Written by: Rik
Date posted: February 10, 2023

Vin Diesel’s a Real Man, I say to myself. Vin Diesel: Wheelman, Vin Diesel: Real Man. I look at the game box again. I wonder: did someone, somewhere, think people might get this phrase stuck in their head, as some kind of clever marketing ploy, or is it just me, and am I going mad? Most likely, it’s the latter. According to MobyGames, and most other sources, the packaging of this budget re-release edition is wrong, anyway: the game is just called Wheelman, which is legitimately what they call the person in a criminal gang who drives the car (plus ‘Driver’ was already taken).

Vin Diesel is a Real Man, though – at least in the traditional sense of going to the gym, being able to change a tyre, put up some shelves and beat someone up. Plus, he does have that gravelly voice, although he’s also kind of goofy if he strays too far out of his comfort zone, and there’s something slightly sexless about him, too. (In fact, there are moments in Wheelman where you think he might do something a bit sexy, but as it turns out, he ain’t got time for any of that – he’s got Wheelmanning/Real-Manning to do elsewhere. It may be a bit like an action script written by a pre-pubescent boy who gets embarrassed by kissing, but I was relieved because I feared witnessing something potentially as disturbing and uncomfortable as Sylvester Stallone’s VR love scene with Sandra Bullock in Demolition Man.)

Wheelman was conceived in a fallow period of Diesel’s acting career, a mid-00s lull after he decided he didn’t want to do a load of sequels, except for The Chronicles of Riddick, and suddenly found himself no longer in high demand. The prospect of more Fast and Furious films seemed in the balance, too, whether he wanted to be in them or not, which is probably part of the reason for his starring in a completely new car-based caper in game-land.

Wheelman was apparently also meant to be a film, too, at some point, but after Fast and Furious was released, in the same year as this game, it all went a little quiet. Which leaves Wheelman as a curious snapshot of a time when Diesel was prepared to put his name, likeness and image on a fairly low-budget GTA/Driver-style caper. To be fair, he is a gamer, with his own development house, Tigon Studios, who teamed up with Starbreeze to bring the world the critically well-received Riddick tie-in, Escape from Butcher Bay. As an original IP, though, Wheelman needs his star power only to elevate the profile of the game, rather than make any meaningful contribution to it.

A wheelman shouldn’t really need to get out of the car. But if Vin doesn’t get out of the car, then there’s not much point in him being in the game. So, like 00s instalments of Driver, we have some fairly dreary on-foot combat supplementing the racing action, as well as a borderline-nonsensical story with cut-scenes that don’t seem to relate to each other. All you can glean is the basics: Vin is Milo Burik, an undercover agent, who needs to do a lot of bad stuff in order to gain the trust of some bad guys, because of reasons that are good. In terms of proportionate use of resources, it’s rather like Sam Jackson and The Rock in The Other Guys, causing an amount of wanton destruction and collateral damage that no mission could possibly justify. Oh, and for some reason, it’s all set in Spain.

I can’t imagine what exactly a film sequel or big screen spin-off would have involved, but if it was to be true to this game, it would consist of about 15 minutes of footage of Vin walking into bars and having a few gruff exchanges about gang connections and roughly 2 hours of car chase action, during which a million bad guys and civilians would be despatched in a non-stop frenzy of fire and twisted metal.

Here’s the thing, though: in places, the game is actually quite good. I may not be a Real Man like Vin Diesel, but in the gaming world, I am a Wheelman. If there are daft timed challenges to do, I’ll do them, no questions asked, and it’ll be quite a while before I get bored. And though the usual form with an open-world driving game is to be itching to get on with the main story but wondering how much pointless filler and busywork you’ll have to chow down on in the meantime, here the filler is the fun, and the story missions the less-digestible element of the action.

Just as Wheelman‘s story feels like a bunch of unrelated happenings sellotaped together, the game itself feels like a lot of different elements borrowed from other games have been thrown at the wall in the hope that some will stick. You begin at the end of a robbery, plotting a getaway on the fly with your female companion as she handily runs you through some of the gameplay basics. This is, you think, what a lot of the game will be like: I’m a wheelman, we will do jobs, and try and get away, just like in Grand Theft Auto. In this scenario, the pursuing local police are your foes, and you can get rid of them by tapping the right analog stick left or right and slamming any that are nearby into a wall. Evasion is still the name of the game, but an amount of fighting back is baked into the driving mechanics.

Soon after, we’re also introduced to the concept of ‘airjacking’ – a way of securing a new vehicle by exiting the one you’re currently driving while in motion, making an improbable leap onto the roof of another and smashing into it via the driver’s window, depositing its owner onto the streets in the process – a Real Man/Wheelman move if ever there was one. When it comes to the on-foot sections, however, Milo is a little less athletic, and is in fact unable to jump at all. He can crouch though, in order to duck behind nearby crates and perform perfunctory cover-shooting duties, popping up to gun down dumb enemies who only present a danger to you if you happen to stagger out into the open for any prolonged periods of time.

And then, as it turns out, the guns also factor into the driving, as the so-called ‘melee’ combat of smashing into opponents is supplemented by leaning-out-of-the-window gunplay. Oh, and if you drive dangerously, then you can earn a speed boost, just like in Burnout. But then you can also use that boost meter to do more gun-ny type stuff, in slow motion, like in Max Payne, either to fire at vehicles in front of you, or spin your car around, in an exact 180, in order to take aim at those in pursuit. Most of the time, it’s not actually the police who are after you – and if they are, you aren’t permitted to kill them, because you’re still a cop despite being deep undercover (it is, however, permissible to send their vehicles spinning through the air and into the nearest building, which is of course not at all dangerous).

These multiple different ingredients combine to make for some occasionally enjoyable OTT ridiculousness, although once you’ve seen it all a few times, there’s not a lot of variety, and it starts to get a bit repetitive. Which is a shame, because the actual driving is pretty solid stuff, perfectly tooled for sliding and handbrake turning around corners, while the layout of the city, combined with an appropriately reduced level of traffic, provides enough vehicles and other obstacles to dodge while also allowing you to maintain a fairly high speed throughout.

Such strengths are best enjoyed via the many side missions such as Taxi, which is just a simple point-to-point timed challenge, with no penalties for dangerous driving or scaring your passenger (and indeed no preamble or explanation as to how you’re driving a taxi in the first place). The additional motivation for such missions is meant to be something that will help you in the wider game, such as the ability to fast travel between different locations in the city in this case, but they’re great fun to do anyway. Rather than ploughing through them while looking forward to the next career mission, you might find yourself putting off doing the latter until all the other available tasks have been hoovered up.

If you take such a course of action, you’ll also find yourself maxing out all of your abilities, as the side missions have a somewhat mysterious and unexplained relationship with various in-game capabilities. Contracts, in which you need to hunt down and destroy a single vehicle within the time limit, increases the maximum amount of speed boost/slow motion aiming you have available; Fugitive missions reverse the roles and put you in the position of fleeing a horde of pursuing psychos who wish to smash or shoot you off the road, and reward you with increased vehicle strength; winning a Street Showdown – a basic city-based race against a pack of opponents – improves vehicle strength and performance; while Rampage, a personal favourite that involves causing as much property damage as possible, improves the power of your attacks.

It’s a good job that these bits are fun, because exactly how they relate to the main action is a little bit fuzzy. To talk about improved car performance and strength is all a bit abstract when there are multiple different vehicles in the game, each with their own attributes, which you have to guess from their appearance anyway. Like in GTA, you can safely assume that a flashy sports car will be faster than a little hatchback, and a 4×4 will be stronger than either, but the impact of various improvements earned aren’t really represented. (Also, most cars are generic, except for some reason – I’m guessing a licensing deal between global conglomerates – the Vauxhall/Opel Astra and Pontiac G8 (exciting!) are also featured).

I’d argue that two of the sets of side missions – Made To Order, in which you need to airjack and then deliver specific target cars within a time limit, and Hot Potato, a set of short courier deliveries – provide very little in terms of meaningful reward, with the former unlocking extra garage locations for a respray and the latter areas where you can pick up a weapon if needed. I found that the police were such a small part of the game that a respray was rarely required, while when it comes to guns, you can usually help yourself to plentiful weapons and ammo dropped by idiot baddies during on-foot missions. But both are well done and enjoyable to complete in their own right.

In the meantime, the plot keeps rolling forward through more gangland cut-scenes and seemingly interchangeable missions that invariably involve you being chased by multiple respawning baddies that keep coming at you no matter how many tyres you shoot out, body frames you slam into buildings, or hired goons leaning out of car windows that you shoot in the face. Perhaps as a result of my tenacity in completing side missions, I found myself to be largely indestructible anyway, with inconveniences like my own tyres being punctured seemingly having no negative effect on my performance and undermining any sense of excitement that the movie-style chases are supposed to cultivate.

Some of these chases are just plain bad, particularly a couple of later examples – one that involves driving an articulated lorry, and another in which you need to pursue and destroy an underground train. These are scenes that are straight out of the end of a movie, but in that context involve a level of choreography and pre-planning that is undermined here by the player having control over the action.

In films, the big truck never gets stuck against a building and has to reverse at painfully slow speed, and the hero never fails to follow a train down the right tunnel because they were distracted by an unskippable cut-scene of a car blowing up. At such moments, you start to understand the trend for QTEs in games around this time. It’s a shame, because there are some good missions, too, with one that involves driving a booby-trapped car with its brakes disabled while hiding from the police standing out in the memory as a rare example of guile and thought being required instead of the usual smash-bash approach.

As previously mentioned, Wheelman doesn’t deliver the most coherent of stories, and other than being vaguely aware of the fact that Milo is supposed to be ingratiating himself with various rival gangs before turning them against each other, it’s not desperately interesting to follow. I belatedly realised that the reason for Milo’s outfits changing intermittently was that he had a different set of casual clothes for each particular gang, with the notion that a distinctive giant hulk of a man could somehow disguise himself by wearing a slightly different t-shirt as ridiculous as the idea that he could go around destroying half of Barcelona on behalf of different groups without any of them finding out what he was doing.

It all feels weirdly unfinished, a feeling backed up by other strange moments, like when a disembodied Scottish voice starts announcing your ‘rank’ – i.e. performance – at the end of side missions (‘Rrrrrank Esss!’ is a good thing, apparently, although here it sounds like a radio-friendly colloquialism for effluent) – which made no sense at all until I later met the character to whom this voice belonged.

But, for all of its flaws and considerable trashy qualities, I found it hard to dislike Wheelman, and it was pretty easy to stay with until the end. It’s a bit of a shame that some of its good bits are buried under a surfeit of other ideas that don’t always work that well, and that some of the most expensive, high-production-value stuff is largely unnecessary. Less gangland nonsense and more reputation-building by doing good driving, as required in the side missions, could have made for a better time.

As it is, Diesel does at least provide a level of star power, even if he is it (no other actors are given prominence – and the final credits literally only mention him), while there’s a level of cheap entertainment value in making the titular Wheelman/Real Man ride a moped or cram into a tiny Smart car. And though there are plenty of slightly crap bits, I don’t think any of them are bad enough to spoil it overall as an enjoyably lightweight action caper. While I wouldn’t tune in to Wheelman as a movie, as a game, it works well enough.