I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 59 was Wheelman. This is an action-driving game that features the actor Vin Diesel as he does an undercover mission in Barcelona to disrupt the local gangs and acquire a weapon of mass destruction. About 85% of the game is driving sequences and the last 15 percent are 3rd person shooter sections.

Graphics/Sound: There is no getting around it; this game looks awful… really bad. The biggest issues are the shaders and lighting. Everything has this glossy hue to it that make character models look like plastic. The streets of Barcelona are also very geometric in a way that is reminiscent of the PS2 era of gaming. This is just a hard to look at game.

The sound is better, but not remarkable. There are radio stations in the cars reminiscent to GTA, which is great! The other sound effects are unremarkable. Surprisingly the voice acting is pretty low quality here. I would have thought that Vin Diesel would be a great name and his voice acting good, but that is not the case. He constantly sounds like he is simultaneously about to fall asleep and extremely drunk/high. He just sounds weird. All the other voice actors are slightly better, but they still don’t give very convincing performances. By 2009 voice acting and graphics in video games were getting to a much higher standard and Wheelman feels like it was stuck in the previous era of gaming.

Story: The story is a f*****g mess and barely makes sense. I just got finished playing the game yesterday and here is what I can sum up for you: Milo (Vin Diesel) is in Barcelona on a mission from the CIA to get a briefcase and needs to go undercover to find it. Along the way he has to work with the three big gangs and Lumi, an independent thief (and love interest?). The whole story just sees Milo meeting the different gang members, then working to get the three gangs to all destroy each other. Finally, he tracks down the briefcase and makes moves to acquire it. It is ultimately a simple plot; however each individual mission makes no sense. I constantly found myself asking “Why am I hijacking this car?” or “What am I doing here?” or “Who was this guy again?” There are way too many characters and too many unimportant plot points to follow. Its also just not that interesting… but who cares about the story when there are explosions.

Gameplay: True to its namesake, wheelman’s core gameplay element is driving. There are 30ish main story missions where you need to drive a car somewhere and commit some sort of chaos. Sometimes you will need to hijack a truck and bring it back to somebody, sometimes you need to just go from point a to point b surviving the hordes of enemies attacking you, and other times you need to kill other gang members by destroying their cars.

Car combat is so ridiculous that I started to enjoy it. When you approach an enemy vehicle you can start shooting at it and if you shoot for long enough you will finally hit your mark and the tire will pop or the vehicle will explode. In addition, you can flick the right stick to ram the car into enemies and deal a bunch of damage to them. IF YOU DECIDE TO PLAY THIS GAME TURN OFF THE CRASH CINEMATICS PLEASE! If you don’t then you have to watch a 5-10 second slow mo clip of every car you destroy and it gets really annoying really fast. Finally, you can go slow motion yourself and shoot cars both in front of you and behind you. Its crazy, the car literally does a 180 and continues driving forward while you shoot at whatever.

One of the best ways to stay alive when dozens of gang members are shooting at you is to just hijack a new car. This is done by driving up behind it and holding the B button down. Milo will literally hop from 1 moving car to the other and you now have a car at full health.

My biggest complaint about the combat is that skill does not matter AT ALL. The game rubber bands like crazy and it doesn’t matter if you are hitting every speed boost and killing all the enemies. New enemies will literally spawn directly next to you 5 seconds after you defeated the previous 1 and the target vehicles will always be just out of reach until the game decides you can finish the mission.

Outside of main missions, there are tons of side quests that are just mini versions of the main missions. They are all formulaic and see you stealing cars or racing others. Pretty typical racing side content. The catch is that completing side quests makes your boost meter larger, raises your car’s health, and raises your damage output. I did a few just to see what they were like, but there wasn’t much of interest and you do not need to level up to beat the main quest.

There are 10 or so missions where Milo will get out of the car and need to engage with the gang members directly. These are some of the worst 3rd person shooter sections I have played on the console. It just doesn’t control very well and Milo can tank dozens of bullets before dying. There isn’t much tension. The nice thing is that they are over very quickly and aren’t that frequent.

My experience: I hadn’t played my 360 in awhile when I decided to play this and get back into the Road to 360 challenge. Its funny how much I enjoyed getting to play a random crappy game again. That doesn’t mean I think this game is any good… but the experience was very positive. I do think that my hatred for rubber banding in racing games has never hit a high as it did while playing Wheelman. I understand some rubber banding in Mario Kart or whatever… but making it this blatant was almost insulting and I hated it.

Overall, Wheelman is not a game worth anyone’s time. There are some pretty campy action sequences and the driving is bad, but in a laughable and fun way. There is nothing redeemable about the shooting sections, but the mid-2000s action was something we just don’t get any more. I wouldn’t suggest playing the game seriously… but maybe give it a try if you smile at things that are “so bad it's good.”(4/10)

I spent 8 hours, 43 minutes, and 40 seconds playing Wheelman.

I have spent a total of 732 hours and 39 minutes on the Road To 360 challenge so far.

Next Game: Dragon’s Dogma