"Wheels".
The actual storyline (if you can call it a storyline) features a wheelman - Milo - working for various gangs in Barcelona. Of course, Milo is actually an undercover agent, doing whatever it takes to make the world a better place by taking down one scumbag at a time. It may sound like a generic narrative, but the game does throw a variety of plot twists your way to try and keep things interesting. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense most of the time and you really don't feel like you have much of an attachment to any of the characters, but making such gripes about the story when the game is clearly designed as a silly and straight-forward action title is perhaps nonsensical in itself.
The Wheelman features gameplay that is reminiscent of an open world game, where you can choose which missions you would like to do, whether they be story based or just side missions to boost your statistics. Driving a taxi or taking out enemies are just a couple of the ways you can keep occupied in between story missions, but doing these isn't a necessity. One thing that's kind of strange and takes the 'open-world' feeling out of The Wheelman is that if you choose to, you can simply select the mission or side-mission you want on the map and get warped to it instantly. While this does save the endless driving around from mission to mission, it also feels unrealistic and kind of a cheap way of making your way around the city.
"Man."
Perhaps the reason for this is that the city itself isn't very exciting to begin with. The city doesn't feel like it's living and breathing, and the streets themselves are almost indecipherable from one block to another; they all pretty much look the same apart from perhaps a couple of landmarks. Maybe the developers thought that driving from mission to mission was tedious given the games canvas, and in that sense they made the right decision in giving you the ability to warp. This more than anything though inspires a feeling that they were just a tad lazy, and perhaps should have just stuck with a menu hub of some kind rather than trying to inject the 'open-world' idea into The Wheelman in the first place.
The missions in The Wheelman are fairly standard. Get in a car, drive to a location, get out, kill some baddies, get back in the car and return to where you started. There is no real challenge in eliminating your opposition, either. Crouching behind some boxes and popping up to shoot the bad guys before moving to the next area to do the same thing again isn't really exciting. Add in the fact that your health regenerates easily and the fact that you have an unlimited amount of ammunition in your pistol, and the entire process becomes fairly mundane. Oh, and you'll still have no real idea why you're killing all these people, which certainly doesn't give you much of an incentive to continue to the end credits.
"Wheelman".
To the game's credit, there are some fun things that you can do, which are fun mostly because they are ludicrous and, in reality, impossible to do. Being able to jump from your own speeding vehicle through the window of another speeding vehicle in front of you and then taking control of the car for example is absolutely ridiculous, but did manage to give us a bit of a giggle. You can also slam your vehicle in any direction you like to try to take out enemies - and we're not just talking about veering to the left or right to hit into an enemy car, but actually making your vehicle move 90 degrees sideways in an impactful slam. It looks crazy because it is, but at least it makes the driving sections of the game more tolerable, given the handling of the cars feels clunky at best.
The game also features the expected bells and whistles from a movie tie-in; if you liked the movie, then you may actually find something to like here. Maybe. At least Vin does the voice-acting. But when it comes down to the decision of whether or not you'd like to spend money on purchasing this title, you have to consider a few things. It's repetitive, doesn't look that great, doesn't sound that great and is hardly original. The plot makes no sense, the gameplay is 'by the book' (apart from a couple of unique and insane stunts which at least break up the monotony) and you overall haven't got much of a sense of what's going on, other than 'vroom vroom, bang bang, wheeeee!!!' The Wheelman should be treated much like the movie. Don't expect too much, eat some popcorn and try not to take it too seriously. Oh, and rent it first.
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