Wheelman Hands-on Preview

Sometimes you hear about an idea and make a judgement, only to find yourself surprised when you finally see the concept in action. Take the phrase “vehicle melee”, for example. For many people this pair of words will summon the ridiculous image of cars boxing with each other – perhaps Herbie the Love Bug dukeing it out with Kitt from Knight Rider.

And yet when you finally try out “vehicle melee” for yourself, while testing Midway’s new action racing title, you find that it’s actually rather good fun. Despite the flash name, “vehicle melee” amounts to something you’ll have been doing in car-based games for years and years – smashing into other drivers with reckless aggression. The difference is that whereas before you’ve had to manually steer into one of your rivals, now you can do it by flicking the right analogue stick on your controller. Do this, and you’ll lurch in the direction of your choice. You can use this to ram a car next to you, or to swiftly weave in and out of oncoming traffic. The first time you use vehicle melee to smack into a motorbike, sending the driver flying, you’ll be an instant convert.

Your impression of Wheelman as a whole may follow a similar curve, moving from initial scepticism to something far more enthusiastic. At first glance the game appears to be a clear combination of GTA IV and the over-the-top carnage of the Burnout series, and indeed it bares many similarities to both those games. But with time it becomes clear that Midway is trying to do something a bit different here. If you read the interview we’re publishing tomorrow, you’ll hear lead designer Simon Woodroffe talk about wanting to let players be “the ultimate driving action hero”. Wheelman isn’t a driving game with a plot bolted on; it’s supposed to be a thrill-ride where you use vehicles as weapons, as tools to achieve your goal. And the goal in question is to blow up as much stuff as you can.

Midway is certainly banging the drum for this game, but in truth it really does look like it could have a lot of potential. As we’ve said, the vehicle melee is quite fun to play around with, but it’s the other moves that set the tone of the game. There’s the Cyclone spin, which sends your car into a sort of bullet-time pirouette, head-shotting badguys and blowing out tyres in slow-mo, or the ludicrous Air Jack – a move that sends your hero leaping into the air and through the window of the vehicle in front. These abilities are completely and utterly over-the-top, but they’re also hugely fun and easy to pull off: you charge a gauge at the side of the screen by driving dangerously or by pulling off stunts – perhaps a wheelie, if you’re on a motorbike – and then you trigger the move by tapping the d-pad or by holding a button and selecting a target car to jack.

When you’re not in the middle of some crazy manoeuvre, you’ll find that shooting is carried by holding L1/LB. There’s no manual aiming, since that’s what the Cyclone is for, so you’ll just lock on to the nearest target and blaze away. It’s a slight simplification, but it seems to work well. Meanwhile the vehicle handling seems to occupy a middle ground between sim and arcade styles. The steering isn’t super-light, and the vehicles feel pleasingly heavy, but you’ll be able to pull off handbrake turns and drifts with controlled use of the brake: tap once to start turning, tap again to control it. These aren’t the kind of controls that you have to devote a large amounts of concentration to, but you won’t totally be able to switch-off either – and that suits us fine. On foot controls are largely what you’d expect from a third-person shooter, favouring an over-the-shoulder aiming method, rather than a lock-on. There’s no Gears-like cover system, but you are encouraged to use cover with a manual crouch – and the game gives you plenty of things to hide behind.

Vin Diesel as undercover hero Milo Burik is a nice bonus, but to be honest we’re more pleased about the fact that it’s him rather than some other Hollywood star whose lent their likeness to the game. Diesel is known to be a bit of a gamer himself and the last title he was associated with, 2004’s Escape From Butcher Bay, was pretty damn good. In other words, it’s his involvement that encourages us, rather than his star value. On a similar note, Wheelman’s Barcelona setting is largely pleasing to us because it suggests a concentrated effort to be a bit different. Having said that, it’s also quite pleasing because the city itself has been designed with a generous portion of bright colours – a nice change from the gritty grey concrete favoured by many action titles. We don’t know Barca that well as a place, but we’re told that Wheelman’s virtual depiction is fairly accurate with a few changes for the sake of gameplay.

Anyhow, these features will not be the key factors in Wheelman’s success. No, this game’s fate will lie with how Midway chooses to let us use our supa-dupa action hero powers. The missions we’ve seen so far are certainly pretty inspired. One quest we were shown starts with Milo in a fairly sticky situation: His mate is in the back of his car, having been beaten to a pulp by rival gangsters. Unfortunately these mean-spirited deviants have strapped your chum to a car bomb, which is now slowly preparing to go off. Your job is to drive him to a safehouse where his allies will diffuse him, but your friend is so concussed that he finds it hard to direct you to the location – and on top of that, your trashed-up car has knackered brakes. Cue much swervy driving, a whole load of slurred cussing and a steady, unnerving beep.

Another mission we watched saw Milo and a drug lord duelling in a pair of oil tankers, pursued by goons on motorbikes. Your enormous ride is excellent for killing bikers by jacknifing back-and-forth, but damaging your rival is a more challenging proposition. Of course, you could Air Jack one of the bikes and take on the enemy tanker that way – granting you increased agility at the cost of your safety. Either way, it looks like you’ll be on for a massive battle. A second boss fight we saw, and tried for ourselves, had us pursing a miscreant through Barcelona’s subway system. Initially we were in a car chasing our man on a bike, then he got off and summoned his henchmen for a firefight. After that he stole a subway train – forcing us to follow him on a bike. As we drew level with the links between each subway car, we shot out the mechanism – shortening the train and dispatching the guys shooting at us through the windows. Of course, this also made his train quicker, so the chase stepped up a notch each time we did this.

All of this was very exciting stuff. Of course, these missions were probably shown to us for that very reason, but it does seem that Midway is doing its best to avoid the yawnville familiarity of “go to A, kill B”-type quests – even the tutorial has you fleeing the cops and smashing through glass-fronted buildings as you attempt to escape a robbery. We’re told that in the middle section of the game you’ll choose which gangs you work for, closing off certain mission strands and opening up others as you upset the balance of power in Barcelona’s criminal underworld. On top of all that, the developers are chucking in a small legion of side missions – 105 of them, apparently – to occupy you if you tire of the main plot. These will range from self-explanatory taxi jobs and stolen-to-order car thefts, to contracts where you must destroy a targeted car before it reaches a safehouse. To boot, all of these side missions will unlock rewards like warp points and extensions to your special-move gauge.

It sounds quite good, doesn’t it? We think so, and it seems to be pulling together well on the technical side of things, too. The draw distance appears to be pretty good, the driving is fast and smooth, and the characters are looking pretty tight – although Vin seems to wave his arms in a bit of a weird way when he runs. Who knows, perhaps he does that in real life. The bottom line is that Midway is talking up this game to be hot stuff. That’s a risky move, but if it pays off then it’l reap the dividends – and of course, we’ll have a cracking game to play. Success is good for them, and success is good for us… So let’s hope they do it.

Wheelman is due out for for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on February 20, 2009.