemies that are chasing you. Again, steadier/better driving makes this easier to do.

But even with all this cool stuff by far the most fun is to be had when things get down and dirty. Car combat (or melee) is simply fun, fun and more fun. The controls and driving mechanics mean you can tussle with enemy cars, the aim being to slam into them enough until they explode. The smarter you are then the easier this is to do (i.e. nudge them into pillars or oncoming traffic). Combine that with some nice slow-mo’s of exploding vehicles then you are suddenly onto a winner.

It’s not just driving either. There are loads of entertaining side missions to complete. You can compete in crazy races. You can be a taxi rider. Or you can just destroy things. All of these are a deviation from the story itself, but just as much fun.

And that’s the key thing. This game is great fun to play. The moment you jump in your first car you get a smile on your face. And that smile will stay until you put the controller down again.
In summary, if Driv3r and Burnout were the biological parents and GTA4 was the surrogate mother, and that mother took ‘fun pills’ for 9 months, then resulting child would be Wheelman. Buy it. I think you’ll like it.