Wheelman

Review:

I don't think my expectations were too high for Wheelman. As a man who enjoys the occasional crappy action film, I came into Wheelman expecting cheesy Vin Diesel dialogue, an unbelievable story and lots of explosions. What I got was a whole lot more -- and not much of it was good. Sure, there's an abundance of cheesy Vin Diesel dialogue and fiery moments, but there's also the complete lack of story, mentally handicapped enemies, a repetitive city and some lame missions.

In short, this is not an interactive The Fast and The Furious. That saddens me.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty details of this game, I feel I should point out why this review is late on IGN PC. See, we got the game when it hit store shelves, but it kept crashing the PCs here in the office. We tried to run it on two Alienwares (Core 2 Quad, 2GB RAM, Nvidia 8800GTX, Vista 32-bit, and all the fixins) and it would either freeze up during install or blue screen when the game started. Thankfully, Ocampo finally got a new rig (Core i7 920, 6GB RAM, ATI Radeon 4850, and Vista 64-bit) and this one could actually play the game. We checked the message boards, and other people are having similar problems.

Wheelman is an apparent undercover mission in Barcelona starring Vin Diesel. I say "apparent" because the story is pretty much never explained with the exception of a short cutscene at the beginning of the game. Vin just meets some dude from an agency who hands him a folder of info and vaguely mentions a world-ending thing that's in Spain. From there, you're Vin's undercover persona Milo, a no-nonsense driver for all sorts of bad guys. Throughout the game, you'll tear through the streets of Barcelona chasing a document in a tube, a guy named Felipe, and more, but you'll never have any idea why the hell you're doing this thanks to the nonexistent story this game packs.

Seriously -- I'm an undercover agent, but I have no idea what group I'm working with. I get profiles of characters from the RAI between missions but I causally told some dude I worked for the CIA at one point. Who am I really working for? Who knows! Why would the CIA come to Barcelona? Who cares! All I know is there are three factions of bad people in the city and I need to work with them all to find the big thing. That's it. These are pretty big storytelling flaws.