Playing A Game Wheelman PC

I was perhaps unreasonably excited when I first heard about Wheelman. As a big fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, one of my favorite portions of the games is just tooling around on the streets, jacking sports cars and ramping them off overpasses, or driving trucks headlong into oncoming motorcycles. So an open-world game that's just about driving like a maniac was an exciting proposition. But I'm glad I gave Wheelman a try before I bought it - because what I found was that the driving wasn't really satisfying at all.

There are many reasons for this:

  • Traffic. There's barely any. Good for speeding around the city, but bad for trying to cause trouble.
  • Physics. One of the things GTA4 really excelled at was making you feel the weight of the game's vehicles, but nothing seems to have any heft in Wheelman. Everything can stop on a dime, and you barely slow down from head-on collisions with other vehicles. One motorcycle I drove into exploded when it hit me, like a gnat on my windshield.
  • Destructivity. There's no shortage of piddly little distractions you can run into on the street: signs, fire hydrants, bus stops, barricades - but they all just fly up into the air, and the objects you hit can't hit other things; barricades can get stuck on your hood and stick out into traffic, but said traffic will pass right through the protrusion. Furthermore, while your car can take damage, it doesn't take enough damage: the body never deforms, and the driving performance never changes.
  • Vehicles. There are sports cars and not-as-nice cars, and motorcycles. Granted I only played for a half hour or so, but I didn't see much of a variety in the vehicle department, and even the different things I did drive, didn't really feel unique from one another. Even bikes don't really perform much different from the cars.
  • Oncoming traffic, and pedestrians, do way too good a job of getting out of your way. And the few times I did manage to hit a pedestrian, there was no real impact at all. Lame.
  • The city. The whole map has a uniform look and feel. I couldn't pick out a really nice part of town, or a slum, or a big park or anything. Maybe that's what Barcelona is like in real life, but it doesn't really make for a memorable game world.
  • This may be a PC-only problem, but the driving controls feel totally wrong, and it's because they're mapped to the keyboard. The game works well enough with binary (as opposed to analog) acceleration and turning, but it definitely feels stupid. Accelerating from a full stop always burns your tires? C'mon.

I didn't get far enough to see the game's gunplay, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's mediocre.

Some of the issues I've listed come down to design, and some to the simple fact that Wheelman's engine is new, and relatively immature. But all of these are problems that even older GTA games have overcome. So, no, Wheelman isn't a distilled version of GTA's driving. It's just worse.

Progress: Gave Up -- Tried the first few missions