Set your minds back about 4 years, and you will remember that there was once an Adelaide-based game development studio named Ratbag Games. This developer had made a name for itself on racing games, including the rather awesome Powerslide. Anyway, back in 2005, this company was working on a rather awesome PS2 prototype named Wheelman, until the big bad corporation Midway came and bought Ratbag, shut it down a few days before Christmas and ran away with their hard work. Since then, Vin Diesel became attached to the project, the game suffered years of delays, and Midway has almost collapsed, forcing it to co-publish the game with Ubisoft. One could be forgiven for thinking that Wheelman is cursed, given that after all of that, the game isn’t really too good.

That’s not to suggest that we don’t get a kick out of Vin Diesel playing Vin Diesel the cop; the man’s gravelly throat, dry wit and limited acting range provide brief moments of amusement during Wheelman’s tired story. You control Vin, who plays Milo Burik, a getaway driver who heads over to Barcelona to turn the gangs of the city against each other. While he attempts to pass off as a regular thug in the intro, you discover pretty quickly that he’s on the side of the law, an undercover agent looking for something big. No attempts are really made to flesh out Milo’s character or even provide proper context for why he’s in Barcelona; you’re just dumped there and told what to do. It’s pretty brainless action movie stuff, which should come as no surprise since at one stage, a movie tie-in was planned for release in conjunction with the game, but the film now sits in development hell.

Wheelman follows a fairly standard open world action game model; players can drive freely around the world, partake in a variety of missions for a number of different employers along with a number of side tasks to fill in the time between story updates. The game follows a linear path until you have become acquainted with the various Barcelona gangs; once you start opening up the other parts of the city, you have some degree of control over the order in which missions are taken. One cool little design decision Midway Newcastle has made is to not force players to drive to mission locations; to go to the next mission, you just need to open up the map screen and select it. It cuts out a whole lot of unnecessary travel time, and makes the game more approachable for quick play sessions.


Mission variety is not Wheelman’s forte; most missions will have you driving between two pre-determined points on a fairly linear stretch of road, either delivering a package, taking out an opposing gang member, or driving to a location to proceed on foot. Side missions are plentiful, but fall into a small number of categories. These off-mission tasks include taxiing people around the city, doing as much damage as you can in a set time, trying to escape from the police in record time or hijacking cars and delivering them to the gangs. Rewards for doing side missions are generous, including new garages (to swap cars when being pursued) and extensions to Milo’s focus meter. You never really have to do any side missions if you don’t want to; the idea is that if you get stuck on a story mission, you take a bit of time off to do the side tasks to power up a bit. It’s a nice idea, but it can get a bit tedious.

As one would expect, driving is the strongest part of the Wheelman experience – it is not going to win any awards, but it makes for some good, old-fashioned dumb fun (kind of like Vin’s movies). The driving model employed by Midway Newcastle is distinctly arcade flavoured, allowing players to pull off all kinds of ridiculous moves while still maintaining a high degree of control. The game has a good sense of speed, and the cars handle well, particularly when pulling off handbrake turns and such. Cars can be used offensively with the right analogue stick – moving it left or right shoves the car in that direction, which is the best way for wearing opponents down for some impressive takedown moves. Players unlock some fancy moves for Milo early in the game, like nitro boosts and the ability to flip a car around 180 degrees at high speed and shoot at any enemies behind you. Another spectacular move is the airjack, where Milo gets up on the door of your car and leaps out onto the next one in front, kicking the driver out through the opposite door – very handy when your car is trashed.


Like so many other open world driving games before it, Wheelman is utterly hopeless when you leave the confines of the car. While Milo runs around like he’s got a steel pole up his rear end, he’s a virtually unstoppable killing machine – the game does most of the aiming for you, health regenerates ridiculously fast and checkpoints are distributed very liberally through each mission. It just doesn’t come across as being as fun as the driving aspects of the game, almost feeling tacked on and unnecessary. Being a good guy, Milo can’t actually kill any civilians – you can severely injure them though, but that will trigger an immediate high level police response.

Wheelman has enough content to run for about ten hours before the credits roll. After that point, there’s not a whole lot to come back for unless you’re intent on getting the top ranking for every side mission, which is a tad masochistic. A reasonable selection of Xbox 360 Achievements and PlayStation 3 trophies are provided for a bit of post-story fun, but they’re not nearly as interesting as they could have been. One can’t have the same sort of rampaging fun as Grand Theft Auto or its ilk after the story has expired due to restrictions on harming civilians and the general lack of life and places to explore in the city.

From a technical standpoint, Wheelman does little to impress. While Midway’s rendition of Barcelona is large, it’s not exactly teeming with life nor is there much to see and explore around the city. The vehicle models are pretty respectable, offering high levels of detail with plenty of destructible components. The same cannot be said for the human character who, outside of Vin/Milo, look kind of crap. Voice actor performances aren’t exactly inspiring either; Vin Diesel essentially plays the same character he does in everything, but his performance is the best in the game, which should give you some idea of how lacking the portrayals of the support cast are.

Wheelman provides some occasional mindless fun, thanks in large to a driving engine which allows players to pull off some crazy moves. Unfortunately, the rest of the package is remarkable dull and flawed. Missions are highly basic, side tasks fail to excite, and the city feels lifeless. Since they had more than three years of delays to get it right, Wheelman is proof that nobody should be surprised that Midway is going down the tubes.