Skip to main content

Vin Diesel's Wheelman Mini-Review

I had some time to sit down with Wheelman last night, and I honestly can't decide if I like it or not.

At least superficially, the gameplay resembles the Driver series, as it started on the playstation 1. You are tasked with being the driver for various illegal oddjobs, such as bank robberies and drug deals, with the focus being on driving, and very little on foot gameplay (I haven't done anything on foot except run to my next car in the first few hours of play). It does have a couple of new tricks that it brings to the genre though: First, and most important, are the vehicle melee attacks. It sounds really odd, but it's actually pretty cool, while driving, if you flick the right stick forward, or to either side, the car will move quickly in that direction, if there's a vehicle in the way, it will ram it for goodly amount of damage, moreso than just running into them, if there isn't a vehicle there, it's just a quick way to move over a lane, useful for dodging traffick. The second new trick is something they call Airjacking, where you are able to abandon your current car, and steal another while driving. Basically you hold a button down, and Vin hangs out the door of his car, and then when you're close enough to a car in front of you (there's an indicator that will turn green) you release the button, and Vin leaps 30 feet from one car to the other, grabs onto the roof, and swings in through a window, kicking the driver out the other side. Why can he perform this superhuman feat? Because he's Vin Diesel!

Other than these new tricks, driving is actually pretty horrible, I still haven't figured out how to take a corner without losing almost all of my momentum, and it just feels loose. I almost felt like I was playing ping pong with as many times as I would bounce off of one wall directly into another.

There's some back story about you being some kind of undercover agent looking for something specific in Barcelona, but really it just feels like you're Vin Diesel, and this just how he drives to work everyday.

So, while it's kind of fun, just for the ridiculous over the top Vin Diesel factor, I don't know that it's something that would hold your interest for more than a couple of hours

Comments

  1. Vin Diesel can do no wrong!! Now, where is my XXX game?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Y: The Last Man: Even Spambots Cry After Reading It

Right off the bat, I'm going to say that Y is the saddest story I have ever taken in, with an emotional punch like a locomotive (or a bomb if you will). No work of fiction has ever destroyed me emotionally like this has. That being said, the story may be a tragedy, but gettin there was a lot of fun. The story starts off with every male mammal on the face of the Earth being almost simultaneously wiped out by some kind of illness. With the exception of English major/escape artist Yorick Brown, and Ampersand, a capuchin monkey that he's volunteered to train to help people with disabilities. There's no apparent reason as to why they survived, they just did. At the time the plague hit, Yorick's girlfriend, whom he was about to propose to, was on a trip in Australia, while he was in Chicago. Naturally he sets out to find his true love. Along the way he picks up the companions 355, an agent of a secret government organization called the Culper Ring, and Dr. Allison Man...

Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day

This appears to be a time for disappointing sequels, although for awhile there, we got a lot of top tier extremely competent sequels. I guess no trend can be permanent. The first Boondock Saints was one of those rare creations that had just about the optimal amount of everything, it was balanced between being believable, ridiculous, funny, and brutal. Balanced is the last word I would use to describe the sequel. The dialogue is terrible, just about everyone in the movie talks like a middle school bully. There are honest to goodness slapstick comedy moments, such as a mafia liutenant getting smacked in the face with a salami, and then a follow up seen where he's forced to wear headgear and can't speak properly. The tone of the entire movie is just so very different from the original, that it feels like it was made with a different director/writer, with a different vision for what the movie should be. All the more sad, since it's the same writer/director, Troy Duffy,...

Prototype Status: Beat

For the longest time I was stuck on a ridiculous boss fight in Prototype, so I shelved it for a couple of weeks. Of course as is usually the case, I brought it out to show it to a friend, and tore through the boss like it was no big deal, so I finally beat the story over the weekend. A major complaint that I've had with the game, and indeed, many other action games as well, is that boss fights all require you to play the game in an entirely different way. In Prototype, you are typically the toughest thing out there, and you regularly square off against multiple opponents at the same time, while tearing them apart with brutal melee attacks. Then you get the boss fights, a number of which mostly involve you just running around, trying to get a heavy object to throw at them very hard. Becuse if you were to get within melee distant of them, they just use some attack that instantly stuns you. As I said, this seems to be a problem with most action games, not just Prototype. I was s...