Joystiq E3 impressions: Wheelman

Vin Diesel's gaming company, Tigon Studios, is trying to make good with Wheelman, a Driver-esque, open world action/driving experience due out from Midway. There were a few... interesting innovations in the game (instead of stopping your car to steal other vehicles, you can now hijack any car on the road while in motion), but this was mostly a case of "we saw it being played so you don't have to."

Still, Producer Pall Palsson was kind enough to show us what his team has been up to lately, so check after the break to see both what Wheelman has to offer, and what it doesn't (hint: realistic physics).

Yes, while the team has convincingly recreated Vin Diesel, the rest of the world fails to impress -- cars seem to float around the landscape, there's little to no resistance when completely driving through objects, and in general, the driving physics are just generally unbelievable. And not in that good "holy cow, that's unbelievable" way, but in the bad "this game needs more polish" way.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves -- the game starts with a mission called "Frantic," which puts you, as getaway driver Vin Diesel, behind the wheel right before a good-looking woman throws herself into your back seat and tells you to "fucking drive" as sirens blare from the bank behind you. It's a good idea -- turn the standard driving tutorial into a frantic bank robbery, but there's too much fail here to really get you into the action: graphical tearing is a mess (at first, we chalked it up to being a pre-release version, which it was, but we were then told the game was "close to beta" -- it's due out in Q3 of this year), there are glitches all over the place, and, even watching the game, the controls seem less than tight -- pushing a police car up against a wall will jump the police car out in front of you, as if the cars are coated in grease.


Not that Tigon hasn't tried -- the developers have gone out of their way to put a few neat cinematic moments in the chase scenes, and there are nice attempts. There is a "cinematic power" meter you can use to run special actions like Boost and a move called Airjacking, which is pretty great, actually: Vin climbs on the roof of the car you're driving, flings himself up towards another car, also moving, in front of you, kicks the driver of said car out, and then takes over. Palsson is the one who dubs it an "airjack," and then shows that it can be done in any vehicle -- convertible, regular sedan, even a huge van. It's exciting for a few minutes, though it doesn't seem quite amazing enough, in our short preview, to carry the rest of the game.

There's also a move called "Cyclone," which seems as though it has potential -- Vin can turn the car 180 degrees, and the camera goes into a third-person view that can let you shoot at the car behind you up (until an explosion, of course) in slow motion. Like the airjack, it's fun -- for the first few times you see it. But it doesn't seem like these few moves will carry a whole game.


Wheelman would like to be a little better than a normal car chase/driving game, and you never know -- if they get in gear the next few months, they might be able to polish this thing enough to be worth a rental. The ideas are good -- it is cool to be Vin Diesel, flip the car around, and blow up the cops chasing you. But as sweet as that move is, there's a reason they only do it once or twice per movie. Do it more, and it just gets old.

Wheelman is due out in the third quarter of 2008, along with an accompanying movie that we hope, without very much faith, turns out a little bit more interesting.